A Security Transport driver was traveling through Chicago when someone driving a pickup truck ran a redlight, causing an accident. Security Transport Safety Director Les Mayhew said his driver was about to be cited for the accident, but he was able to show the police officer video of the scene taken from the Netradyne dash camera on board and exonerate his driver.
Those cameras go beyond exoneration to improved safety scores and reduced insurance premiums, which are heavy hitters to a fleet’s bottom line.
Security Transport’s insurance policy is through High Definition Vehicle Insurance (HDVI), which partners with Netradyne to deploy AI dashcams to help fleets lower their insurance costs by up to 20%. Netradyne partners with other commercial trucking insurance providers as well, like Cover Whale.
“Everybody knows insurance prices have been on the rise. To understand the why we really have to know a little bit about how insurance is priced,” Bob Carl, fleet services and risk engineer at HDVI, said in a Truckload Carriers Association webinar on the impact of AI-enabled safety cameras on insurance. “Underwriters review things such as loss frequency, and loss frequency is on the rise across the entire industry. The cost to settle these losses is getting higher and higher. New equipment with more and more integrated technology just simply costs more to repair or replace.”
Other factors, like potential nuclear verdicts, CSA scores, driver pool and quality, shipping lanes and commodities hauled, are factors that come into play when insuring a fleet. But for an insurance provider, the overarching factor is safety. Carl said a fleet must take care of its CSA score like it’s a credit score, and to do that more and more insurance companies are adopting policies that require not just dashcams but AI-enabled dashcams, which provide more insight into accidents while offering real-time coaching to improve driver behavior.
[Related: AI accuracy is critical in avoiding false alerts and alert fatigue]
