Dash Cams for Safety: Reduce Risk for Your Fleet

You’ve probably explored implementing dash cams for your fleet—and you may have even deployed them by now. What’s the best way to use a dash cam for safety? Make sure it’s equipped with video telematics, or GPS.

Dash Cams Safety 101

The first thing to know: any dash cam system you deploy must provide both inward-facing and outward-facing lenses. You want to be able to capture footage of not only how your drivers’ are interacting with other vehicles on the road, but also capture your drivers’ behavior within the vehicle. Suppose there’s an accident and someone claims that your driver was texting at the wheel—an inward-facing lens will provide evidence as to whether that claim is true or not.

Of course, if you’re implementing dash cams for safety of your drivers, you’ll need to do more than just determine fault in accidents. You’ll also want to use dash cams to support your driver safety program to provide your drivers with personalized coaching. Inward-facing lenses continuously capture driver behavior so that your managers can identify each driver’s strengths and weaknesses.

But there’s more to supporting a robust dash cam safety program than just inward- and outward-facing lenses. Another key element is linking your dash cams to your GPS or implementing a video telematics solution.

Three Ways Dash Cams Can Help You Increase Safety

When you use dash cam technology in conjunction with telematics that can track location, you can monitor whether your drivers are sticking to their routes and schedules, and observe any actions that cause variances. You can also take these steps to improve driver safety and reduce risk:

• Identify hazardous locations. Are many of your fleet’s safety incidents occurring on specific stretches of the highway? You can easily tell if you use video telematics to find out. Knowing that your drivers tend to speed on a certain part of of the interstate can help you respond with training and coaching that zero in on the problem.

• Get the whole story behind driver behavior. Monitoring exactly what your drivers are doing in the cab and how that’s affecting their performance is the most valuable information for coaching and correcting driver behavior. When you incorporate GPS data into the mix, you can start to determine how road conditions and surrounding traffic patterns contributed to their behavior during a safety violation.

• Prevent accidents at customer locations. While many safety incidents happen out on the road, accidents that happen during deliveries can be even more damaging from a PR perspective. A customer whose property is damaged by a delivery truck will be unlikely to do business with that vendor again. When you use a dash cam that offers video telematics, you can pinpoint the customer locations where safety incidents are occurring and discuss hazards with your customers to ensure that you can provide outstanding service without compromising safety.

Let Gridline Help You Build a Dash Cam Safety Program

Find out more about how dash cam technology and video telematics can help you improve driver safety and reduce risk for your fleet. Gridline can help provide you with state-of-the-art dash cam solutions that can give you an edge in preventing costly safety incidents—and we have the know-how to help you get the most out of this technology.
Talk to us today.