Dash cams can play a vital role in modern-day traffic. They are widely used in countries such as Russia, where reckless driving is more common than any other place in the world.
Dash cams in the trucking industry can be the difference maker in insurance discounts, driver training, driver behavior, and it also increases safety while on the road.
Trucker dash cams were predicted by Google Automotive Trends to rise by 20% for 2018, and they were certainly right about that. More and more truckers are installing front-facing dash cams due to the various benefits they offer the driver.
Accidents on the road are very common in the trucker industry. Dash cams give truckers the ability to see what happens during a critical safety event. The motivation for the trucking industry is to ensure safety while on the road and enhance driver coaching programs. These are some of the benefits of dash cams, but they’re certainly more than these two.
Lowering Insurance Rates
Insurance companies will offer discounts to trucker fleets that use dash cams. This is because dash cams hold the crucial evidence of who is in the wrong after an accident. To proof this is correct; we can take an example of the dash-cam predecessor, the electronic logging devices or ELDs.
In the past, insurance companies would offer discounts to those fleets that would use these devices. They did this because of the valuable data they could gather from each trucker fleet. Usage-based technologies empowered insurance programs toward leveraging relevant data. Dash cams can potentially lower insurance rates because of the reduction of false claims, and that puts us nicely to our second point.
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A Reduction in False Claims
Commercial drivers are more likely to take the blame during an accident. This is extremely false as 85% of truck-vehicle accidents are caused by the vehicle, rather than the truck. This is a huge problem as it increases false claims which result in costs up to $200,000 per accident. An accident which results in $200,000 paid in damages could be the end for owners of small trucker fleets.
The biggest thing dash cams offer is the ability to see everything on the road through the driver’s eyes and capture that as video evidence in the case of an accident. This reduces false claims and potential liabilities because you can see exactly what happened and exonerate the driver if they are not at fault.
Dash Camps Improve Driver Training
We never stop learning, not ever, and the same thing can even be said for veteran truck drivers. Road safety is and always will be the number one priority of most truck fleet owners. The safety of someone’s life is far more important than the goods they are transporting.
Dash cams record everything and that data can be used for fleet managers to improve driver training. The videos generated from each driver’s run can be used to review critical safety events and show drivers what went wrong in each of the situations.
This, ultimately, can help prevent future critical safety incidents from happening based on the video evidence provided from the dash cams.