As the UK’s roads become busier, more and more fleet managers are turning to dash cams to help protect their drivers, monitor driving standards, and as an effective tool to quickly and reliably establish the facts of an incident or accident. Dash cams have multiple proven benefits for every motorist and every vehicle, but below we explore five key ways fleet dash cams can help protect and improve driver and road safety.
Protection in case of an accident
Fleet drivers are, by definition, on the road more than most, covering many miles each week. As increasingly busy roads make driving conditions more congested and difficult, it has never been more important to take any steps possible to protect your businesses’ most important assets – your drivers and your vehicles.
A fleet dash cam records high-definition road footage in all light and weather conditions. This means that when footage is needed, it can be downloaded and shared with the police and insurance companies to demonstrate exactly what happened.
Professional drivers know that the unexpected can happen at any time. This can range from another motorist swerving into your path, to an animal running into the road or the sudden onset of atrocious weather quickly changing the danger levels of the driving conditions. Fleet dash cams are an increasingly popular safety accessory which give you and your drivers confidence that when anything unexpected takes place, the recording from the on-board dash cam will be a reliable witness to what exactly happened. This will protect your drivers’ integrity and your business’s reputation from any inaccurate or misleading claims. Deploying a fleet dash cam in every vehicle across your fleet is a very sound investment which means leaving absolutely no room for doubt if any type of incident occurs. Using dash cams also results in lower insurance premiums too.
Monitoring driving
Of course, driver safety is a key concern for any fleet manager. While drivers might be sceptical about them before they fully understand the benefits, fleet dash cams can actually form part of a robust safety programme by capturing footage of every mile driven on every trip made in every one of your vehicles. In addition to exonerating drivers who are caught up in any incident that wasn’t their fault, by showing exactly what happened and leaving no doubt about who was to blame, they can also be used to give fleet managers a better understanding of individual driving habits. This then enables them to tailor any required training to reduce bad habits and coach better driving skills on a one-to-one basis. Footage captured in this way can also be shown to new fleet drivers to explain the standards expected of them, as well as common pitfalls and how to avoid them. Used wisely, footage from fleet dash cams can be an excellent tool to promote better driver safety. And research bears this out, a study from the National Surface Transportation Safety Center for Excellence in the US, for example, found that using dash cams reduced safety-related accidents by 52 per cent when combined with driver safety training.
Educational tool
Fleet dash cams can also be used as a core part of driver training. High quality video footage of the consequences of not concentrating, or poor split-second decisions and indeed routine bad habits can be used as a warning to other drivers about what to avoid and why. It can also be used as an inspiration to upskill and acquire better and more robust driving skills. Used in this way, fleet dash cams can ultimately become an incredibly useful tool to help protect your drivers and any passengers from harm as they go about their journeys.
Risk reduction
Hand-in-hand with improving driver safety, fleet dash cams can also help reduce the risk from bad driving causing accidents which put corporate vehicles out of action. Having a record of every journey means being able to prove beyond doubt how reliable and conscientious your drivers are. Recorded footage of any incident, meanwhile, can be easily shared with the police and insurance companies to prove exactly what happened, in precise detail, exonerating drivers in the event of any unjust claim. This ensures that companies don’t have to bear the financial burdens of not being able to prove their innocence, which can include higher insurance premiums for years to come.
Theft prevention
As we have explored above, dash cams have tremendous accident protection benefits for drivers, and their fleet managers, while on the roads. But they also have benefits while parked as well, whether overnight or during a rest period. Nextbase dash cams, for example, have Intelligent Parking Mode, which operates when the engine is off. This functions as a car security system, recording any bump or knock for up to a week. By capturing movement in this way, fleet dash cams are an effective way to protect your vehicles even when they are not in motion, mitigating theft and loss as well as physical damage.
