Dangerous Driving – How it Can Hurt Your Business, and How You Can Stop It

Imagine driving down the highway. You’re in the center lane. A work truck passes on your left and nearly slams into a car in front of you. The driver narrowly avoids the collision by cutting in front of you and slamming on the brakes hard – which launches hundreds of nails toward your car.

Fortunately for you and the other driver, this is only a near miss.

But this incident underlines the risks facing an organization every time its vehicles hit the road. Let’s take a look at all the ways that dangerous driving habits can hurt your business.

The Impact on Vehicles

People who speed also wind up having to slow down quickly to avoid collisions. That adds up to – at a minimum – more wear and tear on tires and brakes. Drivers who speed will need new tires and brake service more frequently than drivers who stay within the speed limit.

Worse yet, habitual speeders may try to cut corners by not taking their vehicle in for service when needed. This procrastinating makes their vehicle even more unsafe. When they finally get into the shop for maintenance, the problems will likely be more severe. That adds up to more time out of service – which means that vehicle isn’t generating revenue for your business or serving your constituents.

Tallying Up the Losses

Not every example of bad driving is going to result in an accident. But more risky driving increases the odds of an accident.

If the odds catch up to a bad driver in your fleet, you could have a long list of consequences, including damaged vehicles, injured people, lawsuits, and financial settlements.

Even in the best-case scenario – meaning no accidents – you’ll still burn more fuel and need more maintenance for your vehicles. That’s a direct hit to your bottom line.

Your Reputation is on the Line

Go back to our example of the work truck cutting off drivers and scattering nails on the freeway. You’d probably look for one of those stickers that says “How’s My Driving?” or a company logo so you can call to complain. You probably wouldn’t hire them for your next home improvement job.

If you had a passenger, you might even ask them to take a photo or video of the truck and post it to social media.

With review sites and social media networks, there’s no shortage of opportunities for a driver’s bad behavior to get plenty of shares and comments. It’s not hard to imagine the possible damage this could do to your organization.

The Key to Preventing Dangerous Driving

So how can you prevent your drivers from terrorizing other drivers, running your vehicles into the ground, and igniting social media outrage?

Using fleet management solutions is by far the best way to ensure that drivers use your vehicles the way you expect. With tools like GPS tracking and smart cameras, you can benchmark their performance and encourage better behavior.

During a recent safety program rollout, GPS Insight benchmarked an organization’s fleet of nearly 1,000 vehicles. To keep the benchmarking process simple, we focused on just one behavior: incidents of speeding more than 15 miles per hour over the speed limit.

During the benchmark period, they had as many as 650 15+ speeding incidents per week.

Once the GPS tracking units were installed, speeding incidents began to decrease. Less than eight weeks later, they had fewer than 200 speeding incidents.

That’s a 70% reduction. They also had 20% fewer accidents after rolling out their safety program, and the company realized a 115% ROI in reduced fuel and maintenance costs.

Going Beyond Speeding

Speeding is just one questionable aspect of dangerous driving behavior that you can address with fleet management solutions.

What else can you accomplish?

Here are safety-related behaviors our clients often want to improve, along with the solutions they use.

• Excessive idling (GPS Tracking)
• Eliminating side jobs(GPS Tracking)
• Maintenance (GPS Tracking)
• Hard braking and acceleration (GPS tracking)
• Distracted driving (Driveri smart camera)
• Tailgating(Driveri smart camera)
• Red light and stop sign violations (Driveri smart camera)

If you’d like to learn more about how our clients can set up reports and parameters to improve driver safety, you can watch the webinar below on-demand. You’ll find out about features like landmarks, location playback, trip history, and more.