Fleet management company KeepTruckin on Tuesday unveiled its Safety Hub solution, which enhances its existing services with a roster of new features for precision understanding of truck and driver safety.
Safety Hub uses the DRIVE risk score — a first-of-its-kind model that quantifies driver risk using telematics data and insights powered by artificial intelligence. Based on internal modeling, DRIVE has found that the lowest scoring 20% of drivers are nearly 2.5x as likely to get into an accident.
“Existing driver safety platforms simply detect harsh driving and compute a score based on the frequency of those events. The KeepTruckin DRIVE risk score fundamentally changes this paradigm by considering the full context in which a driver safety event takes place to determine its severity and judge the relative performance of the driver versus their peers,” said KeepTruckin CEO Shoaib Makani.
This combination of DRIVE risk scores and Safety Hub helps create more context for a driving incident. Aside from helping identify risky driver behavior, it also enables fleets to stop penalizing drivers for events that were not in their control.
Jairam Ranganathan, senior vice president at KeepTruckin, said current safety solutions are not comprehensive as they only compute a simple score based on the count of telematic events like hard cornering, accelerating and braking.
“This is a poor measure of driver risk because road safety is far more complex than that. DRIVE goes deeper into the context of an event by analyzing additional variables — like location, weather, vehicle make and model and more — that can affect driver performance,” said Ranganathan.
Makani explained that Safety Hub brought real-time visibility, predictive risk scoring and automated coaching — parameters critical for a modern safety platform. “With one consolidated view of driver safety, fleets can not only exonerate their drivers when an accident takes place, but actually prevent accidents through proactive coaching,” he said.
KeepTruckin’s network has more than 350,000 vehicles that can use Safety Hub to determine the true risk profile of each driver relative to their peers. Coaching programs are tailored to suit individual drivers, with it being provided automatically through the KeepTruckin Driver App.
KeepTruckin has already received positive feedback on Safety Hub from its customer base.
“Professional drivers should have no reason not to put this camera in their vehicle,” said Ron Faherty, president at ARL Transport. “Knowing what behaviors to focus on in order to reduce accidents is huge for keeping our roads safer. Plus, it is there to protect you. At the end of the day when everyone runs and scatters, it’s your only eyewitness defense tool that will allow you to continue to make a living.”
Kelly Hanson, senior manager of technology partnerships at KeepTruckin, contended that fleets embraced the new solution as insurance comes with high fixed costs, making it crucial to run trucks without incidents. Nuclear verdicts — jury judgments with penalties of over $10 million — have surged, forcing several fleets into bankruptcy. Having comprehensive risk management and fleet safety programs in place can act as a fail-safe against malicious lawsuits, while also leading to reduced insurance premiums.
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