Unfortunately, road traffic accidents happen; we hear about them all the time. However, if one of your fleet vehicles is involved in one, it can be extremely costly for your business. An accident involving one of your vehicles can result in the following costs:

  • Increased insurance
  • Vehicle downtime
  • Staff downtime
  • Missed sales
  • Repair costs

Although you can’t prevent accidents completely, there are  some fleet management solutions you can reduce their occurrence for your vehicles. In this article, we’ll talk you through how to limit road traffic accidents for your fleet.

Ensure your vehicles are roadworthy

It might sound obvious, but sometimes easy-to-fix defects can go unnoticed, which can seriously impact vehicle safety in the long-run. In fact, research has shown that faulty brakes and defective tyres contributed to 3,894 UK road traffic accidents that resulted in injuries or fatalities between 2013 and 2018.

Common vehicle defects such as underinflated tyres or malfunctioning windscreen wipers can be identified easily during MOTs and routine servicing. Spotting them as early as possible and making necessary repairs will help to prevent the vehicle from being involved in any accidents on the road.

Many fleets rely on their drivers to report problems with their vehicles, but this means there’s a significant risk of issues slipping through the net as a result of negligence or human error. We recommend the use of fleet management and telematics solutions that help you keep track of mileage, maintenance issues and other risk factors so you can identify potential causes of accidents in real time, and act accordingly.

Find out more in our free guide to choosing a telematics supplier.

Download now     

Monitor driver safety

Not all road accidents are preventable, as sometimes they’re caused by other drivers. That said, collisions are more likely to happen if a driver isn’t applying good judgement. You can carefully monitor the behaviour of individuals driving your fleet vehicles using fleet management and telematics tools.

‘Telematics doesn’t allow you to control driving conditions, but it does allow you to monitor speed and erratic driver behaviour. Intuitive systems record any instances of aggressive driving in the driver’s report, alerting you in real time. This is an effective way to run your fleet smoothly and allows you to encourage safer driving techniques to anyone driving your vehicles.

You can also use tracking technology on top of your fleet management system to log mileage and hours worked, which helps you to stay on top of service schedules and monitor how long your drivers are on the road, so you can advise on regular breaks during journeys.

But this data alone isn’t necessarily enough; it’s important that you have a way to interpret the information provided by your telematics easily, rather than simply being swamped with data that is time-consuming to sift through. That’s why choosing the right solution for your fleet is essential.

Maintain a duty of care to your customers

Monitoring driver safety is about more than just protecting your fleet. As a business, you have a duty of care to ensure the safety of your employees; one of the biggest challenges when providing fleet vehicles is that the driver’s safety becomes your responsibility when they’re in your vehicle.

Diagnostics data from telematics allow you to assess the health of your fleet, so you can easily plan maintenance and ensure the vehicles are safe to drive.

Record accurate incident information

Knowing as much as you can about incidents that have taken place within your fleet can help you avoid common risk factors in future, helping to reduce your overall accident rate.

All accidents should be carefully recorded, including highly detailed information such as the nature of the driver’s journey, their speed and behaviour at point of impact and in the moments before, how long they’d been on the road for and when the last safety check had been conducted on the vehicle.

Though this can be done through interviewing the driver involved, the most accurate way to record data is through telematics. An intuitive telematics solution will store valuable information and compile a detailed report following the incident, so you can identify and measure key risks; this analysis will enable you to implement measures that reduce those risks in the future.

 

Find out more about how telematics can help prevent car accidents for your fleet

Fill out the form for your copy of our free guide, 5 things to consider when choosing a telematics supplier. 

Top 5 things to consider when choosing a telematics supplier