About three months ago, a driver for Cargo Transporters was approaching a delivery spot near the company’s offices in Claremont, N.C. While rounding a corner, a car drifted into his lane from the opposite direction.
The truck driver moved over to the shoulder. The car continued on a deadly path. The car was lucky to clip only the truck’s left bumper. It could have been much worse if the truck driver had not swerved off the road and overturned.
“The car driver told the state trooper at the scene that he was reaching for his cell phone,” says John Pope, chairman of Cargo Transporters. Even without a confession, Cargo Transporters had all the evidence it needed to prove its driver was a hero.
At the Truckload Carriers Associations’ annual conference in Las Vegas last month, Pope shared his company’s experience with implementing DriveCam’s risk management system. Cargo Transporters, which uses a number of safety technologies, began equipping its 450-truck fleet with DriveCam two years ago.
The system uses a window-mounted recording device that captures forward and cab-facing video. When a risky event such as hard braking or swerving occurs, a video clip and other event information is uploaded to DriveCam’s server through a cellular modem. The event is analyzed, and results are presented through a Web portal.
Fleet managers at Cargo Transporters now have all the facts when they contact drivers to discuss safety. Managers also often use DriveCam to praise drivers for avoiding accidents. Pope said that in at least three cases, the videos have been used to get plaintiff attorneys to drop frivolous lawsuits. “We are better off knowing all the facts,” he says.
During implementation, fleet managers met individually with drivers to ease their concerns about privacy. Less than 1 percent of drivers decided to part ways, he says.
