As a fleet manager, safer driving and lower insurance premiums are always among your top priorities. Thankfully, there’s now a range of smart-tech telematics available on the market that encourage safer driving and can help cut insurance costs to save fleet managers money.
Telematics explained
Broken down literally, telematics is an amalgamation of the words telecommunications and informatics. Combined, telematics is the technology responsible for sending, receiving and collecting information from remote objects (like cars), via telecommunication devices.
If you’re currently paying a high premium on your fleet, telematics devices and telematics apps could be the answer to your car insurance woes.
How does it work?
Telematics devices (often referred to as a ‘black box’) or telematics smartphone apps work by tracking a vehicle’s activity via GPS. Once the black box is installed in your fleet, or a tracking app is downloaded to your driver’s smartphone, insurance providers will look at the following data to determine your premiums:
- Location
- Speed
- How long you’ve been driving
- How smoothly you tackle corners
- How quick or controlled your acceleration is
- How hard or soft your braking is
To give you a better idea of how telematics work, we looked at insurance company More Than’s DRIVE app to show you how a typical insurer measures driving performance.
After downloading DRIVE, the app records details of your trips over a 200-mile period. After analysing the data, More Than give you a personalised score out of 100 depending on how good your driving was – 100 is the best score you can achieve. While they’re collecting the data, More Than let you know how you’re doing and give you pointers on how you can improve to get the best score possible.
They’ve gamified the experience by allowing users to earn badges and post them to Facebook and Twitter so you can share your scores with friends. The DRIVE app also lets you invite friends and family to join you so that you can compare scores against each other. You can even see how you rank in your county and against the whole country. Thankfully, if you do get a “bad” score (anything below 40) you won’t be penalised, you just might not get the discount you were hoping for.
How can telematics devices and apps improve driving safety or lower your insurance?
Having a telematics device installed in your cars means you can prove that your fleet drives safely. As a result, your insurance premiums are then based on how safe and careful your drivers are, instead of you paying a premium based on how the average UK driver acts on the road.
There are other benefits too; by using a telematics device or app, you’ll be able to see where your vehicles are on their routes, whether your drivers are sticking to the speed limit or if there’s a dangerous spot that your fleet should avoid because a number of road users have had accidents. This will encourage safer driving and increase fleet security.
Analysing how your fleet drives can also help to reduce fuel costs by alerting drivers to actions that necessitate excessive fuel consumption like speeding, harsh acceleration and idling. Plus if your telematics device or app has a satnav system, you can meet your environmental responsibilities by ensuring your vehicles get from A to B in the most efficient way; this also improves productivity.
Despite all the positives, critics have noted that after collecting your fleet data, insurance companies can stipulate that your drivers don’t drive at times when accidents are more likely to happen; typically late at night or very early in the morning. This can cause conflict if your drivers often need to make journeys at riskier times of day. It’s not all doom and gloom though; your cars will still be insured during these hours but driving during those times might affect your premium.
Concerns have also been raised about privacy and data protection regarding black box devices and apps. In response to this, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) issued industry-wide guidelines that detail how insurers can comply with the Data Protection Act when they collect telematics information. In these guidelines, the ABI states that insurers need to get full consent from all named drivers using a vehicle’s telematics system and provide them with “clear and comprehensive” information on how their data will be used.
Inspired to try telematics?
Industry experts claim that telematics systems will soon become opt-out rather than opt-in and insurers say they expect telematics usage to increase from less than 1% of policies now to 15% within five years. The EU is already leading the way, with new regulations coming into effect this month that requires all new cars carry black box-style technology as standard. This is primarily to help emergency services find vehicles involved in accidents; therefore it could be beneficial for your fleet to become accustomed to using telematics before it becomes compulsory.
Companies like TomTom and Stagecoach have been using telematics successfully for years already. Increased productivity, lower fuel costs, reduced CO2 emissions and overall driver safety and security have been sited as just some of the many ways telematics have benefited their fleet managers. So, if you think telematics could help your fleet, have a look at the following apps available to download today.
Content on this page is paid for and provided by Kia Fleet sponsor of the Guardian Small Business Network Accessing Expertise hub.
