Making Safe Driving a Part of Fleet Culture

July 14 through July 20 is the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s (CVSA) Operation Safe Driver Week event -- and although law enforcement will be on extra lookout for any bad driving behavior, this year there’s a special focus being placed on speeding.

The focus on speeding is not unfounded. In 2015, speeding was at least a contributing factor in 94% of crashes, and the FMCSA reported in 2016 that speed was the most common factor in CMV and passenger vehicle crashes; in 2017, speed was a contributing factor in more than a quarter of fatal crashes. Those numbers are telling -- and they’re why the CVSA is placing emphasis on speed for this year’s event, with the Alliance and law enforcement agencies across the U.S. and Canada all promoting the message that “Late won’t kill you, speeding will.”

For CMV fleets, though, keeping track of vehicle speeds shouldn’t be a once-a-week affair. Monitoring and enforcing speed is critical not only for safety, but also makes financial sense: Reduced speeds mean reduced fuel costs, fewer accident repair costs, fewer citations to pay, lower insurance rates, and a better CSA score from the FMCSA.

Indeed, the importance of monitoring speed is such that CMV fleets are best served when adherence to speed regulations and in-house guidelines are a basic part of fleet culture. Idealease, for example, uses the power of CyntrX Xtra -- our full-featured tracking, analytics, and reporting platform -- to help its national account customers create cultures of safety and efficiency that are aimed at continually improving fleet operations in terms of increased safety and reduced operational costs.

Jerry Ring, Director of Business Intelligence at Idealease, frames it this way:

“We have fuel economy calculators that show how small changes can lead to hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in fuel savings alone,” said Ring. “And we also show customers a path to changing driver behaviors and habits, where needed. Changing those habits can help create the significant improvements in safety and operational costs that we want to help our customers with by reducing rentals, lowering accident rates and insurance costs, and improving fuel economy, uptime, and driver satisfaction.”

Changing habits doesn’t happen overnight, and it might not necessarily be easy to change a fleet’s entire culture. It takes a commitment on everyone’s part, from the top executives to the fleet managers to the drivers themselves, and that’s what the power of Xtra can unleash. By providing real-time insights and business intelligence on both driver behavior at a granular level and fleet operations on a broader scale, management can see the changes that need to happen -- and provide the feedback needed to get drivers on board. 

So please do think about your fleet and how speeding impacts it during Operation Safe Driver Week. But please don’t stop thinking about it come July 21st -- because if you do, you’re leaving much-needed gains in safety and efficiency on the table. If you’d like to see a demo of Xtra and find out how we can help you get on the road to your fleet’s own cultural shift, just use this link to request a demo: