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Road Safety Revolution: How Telematics Prevent Accidents
Updated: June 11th, 2024.
Traffic collisions, including car crashes, have a major impact, causing personal injuries, loss of life, and property damage. The social cost is staggering, with billions of dollars spent on health care costs, vehicle damage, and lost time. This is where telematics systems come in.
Telematics data includes acceleration, braking, speed, and driver behavior to identify outstanding behaviors and trends. It can also help predict maintenance needs to prevent vehicle malfunctions and promote safer roads. In this blog, we will go over how telematics improves safety and reduces road accidents.
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Understanding Telematics
Telematics is a technique for monitoring equipment, vehicles, trucks, and other assets. It uses onboard diagnostics, driver behavior monitoring, and GPS technology to plot their movements on a computerized map. Equally important, GPS tracking is the surveillance of location by utilizing the Global Positioning System to track the location of your vehicle remotely. The technology can track the target's ground speed, latitude, longitude, and course direction.
Vehicle diagnostic tools can aid technicians and mechanics in making the correct repairs by tracking the source of the issues, saving you money and time. Also, by receiving real-time alerts about possible issues like engine faults and low tire pressure, preventive maintenance can be done, minimizing the threat of breakdowns and accidents.
Furthermore, telematics technology assists in monitoring drivers' behaviors, like rapid acceleration and harsh breaking. By evaluating these patterns, you can pinpoint risky driving behaviors and provide targeted feedback and training to enhance your safety.
Key Causes of Road Accidents
Road accidents can be complex. It is essential to be aware of their causes so prospective measures can be taken to curb the problem. The leading causes of road accidents are driver behavior, vehicle condition, and environmental factors.
Driver behavior
Higher speed limits are among the most significant causes of road incidents and accidents. Different studies indicate that speeding is dangerous in terms of the likelihood of an accident and increases the severity of the mishap.
Distracted driving refers to behavior that interferes with driving, obstructing the driver's focus with other tasks such as texting, eating, or using in-car applications. Reduced visibility and slower decision-making increase the risk of accidents for drivers due to impaired peripheral vision.
Fatigued driving is even more fatal than drunk driving and thus requires strict laws to set acceptable limits. Fatigued performance is characterized by a decrease in wakefulness, a reduction in response rate, and a decline in decision-making capacity. Inattentiveness, long distances, lack of sleep, and driving during the night are some of the major values drivers exhibit that lead to fatigue.
Vehicle condition
Even if there is no collision with another vehicle, mechanical breakdown due to missed or ignored vehicle maintenance leads to accidents. Some of the most common and frequent issues easily avoidable through proper maintenance include worn-out tires, faulty braking systems, and even electrical problems with the lights.
Environmental factors
Most climates require that individuals drive under different weather conditions, including rainy, snowy, or icy conditions, which could be hazardous. This makes the roads narrow, bends slippery, and tires' traction on the road weak, leading to increased accidents during poor weather.
Other road hazards include potholes, holes developing on the road's surface, and inadequate surfacing, which means a road that has not been well or poorly surfaced in the first place. These conditions can cause drivers to override their faculties or their ability to react optimally to changes in road characteristics.
How Telematics Helps Prevent Road Accidents
The main subtopics of telematics that directly impact road safety for drivers, vehicles, other road users, and pedestrians are improving driver behavior, vehicle maintenance, route optimization, and support for compliance and reporting. Here's how telematics can prevent road accidents.
Improving driver behavior
Telematics utilizes real-time information on violent incline or decline rate, speed, acceleration, and cornering forces. This constant monitoring ensures that hazardous conduct is noted and corrected immediately, as do most fleet managers and drivers.
Automated feedback notifications from telematics produce real-time responses to irresponsible conduct, which may correct it. If the driver is overspeeding or applying harsh breaks, the system can send a message to the driver promoting constructive behavior.
Telematics can provide data for creating effective training programs. Analyzing driving styles and habits can help identify specific areas for improvement to enhance overall performance and safety on the road. Additionally, training tailored to individual drivers' needs can address their weaknesses.
Enhancing vehicle maintenance
Telematics systems track and monitor vehicle health, including engine data, batteries, tire pressure, and other related values. They use notifications to give a potential warning when there is a prospect of a breakdown to allow for adequate maintenance.
The implication is that telematics enables timely servicing and maintenance, avoiding vehicle mechanical breakdowns that could result in mishaps. This helps keep the vehicles in good condition through a controlled system of annual check-ups, thereby decreasing the risk of random mechanical failure during use.
Optimizing routes
Some beneficial aspects include using telematics to help plan better and safer routes by getting information about traffic and road troubles. This optimization prevents traveling through 'hot spots,' and time is saved.
It's important to have control stations that provide current traffic and weather conditions for travel. This information is valuable, allowing drivers to avoid dangerous weather areas, change their routes, and adjust their driving behavior.
Compliance and reporting
Safety compliance is another important goal that can be achieved through telematics. It enables adherence to speed limits, hours of service provision, and all other requirements expected of drivers. Compliance with these regulations prevents accidents by eliminating the possibility of violating them.
Like other forms of coverage, telematics systems provide information about speed, location, and related behavior in the immediate aftermath of an accident. This information is important for understanding the causes of accidents and making future improvements.
Implementation Considerations
Choosing the right telematics system
Choosing a suitable telematics system involves considering factors such as the size of the fleet, the business's specific needs, and the system's features. Two features should be considered when selecting a system that can meet customer demands: first, the system must provide further information; second, it must have a favorable user interface.
Overcoming challenges
Other risks involve using telematics, including cost considerations, privacy, and resistance to change. To resolve these concerns, it is necessary to provide the rationale for implementing telematics solutions, protect data, and discuss the company's personnel and the people behind the vehicle's wheel.
Training and adoption
To ascertain that telematics work effectively within motor carriers, proper training on utilizing the equipment is necessary among the drivers and staff. This would encompass how they should interpret the data from the telematics system, respond to the different alarms, and improve performance and safety levels using the system. This is an important area because the failure of people to adopt new things can be a significant hindrance to making higher achievements, thus the need to constantly educate and facilitate people.
Conclusion
Telematics technology provides an extensive solution to significantly reduce road accidents by addressing important areas like driver behavior, vehicle maintenance, and route planning.
Specifically, by reporting accurate and timely data, telematics assists in altering risky behavior on roads, making them safer. Additionally, scheduling diagnostics and alerts for mechanical problems helps avoid the typical breakdowns that can cause accidents on the road.
Additional contributions to road transport safety include integrated maps showing the best travel routes and entry updates on traffic and weather conditions to prevent the likely occurrence of accidents in adverse circumstances.
Telematics also encompasses accident prevention and introduces efficacy and safety practices for vehicle management. This technology is instrumental in encouraging compliance with legal requirements on the road, ensuring optimal vehicle health, and notably determining safer routes for use.
Looking to find the optimal telematics system? Read our reviews of the top fleet management systems and compare your options. Also, don’t miss out on insightful information about the fleet management industry on our blog page.