How Vehicle Tracking Devices Improve Driver Safety

Installing trackers on your firm’s vehicles will provide your company with a wide range of benefits. Many companies decide to fit vehicle trackers to help cut fuel costs and increase customer satisfaction but there are also a number of ways a tracker can improve driver safety amongst your employees.

Promoting Safer Driving

Vehicle trackers do not just monitor a vehicle’s location and speed, they can also monitor driver behaviour. This means you can see if your drivers are making unsafe decisions whilst at the wheel such as violating the speed limit, sudden breaking or overly harsh steering.

Some trackers will notify the driver of their actions on the tracker screen as well as sending the information to the fleet manager. Many companies successfully use this feature to run safe driving competitions amongst their employees by rewarding the driver with the fewest safety deviations each month, which helps promote a culture of safe driving within your firm.

Health & Safety Legislation

As an employer you have a duty of care to your employees and you are required by law to ensure that your drivers are not working beyond the legally designated safe limits. Vehicle trackers can be used to track the working hours of each of your drivers so you can monitor who is approaching the limit and who has time to spare, allowing you to plan your fleet usage accordingly.

Locating Drivers in an Accident

Should the worst happen and one of your drivers is involved in an accident, you can use the tracker to notify the appropriate services of their location. This feature can be especially important if you have employees who work in remote or rural areas.

Trackers are accurate to within a few inches so your drivers will feel reassured that someone always knows their whereabouts. Furthermore, as trackers use satellite technology, they won’t go out of signal range in the way mobiles can.

Helping Drivers Concentrate on Driving

Everyone knows that driving in an unknown area can be stressful as the driver can be trying to focus on not getting lost rather than what’s happening on the road ahead of them. This lack of focus can result in drivers getting involved in accidents.

To help resolve this issue, many trackers now include navigation features which provide drivers with clear spoken instructions and a demonstration of where to go on tricky junctions. This means that your driver stress levels will be lowered and they will be far more likely to keep their eyes on the road, thereby avoiding potential accidents.

Other Safety Features

The technology in vehicle trackers is improving all the time and features found in certain models include panic buttons to alert you if one of your drivers needs assistance urgently, software that schedules maintenance so your vehicles are safe, and even in-vehicle cameras which provide very detailed information about driver actions.

Features such as cameras can also be used for staff training as you can use real life footage to clearly identify what are and are not acceptable driving practices.