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Knight chooses SmartDrive video-based safety program

June 16, 2016

Knight Transportation is deploying SmartDrive Systems’ video-based safety program across its fleet. The selection comes after a head-to-head evaluation, in which SmartDrive performed well across several key areas including its video analytics platform, ease-of-use, coaching workflow, extended recording, and configurable risk scoring and coaching.

The truckload carrier undertook an extensive head-to-head evaluation of video safety programs after experiencing a sustained increase in litigation activity involving its fleet, much of which was fraudulent and costing the company time and money. With many drivers having purchased and installed their own “crash recorders” to exonerate them when not at fault in a collision, Knight conducted discussions with its driver community about the value of video-based solutions. As a result, company leadership determined it was the right time to investigate solutions to meet their safety needs and business objectives.

“A driver has one thing that can derail his career—and that’s safety. SmartDrive helps drivers protect what is most important: their safety and the safety of the motoring public,” said Brett Sant, senior vice-president of safety and risk management at Knight. “We evaluated different systems, but SmartDrive was superior. There was a significant difference in terms of collisions captured, the overall visibility to risk and the ability to access additional video context on-demand. This combination compelled us to select SmartDrive. “

The pilot program aimed to assess the impact of video-based safety programs against a number of core safety and operational metrics. In each category, SmartDrive outperformed the other solution, and the fleet realized an 84% improvement in safety performance. During the side-by-side trial, a number of capabilities and performance outcomes unique to the SmartDrive platform surfaced. These included capturing twice as many and a wider variety of collisions compared with the other solution, such as hard-to-get side-swipe and low-impact collisions; a significant reduction in unsafe driving; and a substantial decrease in claims cost as a percentage of revenue. The Knight location where the pilot took place experienced the lowest claims cost in the fleet and had zero preventable DOT collisions during the trial.

Other SmartDrive benefits cited were:

•Extended recording capability, which captures more video context in every incident such as side swipes and rear-end collisions, integration to Knight’s collision mitigation systems and advanced maneuver triggering, all of which enable the fleet to capture significantly more risk.

•Configurable risk scoring and coaching workflow, video review, easy-to-use, quick drill-downs, and intuitive links to the coaching process.

•Dashboards that quickly identified areas of risk, allowing managers to focus coaching to actual risk and freeing time to focus on other things.

•SmartDrive SmartIQ safety and coaching scores that made it easy to measure, understand, and improve performance.

•Flexibility to choose a program with a single, road-facing camera that could be upgraded to additional cameras later should Knight choose to do so.

For more information, go to www.smartdrive.net.