Every accident involving a vehicle from your fleet can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, higher insurance premiums, and even costly legal cases. They’re to be avoided at all costs —not least for the health and safety of your drivers and other road users. In this guide, we’ll look at four of the best initiatives out there to help your drivers avoid collisions on the roads, ensuring that you’re well protected from these difficult and damaging eventualities.
Technology
In the modern world, technology has been developed to help drivers avoid collisions. Be they motion sensors that beep when you reverse close to an obstacle, or self-driving technology that helps you maintain speed and direction on the highway, these initiatives are helping reduce crashes and scrapes. And they’ve been developed for haulage firms, too, including the Mobileye collision avoidance system, which is built to spot and protect against hazards on the road. In testing, this solution has proven effective at reducing accidents and can serve as an extra pair of eyes for your drivers as they transport goods and materials from place to place.
Training
Then there’s training, which is something that all your drivers should take part in from time to time to ensure they’re up to speed with ongoing safety developments and regulations. It goes without saying that your drivers should be fully qualified to drive the specific vehicles you’re asking them to operate. But they should also be involved in refresher training and health and safety courses. Meanwhile, if you do install a system such as Mobileye to your trucks, you will need to train your drivers on how this works too. Imposing technology on drivers without first explaining it could lead to more harm than good.
Penalties
Your drivers will be less careless on the roads if they know that they’ll incur penalties in the event of a crash, collision, or scrape. Sometimes these are completely unavoidable, and you should ensure that your penalties didn’t harshly judge your drivers when they were not at fault. But it’s fair to require some personal responsibility of your drivers, especially given the serious risks of carelessness at the wheel of a truck carrying several tons. Consult with drivers before putting these penalties in place to ensure they’re on board and understanding.
Upgrading
Some trucks are more advanced than others. Older trucks, which you might have been considering retiring from your fleet, are more likely to be involved in a collision than newer models with enhanced safety features. Plus, poorly maintained and older vehicles are more likely to experience faults on the road that leads to a collision or accident—and this is your responsibility to avoid. Maintenance helps, but upgrading your fleet to boast newer models is the key to avoiding collisions caused by mechanical failure. These upfront costs can be eye-watering, but they’re essential if you’re looking to avoid crashes that can also cost you a huge amount of cash.
Use these four tips to plan new ways in which you and your haulage firm can avoid crashes in the future.
Image Credits: Quintin Gellar
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