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How Telematics Can Help Reduce the Cost of Running your Fleet

01 August 2018

The notion of having a black box in a car is frankly, unappealing to most people. Aviva found that 49% of people claimed they would never install a telematics device into their vehicle. A new generation of telematics could take this to the next level. Some telematics systems provide driver coaching whereby your very own inanimate car has somehow found a way to backseat drive. 

However redundant or irritating some of the features of a telematics system may be, they can be incredibly useful for reducing the costs of running your fleet. Some telematics systems are already widely in operation, with 850,000 insurance policies that revolve around telematics present in the UK.

The biggest expenses when running a fleet come from fuel and insurance. That telematics system wouldn’t seem so tiresome if you knew it could cut fuel consumption by 20% and reduce insurance costs by 30%. This system can also monitor behaviour on the roads to produce data reports that tell an individual how aggressively they are driving, whether they regularly speed and what type of roads they drive on, along with a multitude of other things. It lowers insurance costs by encouraging safer driving, while simply driving at the speed limit to lower fuel expenditure. Telematics systems with driver coaching can also steer you away from traffic congestion, leading to less time idling and again, lower fuel expenditure.

Introducing this policy across your fleet could introduce a derivative form of “last place aversion”, referring to the natural competitiveness of humanity. This means that suddenly, you have an entire fleet of well-behaved drivers and less money escaping the company accounts.  

Not only does introducing driver scores and telematics help save money and make managing a fleet a bit more fun, telematics can also help protect your drivers in the event of an accident. These systems not only monitor the wellbeing of your employee after an accident, they ensure that the company is informed, putting you in the best position to help them. Whether that is through contacting emergency services or simply sending a replacement car to them. A quickly dispatched replacement car could help save the entire business money and time.

The best thing about telematics is that you can control the level of interaction between the system and the driver. MarshallMatics can have a personal setting, for example, so that you are only receiving this data during working hours. Everyone needs a break from their backseat driver every once in a while!

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