Halt harsh braking to improve fleet safety

Harsh braking, one of the different types of aggressive driving, can put your drivers or others on the road at risk. By monitoring and reducing harsh braking, you may lower the risk of rear-end collisions and the liability and costs associated with these types of incidents. Knowing your level of risk can help you provide significant improvements to driver behaviour.

What is harsh braking?

Harsh braking occurs when a driver uses more force than necessary to stop the vehicle. The presence of harsh braking often indicates aggressive or distracted driving and can lead to costly claims, as well as increased maintenance issues.

It is important to note that harsh braking does not always mean your driver is being unsafe or aggressive while operating. Often, these same types of harsh braking events occur to avoid collisions from happening. Reviewing such events with your drivers is a valuable exercise.

Benefits of monitoring harsh braking

Reducing harsh braking can increase the overall safety of your drivers and the general public. It can also provide continuous savings to your fleet operations.

The benefits of monitoring harsh braking include:

• Reduced rear end collisions
• Prevention of aggressive driving behaviours
• Improved safety of drivers and public
• Reduced maintenance costs
• Reduced brake issues

How to monitor and reduce harsh braking events

If you’re not already using a telematics solution, implementing telematics into your safety programme will offer major improvements. You can expect significant improvements to the performance and behaviour of your drivers, as well as a reduction in collisions and related costs within your fleet.

By installing a Geotab GO device in your fleet vehicles, you can receive reports and real-time alerts for aggressive driving and hard braking events. In addition, Geotab offers live in-cab coaching through buzzers in GO TALK with spoken feedback to drivers.

When you can’t be with your mobile workers in their vehicles, having a telematics system that allows you to be the virtual supervisor with real time alerts and corrections will have ongoing benefits to your fleet by reducing collisions, maintenance and ultimately your overall costs.

Introducing harsh brake detection on Base and Regulatory plans

Geotab has recently launched a new harsh brake detection feature in MyGeotab. By providing greater insight into fleet activity, this feature can help deter unsafe driving behaviours and improve road safety.

Other key fleet benefits include:

• Improvement in driving behaviours
• Lower maintenance costs
• Reduce vehicle wear and tear
• Increase overall road safety

The new harsh braking feature is now available for Base and Regulatory plan users. Additional features, like beeping, driver feedback and other accelerometer data alerts, require an upgrade to the Pro or ProPlus plans.

For more information on Geotab’s software plans and their included features, visit our Software Packages page.