Driver safety is a top priority for any small business or commercial fleet. Employers pay $60 billion annually for motor vehicle crashes involving their employees. Beyond costs, preventing unsafe driving can save lives and protect your drivers, business, and reputation. This article explores the value of live stream dash cam technology in maximizing road safety.
What is a live stream dash cam?
A dash cam is a compact video camera that can attach to a vehicle dashboard, the inside of the windshield, a rearview mirror, or nearby surface.
A live streaming feature provides real-time footage of what’s happening in the cab, on the road, or both at once. Safety managers can conduct virtual ride-alongs with drivers and help coach remotely to improve safety on the road.
How does live streaming work?
Authorized administrators can use live streaming to get an ongoing view from a remote location. With the driver’s permission and awareness.
Live streaming dash cams may offer:
- Audio recording
- Built-in GPS tracking
- HD or high-res image capture
- Night vision
- Accident/motion sensors
You’ll likely also be choosing between a road-facing or dual-facing camera. The most common may be road-facing, but there are added benefits of dual-facing cameras to help coach and protect drivers.
Benefits of live streaming
Live streaming is generally an optional feature for dash cams. Here are several advantages of getting real-time visibility into driver safety on the road.
1. Remote training
You can’t send safety managers out on the road with every driver. Yet with live streaming, veteran drivers and safety personnel can quickly check in on drivers for a spot check. This lets you randomly sample your fleet drivers or focus on individual drivers who need customized coaching. Managers can also conduct virtual ride-alongs to onboard new drivers and provide remote training in real time.
2. Peace of mind
Managers gain the ability to check in on drivers to make sure they’re safe in challenging weather or other conditions. The live streaming enables a veteran driver or fleet safety manager to help troubleshoot and monitor performance on the road.
3. Improved customer experience
Live streaming can help fleet managers verify proof of delivery. The ability to view what’s happening, live, at loading docks can improve communication with your customers and enhance accountability.
How does live streaming affect driver privacy?
Privacy is a top concern for drivers with live streaming in their cabs. You don’t want to sacrifice your employee’s peace of mind by making them feel as if they’re constantly surveilled by the prying eye of the camera. That’s why top dash cams with live streaming technology are built with driver privacy in mind. Like the Motive AI Dashcam.
This optional feature must be turned on by a fleet admin to use. Motive’s AI Dashcam always lets the driver know through in-cab audio and visual alerts when the live stream starts and ends. Only users with live streaming permissions can initiate a live stream, and the vehicle must have the feature enabled for managers to live stream.
Besides live streaming, what are the other benefits of an AI Dashcam?
1. Prevent accidents
Motive’s advanced AI Dashcam includes powerful AI processors and advanced computer vision algorithms that detect unsafe driving with unparalleled accuracy. The Motive AI Dashcam instantly detects unsafe driving behaviors such as cell phone distraction and close following with industry-leading accuracy and alerts drivers in real time.
2. Gain a coaching tool
You have a lot of drivers on the road. That can mean a large volume of dash cam video. Motive’s event intelligence and in-house safety team analyze every video for you within seconds to determine the context and severity. Managers get prioritized videos with rich data to help them make informed decisions, and drivers are automatically coached on correctable behaviors when they complete their trip.
Using Motive’s DRIVE proprietary risk scoring, you can pinpoint your fleet’s high-risk drivers, and follow a prebuilt coaching framework to engage drivers in experiential learning. Using footage showing everything before, during, and after a safety event can provide a clear case study of driver decisions behind the wheel.
Following the preventative measures suggested by our AI Dashcam technology, drivers can also improve their CSA scores, which makes them more desirable and employable.
3. Protect against false claims
With dashboard camera footage, drivers can gather evidence of what’s actually happening on the road. If an accident does occur, the fleet has video evidence in the event of a claim against a driver. This can prevent false claims and help reduce claim costs in the event of an actual event.
In fact, many insurance companies recognize the advantages of dash cam technology and offer discounts when they’re installed in commercial vehicles. Using live stream dash cams sends a clear signal to your insurer that you’re serious about safety.
4. Cut costs
Dash cam footage provides digital proof of what happened on the road. With the ability to search and save the footage of any incident or event, you can avoid steep attorney fees; long, drawn out court cases; and extensive insurance investigations.
With our AI Dashcam alerting drivers of dangerous driving behaviors, the number of traffic citations can drop as well. That means lower out-of-pocket costs for your drivers as well as fewer points against their licenses. Meanwhile, fleet managers will enjoy greater scheduling ease with fewer drivers dealing with suspension and/or higher insurance premiums.
At the same time, in the event of an insurance claim, dash cams can expedite the processing speed of the settlement.
5. Support safety culture
With dash cams installed in your vehicles, your business emphasizes to employees the importance of a safety culture. You’re following vehicle fleet management best practices by prioritizing safety for everyone.
Emphasize the positive. Use recordings from the live stream dash cams to identify good driving habits too. Some businesses use the footage and driver report cards to recognize those who put road safety first.
Request a demo to see what the Motive AI Dashcam can do
Pairing live stream dash cams with a fleet safety program can cut risks, reduce costs, and improve your overall compliance and business reliability.
Not only does Motive’s AI Dashcam offer optional live streaming, our dash cam’s leading-edge artificial intelligence (AI) processor and advanced computer vision algorithms also immediately detect unsafe driving and alert drivers in real time.
Fleet managers can review contextualized and prioritized video and recall clips from a specific point in time for exoneration.
Take a look at this Motive dash cam footage to see the driver tips that a safety manager offered when they had better visibility into driver safety on the road.
Request a demo of our AI Dashcam today!
