The use of commercial vehicles is essential to business activities. This may involve driving to customer locations, moving personnel, or delivering products and services to clients. A fleet’s performance directly impacts profitability, so it’s critical to have efficient fleet administration in place. Installing dash cams in your cars is one method to accomplish this.

Nowadays, more and more drivers are involved in traffic accidents. According to a report by Bankrate, a car crash occurs every 13 minutes in the U.S. Unfortunately, many victims have difficulty resolving insurance claims. Identifying who was at fault is difficult since both drivers offer divergent accounts of what happened. For this reason, dashcams are becoming increasingly common, especially in commercial fleets. Installing a dash camera in your car has many advantages, particularly if an incident occurs where certain details are disputed.

However, many vehicle owners might be dubious because dash cameras may seem like an unnecessary expenditure that they could have avoided.

Learn more about the benefits of installing a dash camera in your fleet.

How Do Dash Cams Work?

A dash cam is a life-saving tool that allows you to record the road ahead or behind you as you drive. Commercial dash cams operate by using your vehicle as a power source, capturing video whenever the car is turned on, when a sensor detects a collision, or when the camera detects motion.  Because it records constantly, the dash cam can capture video of any incident or unexpected situation, such as a reckless driver, an accident, or even a traffic stop. The camera will record video of everything within its field of vision as long as it has power and is turned on.

What Are the Advantages of a Dash Cam?

Dash cams can capture various scenes, including checkpoints, driver safety, auto accidents, and any acts or potential acts of crime. Find below five key benefits of installing a dash camera:

1. Helps Prevent Crash-for-cash Scams

Recent years have seen increased criminal activity due to the high value of car insurance payouts. Some even stage or cause collisions on the roads. The so-called “crash for cash” events can be terrifying, expensive, and have long-lasting effects on innocent victims. Road users are increasingly retaliating, using visible dash cams to thwart fraudsters and the video proof the cameras produce to support the driver’s account of what happened.

Many of these involve fraudsters driving ahead of the victim, abruptly braking, and causing the unsuspecting motorist to collide with them. Sometimes, the driver may have even removed or disabled their brake lights, making it nearly impossible to avoid these collisions.

Some fraudsters have even been known to throw themselves in front of a moving vehicle, with possibly disastrous results. Whatever the cause of the mishap, insurance claims are frequently inflated in new ways. Examples include exaggerated or fictitious damage, hire-car costs, vehicle storage and towing costs, loss of wages compensation, and personal injury claims.

2. Protects Drivers

Imagine one of your fleet drivers being T-boned at an intersection. The person at fault tells the police officer a different account of what occurred. Aside from the inconvenience of a damaged vehicle and the possibility of real injuries, drivers found to be at fault will lose their insurance excess, get higher premiums, and may even face prosecution.

Dash cameras assist fleet managers in transitioning from a vehicle-focused view of their fleet to a holistic view that includes drivers. This will not only help to establish your drivers’ innocence, but it will also provide them with peace of mind that if anything goes wrong, video evidence will be accessible as proof.

In addition, dashcams can serve as a visual deterrent, discouraging fraudsters from staging a mishap in the first place. When discussing camera systems, this is one of the best ways to get driver buy-in because it shows drivers that the business cares about their safety and well-being.

3. Faster Insurance Claims Processing

Even if you were not involved in an accident, dash cam footage could be very helpful to police or insurance investigators. Having valuable video evidence to back up your car insurance claim can help speed up the process by letting your insurance company know what occurred.

Aside from revealing what occurred, it may also disclose other conspirators. Some scams, for example, include a third car that is used to cause the crash. More access to high-quality dashcam video assists authorities in identifying and prosecuting criminal gangs, lowering insurance costs and making roads safer for everyone.

Not all insurance companies are quick to embrace technological advancements. But some are beginning to understand the value of dash cams and how they might expeditiously and effectively resolve insurance claims.

4. Record Driver Behavior and Boost Training

Another excellent application for dash cam video is to improve fleet driver training programs. Driver instruction and coaching are likely to consume a significant amount of your time and energy. But no fleet manager can be everywhere and in every car at the same time. With a dash cam, you’ll have a clear view of what is happening inside and outside the vehicle. Dash cams provide an unbiased perspective of what’s going on the road and in the cab. This can benefit new or inexperienced drivers unaware of possible hazards.

Dash cams improve fleet managers’ ability to use driver scorecards by providing more data to influence your scoring system. Individualized driver coaching is feasible based on actual events, recorded data, and video demonstrating what the driver did well and where they could improve. Near misses, excessive speed, and other risky behaviors can be recorded and incorporated into training plans.

5. Improves Risk Assessment

What sections of your routes have dangerous road conditions and other hazards? Dash cams enable you to see these in real-time and make quick decisions in these circumstances. Dashcams, in conjunction with GPS monitoring software, can also assist you in detecting routing inefficiencies that cost you money. This is a type of financial danger that is avoidable. You can also see if your drivers are participating in other risky behaviors, such as compliance with docking and backing policies.

Dash cams are also excellent instruments for preventing theft. You’ll have footage of any illegal activity with views of your vehicle’s exterior and interior. Your fleet monitoring system can provide authorities with the information they need to recover your truck.

In Conclusion

Dash cams have several other benefits besides their growing popularity as a tool to help the police capture crash-for-cash scammers. Nearly every element of commercial vehicle insurance becomes more manageable and less expensive, from traffic accidents and parking incidents to the time it takes to process a claim and the cost of your premium. However, driver behavior will also change since they are less likely to drive recklessly or dangerously. Thanks to dashboard cameras, road users who aren’t paying attention to safety will be caught, new drivers can receive thorough instruction, and the insurance business won’t have to deal with deceptive claims.