CCJ Staff
The J2497 is the Power Line Carrier Communications for Commercial Vehicles and successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a nearby attacker to activate or disable a trailers brakes. There are so many sensors and computing power on a truck, you’d think the tractor would be the focus of a cyberattack, but the trailer is more likely to be the initial actual target.
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You can reduce the chances of an accident by training, monitoring, and reforming driver behavior using dash cam technology.
Mark Schedler
Identification and Correction
The best defense against an accident is not having one. But with the number of miles traveled and the realities of highway travel, you cannot avoid all accidents. However, you can reduce the chances of an accident by training, monitoring, and reforming driver behavior using dash cam technology. A dash cam system accelerates the identification and correction of unsafe behaviors and sustains the change with ongoing coaching and recognition.
Carriers that correctly use a dash cam system as part of a continual driver training process have achieved best-in-class risk mitigation. A 2019 Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study of carriers who used video event-based coaching and training along with other safety strategies revealed the following results:
Fleets shared in separate study1 how they are leveraging dash cams and the results they are seeing:
The Best Legal Defense is Prevention
In their 2020 study, Understanding the Impact of Verdicts on the Trucking Industry, The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) in Arlington, VA, found that verdict awards over $1 million had skyrocketed.
Additional research by ATRI presented in The Impact of Small Verdicts and Settlements on the Trucking Industry showed that more than 600 cases resulted in a settlement or verdict award of less than $1 million.
Why such significant awards? Because a carrier’s actions are judged in court by what they should have known and done, not what they took the time to find and correct. A carrier must correct any unsafe situation that could affect the motoring public, which is made easier by monitoring driver behavior using video.
The study noted a correlation between cases in which carriers were accused of poor hiring or training practices and cases with drivers who had previous driving or hours-of-service violations.
The ATRI Crash Predictor Model study correlated traffic violation or conviction to the increased likelihood of a crash with examples such as:
Failure to Yield Right of Way violation . . . . . . . . . . . . 141%
Failure to Use/Improper Turn Signal conviction . . . . 116%
Reckless Driving violation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104%
Failure to Obey Traffic Sign conviction . . . . . . . . . . . . .85%
Failure to Keep Proper Lane conviction . . . . . . . . . . . . 78%
Reckless/Careless/Inattentive Driving conviction . . . 62%
When it comes to driver training, you should actively prioritize the prevention of the most costly infractions that ATRI shares and that your dash cam videos and data reveal.
Doug Marcello
WHY IT MATTERS: Risk reduction and denuclearization is not solely the responsibility of safety and risk departments. Every department can, and must, act within their powers to reduce exposure to liabilities. This is even more important in an era of deductibles/retention and captives. The all-out effort in every department protects the public, preserves company profits, and deflates an existential threat.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM: There is a misperception that risk is limited to being a safety and risk department problem. Impose procedures. Minimize claims.
Moreover, safety and risk are misconceived as company burdens. They restrict profits. They erode the bottom line. Burdens.
While safety and risk lead risk reduction, it is company-wide effort. Every department can contribute. Do what they can to minimize exposure.
Unfortunately, these other departments are encouraged to the contrary. Sales to get loads. Recruiting to fill seats. Operations to route. Maintenance to keep wheels turning.
All these functions have elements of risk. Yet few companies encourage, let along focus, on reducing these risk bearing elements. In today’s environments, it is a “must” to do so.
WHAT CAN BE DONE: Safety and risk is not just external, addressing interaction with the motoring public and billboard lawyers. It is also an internal endeavor evangelized to all departments.
1. SALES-Risk-based pricing. Load pricing is market drive. But that pricing cannot ignore risk. The risk inherent in a load that goes to a litigious or accident fraught location.
I have clients that lament the costs of cases in “hellhole” jurisdictions. Yet, they priced the load to that location priced for less risky locations.
Sales must fulfill that role. Loads must be priced for the potential exposure. Or declined if the price does not factor the risk.
I know-easy for me to say as an attorney. But I’ve seen the alternative and the losses suffered by the failure to include risk or exposure in the pricing calculation.
2. RECRUITING-Exposure starts with drivers. Their actions, and their pasts, are potential detonators.
“Filling the seat” indiscriminately feeds the frenzy of the billboard attorneys. As I’ve said before, for them its not about the accident—it’s about the company. Systemic failures.
Questionable (dubious) hiring lobs them a soft one. The billboard attorneys can attack the company for hiring an unqualified driver to operate an 80,000 truck among the motoring public.
The defense starts with hiring. Qualified drivers. Defensible backgrounds. Training to address deficiencies.
Again, easy for me to say. But I’ve seen the alternative…and what it costs.
3. OPERATIONS: How can operations reduce risks? They just direct traffic.
Answer: a lot.
First, driver management is vital—HOS, fatigue, weather,… All of these are potential detonators.
Second, routing is risk related. Telematic companies provide insight into the most dangerous road, days of the week, times of day. These are invaluable insights that can minimize risk if employed in routing.
And one of the largest recent verdicts included an argument that weather should have been considered in routing.
Third, detention time. ATRI’s recent study found increased risk when there is excessive detention time. Not just rushing to make up time, but even enroute to get the load.
4. MAINTENANCE: Functioning vehicles reduce risk. Not just by avoiding failure caused accidents, but by minimizing driver distraction and rushing due to lost time.
Plus post-accident inspections that reveal per-accident defects are fodder for the argument of billboard attorneys that there is a systemic failure that requires a big verdict. “The company couldn’t even keep their vehicles compliant. How do you think the rest of the company operates.”
THE BIG THING: Multi-departmental safety and risk requires one overarching commitment-a safety culture. It starts at the top. With the folks who are responsible for, judged by, and profit from the bottom line.
In my current presentation, “Safety Profit”, I preach the message of this full court press by the entire company and all departments to protect profit…and the company itself. Management must buy in and make clear their commitment to the message. When that happens, safety and risk are no longer a burden. They are a profit. Keeping money on the bottom line by stemming the hemorrhage.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Safety and risk will determine your bottom line. But all departments can and must contribute. Make sure this message reaches all and is effectively enforced.
Increased insurance premiums have driven trucking companies to increase deductibles and amounts of retention.
Couple that with low margins. That makes safety and risk impactful on profits.
ATRI’s Operational Costs of Trucking for 2024 found that the total cost of risk, premium plus “out of pocket” is $0.135/mile; $5.43/hour. The impact is demonstrated by being seen from the perspective of the average profit margins.
Average non-LTL revenue? $3.707/mile. And operating margin? $0.111/mile and $4.471/hour. Less than the total cost of risk.
Want to increase profit? Increase safety and decrease risk.
Angel Coker Jones
Driver- and road-facing cameras, speed limiters, collision mitigation systems, lane departure warning systems, lane-keeping/lane centering systems, telematics and ELDs. These technologies are all measures many fleets have implemented to increase safety, but a large portion of the truck driver population would disagree that these are beneficial in reducing safety risks.
In fact, in CCJ’s 2024 What Drivers Want survey, more drivers said these systems reduce rather than improve driver safety.
When asked which technologies have the greatest impact on reducing driver safety, 67% said speed limiters, while 54% said driver-facing cameras, and 46% said ELDs. When asked which technologies have the greatest impact on improving driver safety, 61% said forward-facing cameras, while 31% said collision mitigation and lane departure warning systems.
Most drivers have an aversion to any technology in the cab at all with many comments from drivers sharing similar sentiments: “Technology has ruined the industry for drivers;” “Just let me drive the truck, don’t need all of that crap;” “All of this stuff listed is a distraction.”
“We are supposed to be professionals and all the intrusive apparatus that is listed takes the mental aptitude away from the driver,” said Jack Mancini, a driver at Latigo Trucking out of South Carolina.
This attitude can often lead to drivers attempting to disable technology.
“When drivers hate the intervention, they tend to ignore it, or they tend to tamper with the system, both of which are bad,” said Stefan Heck, founder and CEO of AI-powered safety platform Nauto.
It’s all about buy-in, said Dudy Markus, vice president of aftermarket at Cipia, a provider of computer vision AI for driver and cabin sensing, including ADAS and driver fatigue and distraction detection.
He said the key to adoption lies in addressing both practical and psychological barriers, ensuring that safety systems not only perform effectively but also resonate with the priorities of their users.
That was the case with forward-facing cameras.
As previously noted, a large portion of drivers (61%) consider forward-facing cameras to have the greatest impact on improving driver safety, though some noted in comments that it doesn’t actually improve safety so much as it exonerates drivers in the event of a lawsuit. This while 69% of respondents said driver-facing cameras are invasive, and 4% said there should be an option for drivers to disable them in certain situations.
Mark Murrell, president of Carriers Edge, a provider of online driver training for the trucking industry, previously told the CCJ that fleets once experienced the same criticism of road-facing cameras as they are now with inward-facing cameras, but now it has driver buy-in because perception has shifted.
“Drivers didn’t want anybody watching the road or watching what was happening, but then, all of a sudden, we started seeing all of these dashcam videos showing up on YouTube, and it became a way for drivers to share the crazy stuff they were dealing with on a day-to-day basis,” Murrell said. “Then we started seeing more and more stories about how the camera footage had exonerated drivers in crashes, and it was becoming kind of a safeguard and all of a sudden the driver perspective changed completely.”
It’s the same for all technology, Markus said.
He said for safety systems to gain traction, the perceived value must go beyond life-saving benefits. Though, in theory, that should be enough, he said in practice, adoption increases when these systems align with broader incentives.
For fleets, that looks like cost savings, efficiency improvements, regulatory compliance and risk mitigation. For drivers, that looks like bonus checks because of these results.
Markus said once drivers see the benefits and develop confidence in the system, they’re much less likely to attempt to disable it.
Fleets may experience drivers tampering with technology like cameras, from tossing an article of clothing over the lens to “accidentally” breaking the instrument. When it comes to other technology that drivers don’t perceive as an invasion of privacy, they may attempt to deactivate it simply because it can be annoying.
“Poor solutions with high false positives lead to alert fatigue, which is one of the primary reasons drivers attempt to override safety systems,” Markus said. “Systems must demonstrate their value in enhancing driver safety by providing accurate, timely feedback.”
In instances of unreliable technology, Markus said disabling it might benefit safety by reducing driver distraction, but disabling a quality system that prevents unsafe behaviors like unbuckled seatbelts or texting while driving can have life-threatening consequences.
“Loud alerts for objects on the passenger side can scare drivers into jerking the wheel. And following distance buzzers dramatically increase anxiety,” Terrence Hyden, a driver out of Orlando, said in response to the What Drivers Want survey.
Markus said if the initial system configuration properly accounts for varying driving situations, individual driver adjustments are typically minimal, and fleets get more buy-in from drivers.
He said a comprehensive safety system goes well beyond a simple dashboard camera.
“It should be automotive-grade and adaptive per fleet-specific needs, combining ADAS with DMS (driver distraction detection) to provide both real-time alerts and driver analytics that support ongoing skill improvement,” Markus said. “When all these elements are in place, instances of drivers disabling safety technology become negligible.”
Any driver hired could represent a multi-million-dollar negligent hiring lawsuit. You can reduce that risk by using a hiring checklist to avoid pitfalls in five key areas.
Mark Schedler
Any driver hired could represent a multi-million-dollar negligent hiring lawsuit. You can reduce that risk by using a hiring checklist to avoid pitfalls in five key areas.
The regulated driver application is an investigative roadmap for new hires.
Common application errors include:
Avoid these prior employer investigation mistakes:
An expert should review MVRs. The person must know the state codes and the differences between various states’ MVRs. If they are not knowledgeable, they may overlook the following items:
Common mistakes when documenting a driver’s medical certification include:
Road tests are a carrier’s seal of approval that a driver can operate their commercial motor vehicle (CMV) safely. Errors or omissions when assessing a potential driver’s skills include:
In closing, reduce the risk of negligent hiring claims by using a hiring checklist for every driver who will operate a CMV for your company.
