Which Companies Have Driver Facing Cameras?

The idea that inward or outward facing cameras can make any driver safer is, at the very least, laughable. They serve only one purpose and that is to deal with liability and lawsuits. A way for insurance companies to push liability off to somewhere else.

I think it depends on the camera. Imagine if they came out with a camera that recorded your whole day and evaluated your performance using some super high tech artificial intelligence. Then you was scored and coached on every single thing you did wrong all day long. What if the camera could read signs and see stop lights and know your exact following distance and stuff like that. Imagine if your fleet manager could play your whole day out using a fast forward button similar to a time lapse video. Wouldn’t that be the day. Imagine they had each driver on a app similar to tictock where they could swipe through live video of each driver at anytime of the day or night. This might make you drive better.

The idea that inward or outward facing cameras can make any driver safer is, at the very least, laughable. They serve only one purpose and that is to deal with liability and lawsuits. A way for insurance companies to push liability off to somewhere else.

I have been speaking with my folks. I want to know what costs are being passed on to me and what if any insurance breaks they are going to offer me. Their first response was classic. They said you pay for the service for the eld. I agreed however the eld is mandatory through regulation. Camera’s are not.

I have run a dash cam for several years. I have no problem with the idea. What I have issue with is it being forced upon me with a cost.

I’m still waiting for the company response.

As of 3/1/20 C.R. England has Outward facing cameras only. They do not record audio, but they do record telemetry data, including fuel pedal, brake pedal, speed and such.

The idea that inward or outward facing cameras can make any driver safer is, at the very least, laughable. They serve only one purpose and that is to deal with liability and lawsuits.

Joseph, I've had a few triggered camera events that made me seriously consider all the factors that went into them. Every single one of them taught me better how to appraise the situations we face on the road, and adjust my driving ahead of time, so that I could avoid those near catastrophic events better in the future.

So, I completely disagree with your statement. My camera has definitely been an aid in making me a safer driver. Just the fact that it triggered caused me to evaluate the situation deeper. Each time I realized I could have avoided the problem had I been more observant of, and responsive to, my surroundings and the actions of the other drivers.

I installed a piece of electrical tape over the inward facing camera lense on the day I accepted the truck and have heard nothing from the higher ups.

Might want to reconsider that, at Conway nobody said anything until someone reviewed a event. Then the driver was given 1 warning a 2nd time was immediate termination.

Nope. Not until I hear otherwise. We have not been Conway for several years.

Giltner out of Twin Falls ID and the sister company, GLS Carriers just installed forward and driver facing cameras. The driver facing cameras only come on for 15 seconds on either side of a critical event is what Safety told me when I came back Tuesday.

Laura

The idea that inward or outward-facing cameras can make any driver safer is, at the very least, laughable. They serve only one purpose and that is to deal with liability and lawsuits. A way for insurance companies to push liability off to somewhere else.

I completely disagree with this, also, and the scientific community has already proven the merits of monitoring people.

When someone knows they're being watched they make decisions on a much higher level. You won't try to secretly bend the rules, sneak in a few exceptions to the rules, or take the risks you might otherwise take.

When someone knows they'll be held liable for any mistakes and there's no getting out of it, they'll be more careful.

Here's an awesome article about some experiments that have been done on people's behavior at just the suggestion of being watched:

To sum up one of the experiments, they hung posters up in a cafeteria. Sometimes they were of flowers, sometimes they were of human eyes:

The researchers found that during periods when the posters of eyes, instead of flowers, overlooked the diners, twice as many people cleaned up after themselves

So even putting up a poster with eyes on it triggers a change in people's behavior. They behave better, and they're not even being watched! Just the idea of being watched made them behave better.

Putting a camera in a truck means real monitoring and drivers know they won't get away with unsafe behaviors or mistakes. It will radically change the way a driver behaves when behind the wheel. That's a fact.

You don't have to spend much time on the highways to know that texting is a big problem. If people knew they were being monitored, do you think they would be texting? No way.

I think it depends on the camera. Imagine if they came out with a camera that recorded your whole day and evaluated your performance using some super high tech artificial intelligence. Then you was scored and coached on every single thing you did wrong all day long. What if the camera could read signs and see stop lights and know your exact following distance and stuff like that. Imagine if your fleet manager could play your whole day out using a fast forward button similar to a time lapse video. Wouldn’t that be the day. Imagine they had each driver on a app similar to tictock where they could swipe through live video of each driver at anytime of the day or night. This might make you drive better.

The idea that inward or outward facing cameras can make any driver safer is, at the very least, laughable. They serve only one purpose and that is to deal with liability and lawsuits. A way for insurance companies to push liability off to somewhere else.

Not hard to imagine all that. My truck, which I have dubbed the blue spaceship, already does much of that. We have the Netrodyne Camera system, and it reads stop signs, red lights, speed limit signs, School Zones, Do Not Pass Signs, and senses hard braking events, and it knows when you leave a School zone as well. Our safety bonus system is based off all of those things, as well as following distances. In fact, following distance, speeding, and stop sign/red lights, are pretty much all of it. Just a few minutes of following distance a day can cost us 50 points in a day. Each day starts out at 1000 points, and goes down from there, unless we get a driver star. Then it adds 50 points possible score for the day. A driver star means we are proactive about slowing down if someone cuts us off, and we open the distance between us to over 250 feet or more. The trick is to have the distance back before it triggers an alert. And the way people drive nowadays, that is a constant battle. Last month, I had a total score of 985 with 5 driver stars, and I was ranked 35th out of 189 drivers, which includes about 20 mechanics. I had 135 minutes following distance with 13907 minutes analysed. We can view the videos with the Driveri app that coincides with the camera.

I do not like the system, but it has made me much more aware of the whole following distance problem plaguing the highways. Combined with the collision mitigation system, the cameras are very stressful to me, because of the false positives that the collision thing throws out. It will go off for a random bridge, over head sign, or for no reason at all, and sometimes it randomly hits the brakes. If it were not for all that technology, I would probably spend the rest of my trucking career here, because I love the company that much. But the stress from it all has me looking for a new job. The problem is, I make 55 cpm , so finding something that equals that, and hires from New York where I live, and runs farther west than Denver has been proving extremely difficult.

Some of the training companies like Prime are self insured.... so Prime makes the decision. We have outward cameras ONLY in trucks of drivers with multiple safety issues for training purposes.

yes, if a company is aware they can improve