SAN DIEGO, June 7, 2016—SmartDrive Systems, a leader in driving performance solutions that reduce collisions and improve fuel efficiency, announced today that Knight Transportation, one of North America’s largest and most diversified truckload transportation companies, is deploying SmartDrive’s video-based safety program across its fleet. The selection comes after a head-to-head evaluation, in which SmartDrive performed exceptionally well across several key areas including its video analytics platform, ease-of-use, coaching workflow, extended recording, and configurable risk scoring and coaching.

“For the best fleets, there is no such thing as good enough—especially when it comes to safety. Knight Transportation is just such a fleet having long been recognized as an industry innovator and safety leader,” said Steve Mitgang, CEO of SmartDrive. “SmartDrive outperforms other systems because our platform identifies and captures more risk, delivers actionable transportation intelligence that uncovers more savings and efficiency opportunities and is easy for managers to adopt and use. We are proud to have been selected by Knight and welcome them to the SmartDrive family.”

Knight undertook an extensive head-to-head evaluation of video safety programs after experiencing a sustained increase in litigation activity involving its fleet, much of which was fraudulent and costing the company time and money. With many drivers having purchased and installed their own “crash recorders” to exonerate them when not at fault in a collision, Knight conducted extensive discussions with its driver community about the value of video-based solutions. As a result, company leadership determined it was the right time to investigate solutions to meet their safety needs and business objectives.

“A driver has one thing that can derail his career—and that’s safety. SmartDrive helps drivers protect what is most important—their safety and the safety of the motoring public,” said, Brett Sant, senior vice president of safety and risk management at Knight. “We evaluated different systems, but SmartDrive was superior. There was a significant difference in terms of collisions captured, the overall visibility to risk and the ability to access additional video context on-demand—this combination compelled us to select SmartDrive.”

The pilot program aimed to assess the impact of video-based safety programs against a number of core safety and operational metrics. In each category, SmartDrive out-performed the other solution evaluated, and the fleet realized an 84 percent improvement in safety performance. During the side-by-side trial, a number of capabilities and performance outcomes unique to the SmartDrive platform surfaced, including capturing twice as many and a wider variety of collisions as compared to the other solution, including hard to get side-swipe and low impact collisions; a significant reduction in unsafe driving; and a substantial decrease in claims cost as a percentage of revenue. The Knight location where the pilot took place experienced the lowest claims cost in the fleet and had zero preventable DOT collisions during the trial.

“Our driving associates are embracing SmartDrive because it will help them get better and better at operating the truck as safely, effectively and productively as they can— protecting their commercial driver’s license and their livelihood,” commented Kevin Knight, founder and chairman, Knight Transportation.

Additional SmartDrive benefits cited by Sant and his colleagues on the Knight leadership team were:

• Extended Recording capability, which captures more video context in every incident–such as side swipes and rear end collisions, integration to Knight’s collision mitigation systems and advanced maneuver triggering, all of which enable the fleet to capture significantly more risk
• Configurable risk scoring and coaching workflow, video review, easy-to-use, quick drill-downs and intuitive links to the coaching process
• Dashboards that quickly identified areas of risk, allowing managers to focus coaching to actual risk and freeing time to focus on other things
• SmartDrive SmartIQ® safety and coaching scores that made it easy to measure, understand and improve performance
• Flexibility to choose a program with a single, road-facing camera that could be upgraded to additional cameras later should Knight choose to do so

“I was an aggressive driver and as an aggressive driver, you are putting yourself and your surroundings more at risk. But I didn’t feel like I was an aggressive driver because I’ve been on the road for 16 years. After experiencing the SmartDrive program, I am more aware of the way I drive. For the company liability, my own safety and the public safety, SmartDrive has made a big difference,” said Roger Call, Knight Transportation driver.