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One company looking specifically at addressing the cause of some common accidents is E-Training World, which has recently launched two new web-based courses targeting the most frequent source of damage to company cars: rear-end collisions and car park accidents.
The company argues that all accidents are preventable if more care was taken by drivers.
"If you offered a driver £1m to get from A to B accident free, including parking their car, they would be able to do it," comments E-Training World sales and marketing director Jonathan Mosely. "This scenario proves it can be done and it demonstrates that accidents when manoeuvering and at low speed are down to attitude rather than ability."
"Even small knocks and scrapes can be extremely expensive to repair," adds E-Training World managing director Graham Hurdle. "We have developed these new e-modules to help educate drivers of the causes of these incidents - more often a lack of concentration and anticipation - and how to avoid them."
Swiftly getting damaged cars back on the road is vital to keeping the cost of an accident under control, especially in minimising additional costs away from the actual incident itself.
"The downtime element transposes into cost, as if you have a vehicle off the road then some fleets will fund a hire car," says Roberts.
"The provision of a small courtesy car is standard, but it's not always adequate for a customer so therefore will have exposure on cost." He cited the example of a company director used to a BMW X5 off-roader not being keen to swap to a small city car courtesy model.
One area where the industry has upped its game in recent times is in controlling the costs of the car that's been hit by a fleet driver.
"With third-party capture, if we're not very quick at doing that, and five or six years ago we weren't very good, you can be in for an expensive hire bill," says Monteith. "We've become acutely aware of it in the last five years with personal claims, and the more third parties we can capture then the smaller the bills."
Hitachi's Roberts feels the industry still has room for improvement in this area. "They like the theory, but people haven't got their heads around it yet," he says, referring to the attitude of ensuring an accident management firm takes control of the innocent party involved in an accident with a fleet vehicle to make sure hire and personal injury costs in particular are managed.
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