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TELEMATICS: Playing it safe

Date: 01 August 2013

 

In terms of seeing a return on investment, use a telematics package properly and you can shave vast sums of cost off your bottom line. Margerison cites one client that saved almost £80,000 in insurance spend: "We have one customer - Zenith Hygiene - which has a 120-unit fleet and was paying a quarter of a million a year on fleet insurance. After seven months they got a £60,000 reduction in the premium, then they changed insurers in year two and got a further £28,000 reduction. Their personal driver excess has also reduced significantly."

It's said that the technology is now becoming more affordable, too. An increase in the number of mobile- and smartphone-based systems has muscled the traditional, wired black box aside as the only option on the market, as well as making it cheaper and easier to employ.

Nigel Trotman, strategic fleet consultant at Alphabet, explains: "It's quite an interesting time. we've seen a number of new products based on things like smartphones that are bringing the cost down. Customers are often reluctant to spend £15, £20, £25 a month on a telematics system. Making the case for spending that much money per month just on driver behaviour is difficult to justify, but there's also dongle-type technology available now, so that, along with smartphones, is bringing the cost down.

"That opens it up to small fleets. If your drivers are all equipped with smartphones then that will stack up. If you've got a big fleet then you've got more to do, so a fixed system might make more sense."

Trotman believes that the mobile driver monitoring aspect is the way that all of the industry is moving and is effectively the first rung on the ladder before we see fully integrated telematics in cars as they leave the factory. "My view is that there will be the equivalent of a smartphone in every vehicle in the not too distant future and driver behaviour will be an app," he says. "It will all be accessible. The challenge for this is common technology - every manufacturer will want to make their technology common to them." 



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