Driver Behaviour: the 1st Step of Your “Green Fleet” Programme

As you transition your fleet to EVs, don’t forget the basics: you can’t truly “green” your fleet without greening driver behaviour!

Why? Because the end-goal isn’t the percentage of EVs: it’s how much energy your fleet consumes, and the volume of emissions it generates.

And the key to minimising these metrics – for any type of vehicle, in any industry – is improving the behaviour of your drivers, making their driving styles smoother, safer and “greener.”

Consider:

• When your ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles consume less fuel today to cover the same distance they drove yesterday, you’ve done more than reduce your expenses: you’ve also reduced your impact on the environment, whether in terms of fuel burned or emissions generated.
• When yours EV (Electric Vehicles) use less electric charge today to cover the same ground they covered yesterday, you can extend the time between battery recharges, accomplishing more work while reducing the need for inefficient en-route charging. Besides improving productivity, longer charge range enables a smaller charging infrastructure, reducing the capital outlay of the EV transition be reducing your overall power needs. Note: power plant emissions, a factor often overlooked when calculating a fleet’s environmental footprint, are reduced when the fleet’s overall power needs are decreased.
   

So how do you get your vehicles to consume less fuel or electric charge? The answer can be surprisingly simple. Small, achievable changes in driver habits – convincing drivers to ease up on their use of brakes and accelerators while respecting posted speed limits - can have a dramatic impact on fleet energy consumption and emissions. In trial after trial, we demonstrate that improved driving behaviours reduce fuel consumption by 7-15% or more for heavy vehicles, and up to 30% for lighter vehicles, with even higher percentages of emissions reduction. These benefits compound the safety and operational pay-off of careful driving, which often reduce accidents by +50%, improve maintenance costs and reduce insurance premiums.

That’s why GreenRoad has spent 15 years perfecting the industry’s most effective technology platform for improving driver behaviour – and why our solution been adopted by so many safety/environmentally-aware fleets throughout the world.

GreenRoad Safety Telematics: the Driver-Centric Approach to Improving Driver Behaviour

• So what’s GreenRoad’s secret? It’s based on smart psychology, and even smarter technology. First, drivers have to be motivated to pursue safety and eco-driving. Then, they have to be empowered with tools for self-coaching, self-training and management follow-up.
• GreenRoad’s driver engagement tools are the best that exist for getting your drivers on-board with fleet safety and sustainability programmes. Based on the fact that no one likes to see themselves on the bottom of the list, drivers are rated with Safety Scores for their driving over the past 10 days, and the scores are published on rosters. Some fleets “up the ante” with friendly competitions, prizes and acknowledgement, and GreenRoad supports the effort with its global Fleet Elite standard. Most fleets see dramatic improvement within weeks.
• Once drivers are motivated to improve, GreenRoad provides them all the tools they need. First, it provides drivers with real-time, in-cab feedback about 150 different types of driving errors, including those related to eco-driving and passenger comfort as well as to safety. This empowers drivers to self-coach and self-correct their way to smoother, safer, more energy-efficient driving with minimal management intervention. Contrast this approach to that taken by other telematics systems, which detect only a handful of simple harsh maneuvers, and report about them to drivers only after the journey, when self-correction is no longer possible. Experience confirms that GreenRoad’s approach helps drivers rapidly move from “risky” to “safe” categories, and then to continue improving, reaching levels of safety and eco-efficiency that the fleet never imagined before.
• The final piece of our platform is GreenRoad’s fleet monitoring and management tools: its high-level KPI dashboards with full drill-down into the performance of individual drivers and vehicles, supplemented by real-time exception alerts and training suggestions. Advanced real-time tracking enables efficient resource allocation and identification of idling hotspots, and AI-based trend analyses give insight into fleet-wide  safety, operational and environmental issues.

Taken as a whole, the GreenRoad Safety Telematics Platform makes it simple for fleets to create a broad-based safety culture that reduces the carbon footprint while reducing accidents, expenses and risk. This is the culture you need to achieve maximum environmental responsibility, whether the bulk of your vehicles are ICEs or EVs, heavy or light.  We’d be delighted to discuss how it can begin delivering these benefits to you.