“We’ve had great success with it. I think overall it’s going to help with insurance in the long term, prevent accidents and just make our drivers better.”
International Wood Products (IWP) is a distributor of building materials with facilities in California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. IWP added EROAD’s Clarity Dashcam to its fleet of 55 trucks in 2021. We spoke with Brett Spicer, transportation safety manager at IWP, about the organization’s experience with Clarity Connected.
Why Did IWP Add Fleet Dash Cams?
“Protection – protection for our drivers, protection for ourselves. The biggest thing that we’ve found is that on the road it’s my word against yours. How incidents are recalled through memory or documentation can be subjective. Cameras clearly show the good, bad or indifferent of what happened on the road, allowing us to either move on, close cases, exonerate our drivers or take corrective action if need be.”
FREE DOWNLOAD: How Dash Cams Protect Your Drivers and Your Business
Has Clarity Dashcam Provided that Protection?
“Multiple times. We’ve had a few accidents where if it wasn’t for the cameras, we probably would have been found at fault just because of how it hit the vehicle or the location of the vehicle. I can think of two recently that with the camera it was a quick, open-and-close case. Even the other drivers’ insurance said, ‘oh yeah, they were completely in the wrong.’”
How Did Your Drivers React to Dash Cams?
“The reaction was hit and miss. Driving is a very independent role. You put a camera in there, and they think it’s like Big Brother. So, for us, it was a lot of education – showing them how EROAD’s camera specifically works, explaining that we can’t watch live footage, explaining what the parameters are and what we’re going to do with the camera footage. A lot of it was getting them educated on how the cameras work.”
RELATED: How to Get Your Drivers Comfortable with Dash Cams
Have Drivers Warmed up to Cameras Since the Implementation?
“[Seeing the cameras exonerate drivers] has been really good for our reluctant drivers who were slow to get onboard. They can use it to their advantage and for their protection – like getting cut off, they would hit the manual trigger button and call us and say, ‘Hey, did you see that?’ We found that it works to our drivers’ advantage more than anything else, as opposed to a way to get them in trouble.”
FREE DOWNLOAD: 5 Ways Dash Cams Protect Drivers
Have Cameras Helped with Driver Coaching?
“Yes. It allows us to hold them accountable, but also to not falsely accuse them of something that they weren’t doing,” he said. “If someone calls in about a driver and says they were driving erratically, we can see if that was or wasn’t the case.”
How Would You Sum up Your Experience with Clarity?
“We’ve had great success with it. I think overall it’s going to help with insurance in the long term, prevent accidents and just make our drivers better.”
A Dash Cam Solution for Every Fleet
Whatever the size, type or use of your fleet, EROAD’s Clarity Dashcam products are designed to bring you all of the benefits of fleet dash cams. Clarity Connected integrates with the EROAD ELD to add HD video footage to actionable telematics data. Clarity Solo is an all-in-one device that provides video, telematics and GPS in a single unit for light, mixed and non-regulated fleets.
