A mobile app designed to gamify fleet driving proposes a way to make driving safer.
On April 26 GreenRoad released GreenRoad Drive, an app targeted toward enterprise, commercial, or shared vehicle fleets. It provides the driver with “real-time in-cab continuous coaching,” advising them on driving styles and alerting them of weather conditions. It adapts to driver behavior and fleet size, using Deep Learning tools to advise each driver based on a personal profile.
While fleet management is far from a new endeavor, this marks a switch within GreenRoad itself, which thus far has worked in the field of global commercial fleet telematics. Its new app aims to replace hardware solutions with a system powered by the cloud, as well as to predict and plan for behavior predicted by deep learning. It’s the sort of always-on system that could help fleet managers plot greener, safer courses, but also means that drivers have an eye on them at all times.
“Technology advances have allowed GreenRoad to transform it’s hardware-based solution into an everyday mobile app…” says Zeev Braude, President and CEO of GreenRoad technologies. “Today, commercial fleets are just the tip of the iceberg as the shared economy shapes the future of transportation, we are democratizing driver safety making our data, our application and deep learning in the field of driver behavior available to the masses.”
GreenRoad is also pushing the app as a step toward Vision Zero, a multi-national project to completely eliminate road fatalities. Vision Zero incorporates every aspect of road transport, including personal cars, fleets, and bicyclists or pedestrians.
The app could also be used to support Smart City stakeholders, with driver maps helping decision-makers to pinpoint dangerous locations and observe traffic flow.
Among GreenRoad’s first customers is National Grid’s UK Capital Delivery Division, which builds major gas and high-voltage electricity projects throughout the United Kingdom.
“We reviewed a number of different methods for improving our approach to safe driving, and the key to the success of our GreenRoad initiative has been the positive rewards based culture that it facilitates,” National Grid Project Manager for the GreenRoad initiative, Paul Kiddle says. “Many meetings now start or end with people comparing their GreenRoad scores, as our volunteers for the app have really embraced it.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 94 percent of accidents on the road in the United States are due to driver error, particularly driver decisions and recognition errors.
Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)