The home delivery arm of Tesco are to introduce speed monitoring which will allow the company to map the speed of its delivery vans to the actual speed limit of the road the van is on.
It will enable them to identify when and where the drivers are exceeding the speed limit and allow them to take appropriate action. A speeding event will be triggered once the road limit is exceeded by 10%. The speeding system, using a combination of Microlise telematics and Navtech mapping data, will provide a report on the driver which will show the road speed limit, the speed of the vehicle, what time of day it is and the longitude/latitude, which can be dropped into Google maps to give an exact location. It will also provide the registration of the van and the nearest Tesco store location. Tesco are in the process of training its drivers to make them fully aware of the new system ahead of its launch which they hope will be in October.
Tesco took the decision to use this system rather than GPS, as this system is more accurate and it also uses data that the driver will be able to see. Initially Tesco will target drivers that are exceeding speed limits by the biggest margin and also the drivers who are persistent offenders. Once they get the number of speeding drivers down to a manageable level it will then ask store managers to control the process and take action. Tesco anticipate that there will be a reduction in fuel usage and fewer accidents as the behaviour of the fleet changes. Tesco also believe that it will cut down the number of claims on the commercial vehicle insurance policies.
Cliff Cheeseman, Tesco fleet operations manager, said ”When we were talking to the unions about this it didn’t seem fair to take data from something that the driver couldn’t see, i.e. the GPS. But they can see the CANBUS system as it is taken from the speedometer.”
Tags: commercial vehicle insurance, Speeding, van drivers, van insurance