Nauto’s mission is to make driving safer and smarter and as we look back on 2018 we are grateful for our partners and customers who helped us make this happen. Since launching our original product, Nauto Coach, in April 2017 we’re now in over 250 fleets across the United States, Japan, and Europe and we have learned a great deal over these 150 million AI-processed video miles.
Here are some of the things we’ve learned about road safety:
- Lots of collisions involve distracted drivers
- Evidence-based coaching reduces crashes, increases savings and improves road safety
- Safety culture makes a difference in a company
- Real-time alerts improve road safety even more
70% of collisions involved distracted drivers. With our partner, Atlas Financial Holdings, we conducted a study of over 1,400 drivers using Nauto Coach over a 6 month period. One of the key learnings of this study is that 70% of collisions involved distracted drivers. This finding was sadly not surprising to those of us in the transportation business, but it was significant because there is not a lot of data on distracted driving and its relationship with collisions. After all, most people don’t volunteer that they were distracted after a collision.
Nauto Coach reduced collisions by 35.5%. Our hypothesis when we launched Nauto Coach was that the event-based uploading of visual and other data would provide commercial fleet managers evidence to have meaningful conversations about improving road safety with their drivers. In the same study conducted with Atlas, we found this to be true! In fact, we showed a 35.5% reduction in collision frequency. That’s good for business and good for everyone on the road.
Safety culture makes a difference. When we’re talking to companies with fleets and drivers, we hear about the importance of safety all the time. Whether they are delivering and logistics fleets, home or office service fleets, passenger carrying fleets or autonomous vehicle test fleets, companies know that improving road safety is important for their employees, their brand and their bottom line. Through our Atlas study, we learned that having a safety culture makes a difference. In fact, when fleets used Nauto Coach in most of their vehicles, even those drivers without it benefitted and saw a 20.7% reduction in collision claims frequency. We believe this is because Nauto Coach increased the safety culture across the entire fleet.
Real-time alerts improve road safety even more. Earlier this year, we launched Nauto Prevent (now Driver Behavior Alerts), an added service to Nauto Coach that provides real-time alerts for distracted driving. Given we were already detecting a distraction event every 11 miles, we thought we could do more about it. With real-time alerts, our customers have been telling us about the crashes they’ve avoided. In fact, our early Nauto Prevent customers showed an average 54% decrease in distraction events per hour of driving.
Looking ahead to 2019. With our partners and customers, we’re continuing to learn more about what happens on our roads and we’ll continue to work on ways to make our roads safer. For instance, we’ve already enhanced our distracted driving algorithms so they can detect more forms of distraction. And given rear endings are the most common collision in the US, we’re looking at more ways to help drivers avoid them. We were fortunate enough to win several accolades in 2018: Amazon Web Services' Hot Startups for 2018, TU-Automotive's Best Connected Product/Service for Commercial Market and we were featured as one of the Wall Street Journal’s Top 25 Tech Companies to Watch 2018, to name a few. We’re immensely grateful. Though when it comes to improving road safety, we believe the best is yet to come!
