How Commercial Dash Cams Can (And Can’t) Affect Your Insurance

Here’s the bad news: Simply having dash cams in your fleet won’t save you money on insurance premiums. Not directly, anyways. While no insurance companies currently offer a specific dash cam discount, having them in your fleet can positively affect your premium, which in turn helps keep your rates down. 

As we’ve discussed in a previous post about selling the idea of dash cams to your fleet, you’re not installing dash cams because you don’t trust your drivers; rather, you’re installing them because you want to protect your drivers from false claims and protect your business from a system that often assigns liability to the party that can most afford the payout.

Consider our post about nuclear verdicts, “large organizations with massive fleets are assumed to have more resources (i.e. more insurance), they are typically targeted for payouts, even if they’re not entirely at fault. For example, there are cases where a company can be identified as 10% negligent and still have to cover 100% of the financial liability.”

Many insurance companies have been slow to adopt dash cams into their policies, but that doesn’t mean that the technology can’t save you and your fleet thousands of dollars in payments and premiums. Dash cam footage can fast track your claim, exonerate your drivers and positively impact your bottom line. 

Current state

Insurance companies in Canada do not offer a specific discount to fleets that install dash cams. In Ontario, simply having a dash cam does not mean automatic savings on insurance premiums, but it can protect you and your drivers from being wrongfully charged for an accident. 

Insurance companies require photo evidence in a claim, but many of them don’t have specific policies regarding video. The usefulness of video footage most often depends on the adjuster who reviews your claim and whether the footage can help resolve the case. In any event, video footage can definitely help fast track a claim and get your driver back on the road.

Dash cam footage saves your organization time and money in a number of ways, most of which can directly affect your insurance premiums:

• Assigning responsibility: Dash cam video can help your insurance provider determine who was at fault.
• Catching fraudulent activity: Footage can help protect your drivers from staged accidents by other drivers, or the “crash for cash” epidemic.
• Added security: You can program your dash cams to record your drivers’ surroundings, even if the ignition is off. These settings can benefit your claim in the event of theft, vandalism or a hit and run.
• Additional features: Commercial dash cams have alerts to automatically identify motion detection, lane change and collision notifications, all of which can prevent collisions before they occur.

The ZenduCAM solution

The ZenduCAM Z6 is an innovative dash camera that gives you cutting-edge visibility of your vehicles on the road. It contains advanced features such as live-streaming, accident retrieval, distracted driving detection, reporting, data analytics, as well as two-way communication. 

The Z6 is installed inside the cabin of the commercial vehicle and can view both the road ahead as well as the driver. Its comprehensive AI functionalities allow it to monitor for various unsafe driving behaviours day or night. 

Our ZenduCAM dash cam solutions help you identify those outlying driver behaviours that can impact your insurance premiums and ultimately your bottom line. We have image analytics that detect cell phones, harsh braking and other events as required for enhanced notifications:

• Improved facial recognition recognizes driver distraction and drowsiness at any hour of the day
• Real-time access to live video is provided from any device to assist your drivers
• Quickly review an incident in real-time — collisions, near-misses or unsafe driving events — to save time and resources on insurance claims or investigations
• ZenduCAM’s accompanying web platform provides access on any platform, including desktop, tablet or mobile devices. 

While insurance companies in Canada and the US have been slow to adopt dash cams into their premium plans, there’s no question that having access to video footage of events as they occur will, at the very least, expedite the claims process. Investing in a comprehensive dash cam solution will help you save time and money, both of which will have lasting impacts on your business.