Real time driving and its fuckery

The organisation I work for take themselves and what they do seriously which I appreciate and applaud; working so hard for an organisation that did not wouldn't work for me. They have (sometimes) convoluted systems to track and evaluate many different metrics from personnel, financial, environmental, plant and equipment to facilities, waste and everything in between; the boffins that work in that space are kept very busy...they're a particular type of person too, trust me.

Two areas I'm really pleased to see are a focus is safety and the environment and there's a particular aspect of the organisation which combines both of those, the fleet...I mean the vehicles.

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Telematics

Each vehicle the organisation owns (there's very many of them) is fitted with a telematics device which gives real-time tracking and data on various things. It uses GPS (global positioning satellites), a connected device in the vehicle and the cellular network to send data from the vehicle to servers and eventual reports on each vehicle and driver.

Each person (who will drive the organisation's vehicles) is issues a personal fob which has to be swiped on the in-car device each morning to activate the system; failure to do so means a loud high-pitched beeping will emit continuously from the device. I'm assigned my own vehicle but can drive any other as needed so each time I get into any vehicle I'm required to swipe the fob, it's not too difficult really and from there I use the vehicle as normal.

They track many things but the three major things are safety and environmental oriented.

Smooth driving

This relates to hard acceleration and harsh braking. The former uses more fuel and emits more harmful gasses into the atmosphere so they want to minimise it and the latter means the driver may be tailgating or driving too fast, exceeding the speed limit, in which case hard braking may be required. The telematics unit reads these metrics from the on-board systems of the vehicle itself, it's intrinsically linked. A 100% score each day is zero harsh braking events, 80% is 1 harsh event per 100km and 50% is 4 harsh events per 100km which is a fairly tight tolerance considering the fuckery on the roads these days, inattentive driving and all.

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Safe driving

Speeding increases the risk of accidents and the company has had many, hence the reason why the telematics have been introduced. Some of the drivers have been clocked at speeds of 40-50 kilometres over the speed limit...100 in a 60 isn't justifiable; two of those drivers were dismissed and the cases of it have declined sharply since then. The telematics reads the speed and applies it against the posted speed limit on any given road as the GPS tells the system where the vehicle is; the metric measures the percentage of time the driver is driving at over 10% above the posted speed limit.

Clean driving

The unnecessary idling of a vehicle, say to keep the air conditioning running whilst one is parked making a phone call, emits gasses into the atmosphere and they are focused on reducing that so it's one of the three main metrics measured. Many of the vehicles are hybrid so idling is minimised but we run diesel and non-hybrids also and it's unnecessary idling in those they would like to reduce.

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In the smooth category I sit in the top 15% of drivers, for safe driving I sit in the top 10% and in the clean driving metric I'm in the top 1% but that's mainly because the vehicles I drive are the hybrids or electric vehicles. I'm not overly focused on where I sit in the company when it comes to driving; if I need to brake or accelerate hard I will, if I need to speed to overtake I will and if it's hot the air conditioning is on...however the telematics makes me and everyone else a more aware driver and it has dramatically reduced emissions and incidents.

The fuckery

I think it's a great concept and system but as always it's not perfect.

Some of the systems installed are a little glitchy or not calibrated correctly.

For instance, there's one poor fucker who was reprimanded over and over, given a two written (formal) warnings for hard acceleration and braking until it was discovered the telematics device in his vehicle was faulty. Too bad if he was fired first though huh? We laugh about it though and his nickname is now Evil Knievel (google it if you don't get the reference).

Another one was found to be faulty in that it wasn't registering the metrics properly, or at all. This doesn't seem like too much of a problem until you consider that the company hand out a few hundred dollars each month to each of the drivers that end up at the top of the pack for the driving metrics. That driver has received over a thousand dollars so far...until people started to question it. The device was calibrated and that paragon of driving excellence was found to be a more shit driver than most.

Over all though, the fuckery is worked out and any situations that arise from it are reversed, although that one above was allowed to keep the financial rewards (much to the chagrin of some others).

I don't mind that they track these things as I'm a pretty good driver and generally operate within the acceptable tolerances. I've got nothing to hide and don't care that they can track my physical location by GPS and other metrics that relate to how I use their vehicles; I actually think it's a good thing. They have plans to be net carbon zero and part of that means changing the large fleet over to full electric vehicles - I'm not sure a full electric vehicle is much better for the environment due to manufacturing methods, but I don't make those decisions.

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Have you folks had any exposure to real-time vehicle telematics or methods of having performance measured and evaluated in this way? Have you experienced any fuckery around performance tracking? If so, feel free to tell me about it in the comments below, or just comment generally.