Photo: Rhys Moult/Unsplash
When a truck in your fleet suffers an accident or collision, it can end up costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you were unlucky enough to see valuable stock destroyed in the crash, it might cost you millions – are increase your insurance premium by a great deal. As such, maintaining a reliable and safe fleet is a paramount priority for shipping firms. In this article, we’ll look at what can be done to increase safety so that you don’t suffer unfortunate and costly collisions on the roads.
Safety Training
The easiest way to make sure your entire fleet is operating safely is to give them all training in safety behind the wheel. They might see this as surplus to requirements, feeling that they’re safe as they are, and needn’t gain more training. But as you’ll learn when you speak to fleet safety training firms, even the more experienced drivers in your fleet may be liable to have accidents because they’ve overlooked a part of their initial safety training.
So, a recap is always useful. Even if it might seem a little patronizing to your older drivers, these programs can help you to ensure your drivers are refreshed and aware of new risks on the roads and how to avoid them. It’s well worth paying for these courses for all of your drivers.
Hire Experience
One of the ways in which you can reduce the likelihood that a member of your fleet with be involved in a collision is to hire people based on their experience. Drivers with over five years of experience behind the wheel tend to know the tricks of the trade – how to spot accidents before ether happen and what they ought to do to keep their payloads safe.
This tip isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be hiring new drivers for your team. But if you can offer a slightly higher rate of pay to older and more experienced drivers from other firms, you’ll be able to poach the best talent in your area that you can rely on to do a stellar job for your firm.
Maintenance
Sometimes trucks crash not because of driver fault but because of a fault with the truck itself. And this is where regular maintenance comes in – beyond the yearly checkups that are expected of all trucks. There is some responsibility on your drivers here to report issues or faults that they can sense in their vehicles. But there’s also an operational responsibility to build in safety tests regularly on your vehicles.
Even if your trash doesn’t crash as a result of a mechanical failure, these issues can still result in hugely expensive repairs that might have been avoided if you attended to an issue as it emerged rather than when it caused a catastrophic fault when on the road. So, it may actually save you money to better maintain your vehicles – as well as keeping your drivers and containers safe en route.
