Motive: Gary Johnson, head of safety and compliance strategy
The biggest shift in commercial vehicle safety over the next five years will be the move from reactive to proactive safety, powered by AI. Instead of investigating accidents after the fact, real-time data from vehicles, drivers, and worksites will help fleets anticipate and prevent incidents while transforming how drivers are trained and coached.
Motive’s AI Dashcams deliver real-time alerts, enabling drivers to correct unsafe behaviors immediately. Meanwhile, safety videos and performance data flow into our Safety Hub for timely coaching and recognition of safe driving.
We’ve taken it a step further with AI models that address critical risks before an accident occurs: Motive’s Lane Swerving Detection flags patterns of swerving over time, and Unsafe Parking Detection alerts managers when vehicles stop in high-risk areas. Fleets using our AI Dashcams have cut collisions by an estimated 80% in the first year. It’s about delivering real-time, context-aware insights that prevent accidents.
Samsara: Johan Land, SVP of product engineering
The most game-changing shift will be from reacting to accidents to actively preventing them at scale through AI. In fact, AI will be the single most transformative technology for road safety, saving more lives over the long term than the invention of the seat belt, antilock brakes, and airbags combined. For too long, the industry has focused on mitigating the severity of accidents through measures such as seat belts and airbags. It’s a paradigm shift from 20/20 hindsight to 20/20 foresight.
At Samsara, we’re harnessing real-world data at scale, with 20 trillion data points covering over 90 billion miles each year. This enables us to apply computer vision and Edge AI with unparalleled precision to prevent accidents from occurring. Edge AI, coupled with a deep understanding of and partnership with physical operations, positions us to give fleet operators a competitive edge in the AI-augmented vehicle safety transformation.
It’s going to fundamentally reshape our roads in the next decade, and we’re proud to partner with fleets on pioneering this safer future with AI-augmented vehicles and the most advanced safety technology.
Solera: Sean Ritchie, VP of sales
The next leap in fleet safety will be a shift in focus—from looking inward at the driver to looking outward at the environment surrounding them.
For the past decade, safety technology has focused on driver behavior, including speeding, following distance, and seat belt use. But as AI matures and autonomous technologies evolve, the bigger risk factors won’t come from inside the cab. They’ll come from the road ahead: other drivers, construction zones, weather patterns, detours, and congestion events.
Sometimes the best way to make a delivery route safer isn’t to coach the driver more but to choose a safer route altogether.
Imagine a platform that recognizes a stretch of highway as high-risk based on patterns across thousands of vehicles and suggests a safer route while the load is still in dispatch, allotting time to ensure the delivery still meets customer expectations. That’s not just risk detection; that’s risk prevention.
To deliver that future, three ingredients are required:
- Data: Solera’s proprietary data lake holds over 5 petabytes of insights across the vehicle life cycle, built over 40-plus years in the industry.
- Ethical AI infrastructure: Our AI is matured through intentional human intelligence, continuously verifying model performance and ensuring fairness, transparency, and accuracy.
- Operational connectivity: The Solera Fleet Platform unites safety, telematics, routing, compliance, and asset management—not siloed tools, but an integrated, natively connected ecosystem feeding real-time data directly into the AI for multi-factor processing.
The result is a fleet that doesn’t just respond to events but anticipates risk, plans around it, and optimizes operations from the point of order all the way to delivery.
Zonar: Jason Craven, chief technology officer
The next major shift in commercial vehicle safety is happening now, driven by predictive analytics and AI. Fleets that can anticipate risks rather than react to them will experience fewer accidents, less unplanned downtime, and lower operational costs. This shift isn’t just about reading and storing the data; it’s about transforming that data into proactive decision-making.
Zonar is at the forefront of this shift through AI-powered video detection tools, such as Zonar Coach and, more recently, Zonar Ignition, its integrated cloud-based platform. With AI-powered event detection, including advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and driver monitoring systems (DMS), combined with real-time in-cab coaching and behavioral analysis, operators can make informed decisions. An open API and the ability to create sophisticated custom reporting, such as accident reconstruction reports, enable fleets to fully leverage their data, integrate insights across systems, and continuously improve safety outcomes. By translating predictive insights into proactive action, Zonar helps fleets move from reactive operations to strategic, data-driven decision making.
