Why Should You Track Sudden Acceleration and Braking?

How a Road Trip Planner Can Help Track Sudden Acceleration and Braking
Featured image credit : Pokpak Stock/Shutterstock.com

If you regularly send employees out into the field, then there are many reasons for you to keep your vehicles in great shape.

First, vehicles are expensive. By maintaining your vehicles properly, you’ll be able to avoid costly repairs and make sure your vehicles last as long as possible.

Second, avoiding those breakdowns will help your field employees make it to all their stops on time. Your customers will love that!

Third, breakdowns are dangerous. They put your field employees at risk of getting into an accident, which could lead to serious injury and cost you a fortune in legal fees.

Driving practices have a huge effect on the condition of your vehicles. To get the most out of your vehicular investments, you must use a road trip planner to stop your field employees from suddenly accelerating or braking.

What Sudden Acceleration Does To A Vehicle

A quick start is terrible for your vehicle’s engine, especially in cold weather, when oil has trouble getting everywhere it needs to go. Sudden acceleration also eats up a lot of gas.

By accelerating slowly instead, your field employees will preserve the most important and expensive part of their company vehicle. They’ll reduce your fuel expenses, too.

Another problem with sudden acceleration is that it puts unnecessary strain on your tires, and replacing tires certainly isn’t cheap.

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What Sudden Braking Does To A Vehicle

When you brake, you create heat. When you brake suddenly, you create more heat than usual, which warps the brake rotor. This results in pulsation, which can damage the steering mechanism and suspension.

What Sudden Braking Does To A Vehicle
Image credit : Nor Gal/Shutterstock.com

So, sudden braking doesn’t just put your brakes in jeopardy – it can force you to fix other parts of your car as well.

Why You Need To Track Your Vehicles

It’s easy to tell your employees to stop accelerating and braking suddenly, but that’s not enough. These habits are hard to break (pun intended).

How do you know your field employees are actually following your instructions? They’re on the road, and you’re in the office. You can’t see what they’re doing.

That’s why you need a road trip planner with GPS tracking. Such software allows you to see where your vehicles are and how fast they’re going in real-time.

Any instance of sudden acceleration or braking is automatically recorded. You’ll be aware of every time your field employees ignore their instructions. Let them know that if you catch them accelerating or braking suddenly, a raise or promotion they were up for may no longer be on the table. That’ll give them incentive to drive more carefully.

The beauty of using a road trip planner with a GPS tracker is that you don’t even need to look at the tracking data for it to have an effect on your field employees. When they know they’re being watched, they’ll be on their best behavior.

Why You Need To Offer Safety Training Courses

The following eight training courses will drastically improve the driving behavior of your field employees:

  • Basic Vehicle Maneuvers
  • Collision Prevention
  • Driver Readiness
  • External Risk Factors
  • Intersections
  • Managing Risk
  • Signs and Signals
  • Substance Impaired Driving

But you should do more than just give your field employees access to training courses. You should also personalize the training material according to each employee’s needs, monitor their progress, and confirm that they’re learning what they need to learn. For that, you need Predictive Coach.

Predictive Coach makes it easy to manage your training process. It detects the actions that you want to prevent, such as speeding, swerving, and sudden acceleration. Then, it uses this information to automatically assign relevant training lessons to the field employees that need them. And with Predictive Coach’s comprehensive dashboard and reports, you’ll get a complete picture of how everyone is progressing through their training.

What strategies have you been using to prevent sudden acceleration and braking? Do you have any questions about using a road trip planner? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below.

Finally, answering these three questions correctly will confirm that you understand why you should track sudden acceleration and braking:

  1. How does sudden acceleration damage your vehicles?
  2. How does sudden braking damage your vehicles?
  3. How can a road trip planner with GPS tracking stop your employees from suddenly accelerating and braking?
Route4Me

Want To See For Yourself How Route4Me Can Boost Your Profits?

Whether you want to slash the time it takes you to plan routes for your drivers, increase the number of stops they can make, or keep your customers satisfied knowing that your drivers show up on time… Route4Me helps you achieve that!

Start Free 7 Day Trial

About author: Rahul Dasgupta

Rahul Dasgupta is a content writer with over 20 years of work experience. He holds a master’s degree in computer science and has written thousands of blog posts on route planning and scheduling, making it easy for readers to learn about these complex topics. Rahul enjoys playing tennis in his spare time and loves cuddling with his pet labrador Shinu. Rahul is a big fan of Roger Federer, Messi, and Bill Gates - he admires their drive to be the best at what they do and their philanthropic efforts.

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About Route4Me

Route4Me has over 40,000 customers globally. Route4Me's Android and iPhone mobile apps have been downloaded over 2 million times since 2009. Extremely easy-to-use, Route4Me's apps create optimized routes, synchronize routes to mobile devices, enable communication with drivers and customers, offer turn-by-turn directions, delivery confirmation, and more. Behind the scenes, Route4Me's operational optimization platform combines high-performance algorithms with data science, machine learning, and big data to plan, optimize, and analyze routes of almost any size in real-time.