In many businesses, fleets of vehicles are maintained to make deliveries, provide transportation, pickup supplies and/or customers, and perform countless other activities. Businesses and/or organizations may maintain fleets of vehicles, ranging from one to thousands, to accomplish these tasks. Monitoring the whereabouts and use of all of these vehicles often presents problems: a driver may misuse a vehicle (such as for personal errands), a driver may take the vehicle at unauthorized times, a driver may take meandering routes (by mistake or on purpose in order to delay or avoid reaching the destination), and/or a driver may make an unauthorized stop for recreation and/or sleep.
Beyond these improper uses, drivers, while performing business-related or personal-related operation of the vehicle, may exhibit widely varying driving styles. Some drivers may tend toward cautious driving, such as maintaining a safe distance between their vehicles and the vehicles in front, braking gently, and not accelerating overly quickly. Conversely, some drivers may tend toward more dangerous driving behavior, such as: sudden stops, cutting into traffic, sudden acceleration, exceeding the speed limit, and tailgating. Further, such driving is expensive in terms of wear on the vehicle and excessive fuel use. For example, if a driver tends to accelerate quickly, fuel efficiency may decrease. As another example, if a driver applies the brakes too often, or for too long of a period of time, the brake pads, drums, and/or discs may wear out prematurely. Such driving behavior may also increase the likelihood of an accident, especially accidents that are primarily the fault of the driver. Such accidents are dangerous, are time-consuming, may result in destroyed goods or injured customers, and are expensive to resolve.
Fleet operators have a preference for safe drivers for many reasons, each which have reduced cost as an end result: less litigation relating to vehicular accidents, reduced fuel use, reduced vehicle maintenance, reduced driver downtime, longer vehicle life, to name only a few examples. Therefore, it would be advantageous for fleet operators to be able to encourage positive driving characteristics and behaviors in their drivers.
A possible way of encouraging positive driving characteristics and behaviors in drivers is through increased driver monitoring, possibly with incentives provided to drivers for efficient and safe driving (or punishment for inefficient and dangerous driving). Accordingly, there is a need in the art for tools and techniques that allow for increased monitoring and metrics to be gathered on driver and vehicle operation.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds