Making deliveries in the heavily congested Northeast and Mid-Atlantic can put a lot of stress on even the most seasoned drivers. With routes extending from some of the most populated metro areas along the East Coast to more rural areas in Ohio and Pennsylvania, family-run snack food maker Herr’s is using AI to make its private fleet safer and more efficient.
Since embracing the power of AI back in 2018, Herr’s saw its truck-involved collisions decrease 44%. Michael DiMascola, safety business partner for Herr’s fleet of delivery trucks, credits a lot of this success to AI-powered advanced driver assistance technology from Nauto.
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In 2017, DiMascola noticed “some safety gaps” within the fleet when he joined Herr’s. “Whether it's behind the wheel of our vehicle, in and around the truck, in and around the account, or in and around the warehouse, safety needed to be supplemented to be sure that we were a complete program,” he told FleetOwner.
As much as Herr’s tried to increase driver coaching and ride-alongs to bolster safety, it didn’t work as well as AI, DiMascola said. “When nobody was sitting in your truck, it was easier to revert to those old behaviors,” he noted. “We had cameras in some of our trucks, but these were cameras that only captured events after they were triggered.”
Deterring distracted driving and changing the behaviors associated with distraction is what drew Herr’s to Nauto, the safety manager said. Nauto’s on-vehicle AI solutions use dual-facing cameras to analyze driver behavior and external road conditions to alert drivers in real-time early enough to avoid collisions. These real-time alerts are 95% accurate, according to the company, which should help reduce a common driver complaint about false in-cab alerts.
Using AI to help, not to annoy drivers
Nauto combines predictive-AI technology, data science, and more than 1.3 billion AI-processed driving miles to help predict and prevent collisions before they occur, Yoav Banin, Nauto’s chief product officer, explained to FleetOwner. He added that the system can improve driver performance and help reduce collision loss, providing fleets an ROI within six months.
Herr’s fleet has seen its drivers involved in 70% fewer medium-to-high distracted driving events in the past three years since installing the Nauto system. Banin said fleets are seeing these results because his solution is more driver-friendly.
While there are many in-cab and forward-facing camera options for fleets, Banin said Nauto set out to be an “AI-first type solution” that can help drivers change their behavior instead of simply recording dangerous events and accidents.
“We want drivers to be safe, but too many alerts are going to annoy people or lead drivers to tamper with the device,” he said. “So we wanted to thread that needle between proactive alerting and precision driver experiences. It’s really amazing to actually see how well this stuff works. It sounded like science fiction years ago.”
Using those 1.3 billion miles of real-world data gathered from various drivers in a range of driving conditions, Nauto’s predictive AI can offer accurate driver alerts that account for in-cab behaviors, vehicle motion, and external threats to the truck, according to the company.
Nauto also promotes how it focuses on alerting drivers, not their managers. For example, drivers get in-cab alerts to improve their behaviors that aren’t shared immediately with fleet managers. Only high-risk events and collisions are sent directly to the fleet. And the system considers context, Banin said. While hard braking can be regarded as bad behavior, it can also be a good driving behavior if it’s done to avoid a pedestrian or animal that unexpectedly darts into the road.
When DiMascola and his team first convinced Herr’s senior management to invest in the Nauto technology, they wanted to try it out slowly before committing the whole fleet. “The rollout was supposed to go over three years,” he explained. “We started a pilot program. Then within a month or two of that pilot program, the rollout plan changed.”
DiMascola said Herr’s has “been able to custom-fit our fleet with this AI technology. It really has become part of our truck.” After initially planning to outfit just 150 trucks with Nauto cameras to start, Herr’s executives ended up installing the system in every branded fleet vehicle within a year. “The change from what we saw early on to now is unbelievable,” he said. Now the company is looking to install Nauto into another 300 unbranded corporate vehicles.
Scoring and rewarding fleet drivers
Nauto also uses its cameras and AI to feed into a driver risk scoring system: the Visually Enhanced Risk Assessment (VERA) summarizes all driving events and behaviors into a score that allows fleets to track drivers’ safety over time.
DiMascola’s division oversees the drivers operating in a fleet of more than 600 delivery trucks and a few dozen more than straight trucks in seven states: Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Herr’s fleet also includes tractor-trailers that operate within the production and manufacturing side of the business.
The Nauto VERA scoring system is now part of drivers’ regular one-on-one meetings with managers. “A majority of the meeting is sales-driven, but now the final 10 to 15 minutes is a Nauto caching session,” DiMascola said. Together, managers and drivers go over the past six weeks of driving data, which includes a focus on distracted driving and smooth driving, such as acceleration, braking, cornering, following distance, and collisions. “That makes up the various scores, which we’re using in a coaching sense,” he explained. “We’re able to see, per the VERA score, where the successes are, where the strengths are, and where the areas of opportunity are.”
Herr’s also uses the VERA scoring system to celebrate its drivers across the fleet. The top five drivers at each of Herr’s 20 branches are entered in monthly drawings for gift cards. The top-scoring branch also is treated to lunch. On a corporate level, the company recognizes the top branches and drivers of the whole fleet each quarter. “We use this gamification as a healthy competition—based on the scores,” DiMascola said. “It’s a great motivator. Then at the end of the year, it’s an even bigger celebration. A good-size team of senior management shows up at branch or two to celebrate their success that way.”
