Recently, after spending the last five years in research and development, a company that was founded in Israel entered Silicon Valley with venture capital and a team of seasoned managers recruited from within the United States. With a new name and new Web-based subscription service, the new company aims to help fleets improve driver safety and lower costs.
GreenRoad Technologies, with headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif., is offering a unique product and service to all types of fleets that combines in-vehicle driver coaching with integrated web reporting of driver behavior and risk.
Its new product and service is the GreenRoad Safety Center. It relies on a sensor installed in a vehicle to collect information about driving behavior. The sensor detects 120 different driver maneuvers in five categories: speed, braking, acceleration, lane-handling and turning. During its years of research, GreenRoad Technologies developed advanced algorithms to convert raw motion, sensory data into meaningful information to identify high-risk maneuvers, behaviors and patterns, says Dan Steere, chief executive officer.
The in-vehicle coaching is done by using a simple display mounted on the dash or next to the steering column with three lights–green, yellow and red. Aggressive behavior, such as speeding or weaving between lanes, will turn the light red.
“The system in the vehicle is there, constantly awake and watching what the vehicle is doing as it is rolling,” Steere says.
The small device in the vehicle passes information to a Web server with a suite of Web-based driver performance management tools to view high-level reports on driving performance as well as exception-based reporting to the fleet manager. The applications accumulate profiles of individual driver behavior, Steere says.
“No human intervention is involved in the process,” he says.
