Driving conditions—including geography, traffic congestion, weather, and job type—outweigh mileage as a predictor of collision risk. But driver behavior trumps both environment and mileage.
Further developments in AI safety technology, helping fleets improve driver behavior and reduce risk, could be a key reason why traffic fatalities decreased in the first half of 2025, according to the 2026 Motive AI Road Safety Report that analyzed 2025 road safety trends, including the most dangerous roads and times of day and year.
Data in the report, pulled from Motive’s platform between October 2024 and October 2025, shows that road safety improved in 2025, highlighted by fewer severe collisions. The report says severe collisions involving injuries, tow-aways, and fatalities across long-haul, heavy-duty interstate fleets trended down 9.5%. This is in line with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data that projected an 8.2% decline in roadway deaths from January to June 2025 compared to the same time frame in 2024, despite an increase of 12.1 billion vehicle miles traveled.
“We’ve seen collision rates fall before, but I believe what’s different this time is why they’re falling. This isn’t a temporary traffic lull or a seasonal dip. It reflects sustained changes in how organizations identify, coach, and manage risk,” Hamish Woodrow, head of strategic analytics and data engineering at Motive, said in the report. “The risk has always been there. What’s different now is that AI allows organizations to see it earlier, coach drivers more consistently, and intervene before unsafe behavior turns into a collision.”
Motive’s data underscored the impact of AI-powered safety tools when examining near-collisions, which are defined as dangerous moments that signal heightened risk but don’t result in a collision. According to the report, Motive’s AI delivers seven near-collisions—or seven warning signals—for every one collision that occurs across fleets using the provider's AI safety tools.
Motive asserts that near-collision warnings will become the leading safety indicator, replacing collision data as the primary metric organizations use to manage risk.
Conditions vs. behavior
The good news for trucking is that despite driving the most miles of any other fleet sector, transportation and logistics fleets had the lowest overall collision rate at fewer than two collisions per million miles driven from June to November 2025, according to Motive’s data. Waste and recycling had the highest collision rate with just over four collisions per million miles, followed by field services, non-government utilities, construction, oil and gas, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, and passenger transit.
“Transportation and logistics fleets, by contrast, tend to operate on interstates, where environments are simpler and collision rates are lower,” Woodrow said. “That said, when collisions do happen, they’re often more severe due to vehicle size and speed.”
The report noted that collisions among these fleets are less common because the sector employs professional drivers, enforces tighter driving regulations, and maintains higher dashcam adoption, contributing to lower overall risk.
“Collision risk is shaped as much by the work drivers do as by how they drive,” Woodrow said.
Route types, operating environments, and daily job demands create different risk profiles across industries, the report said. Job conditions and driver behavior collide at the point of drowsiness. Conditions like varying times of day on the road can cause the driver behavior that is drowsiness, which is a leading contributor to collisions. The report found that drowsiness, distraction, and aggressive driving consistently precede incidents, and industries with the most extreme spikes in drowsiness and distraction have the highest collision rates.
According to the report, drowsiness peaks for drivers in the transportation and logistics sector are smaller and more spread out. Cellphone usage among drivers in that sector was also more spread out, ranking the sector in the median of other fleet sectors with a little over 2,000 events of cellphone use per million miles driven. Drivers in agriculture showed the highest rates of cellphone usage.
Cellphone use is among the top five risky behaviors linked to collisions, according to the report. Aggressive driving—like speeding, cornering, lane swerving, close following distance, and harsh braking—is also one of the most dangerous risk factors.
Motive’s data shows that drivers who experienced a collision in October 2025 alone were 25% more likely to hard corner or swerve lanes and 7% more likely to speed. The report said the transportation and logistics sector saw a 30% jump in speeding events in the winter months, when driving becomes more hazardous and collision rates increase due to weather and road conditions.
Motive’s dash cameras detect and alert drivers to speeding events.
A new dash cam
The company has rolled out a new solution with greater AI capabilities. AI Dashcam Plus is powered by a Qualcomm AI chip, delivering more than 30 high-precision AI models simultaneously to enable broader detection with fewer false alerts.
The device provides dual forward-facing stereo vision using two synchronized road-facing lenses to create human-like depth perception. This enables the AI to judge distance and closing speed with greater accuracy and improve forward collision warning, close following, and lane swerving alerts. It also integrates video, audio, telematics, GPS, and dual-motion sensor data to detect more complex events, such as a break-in from the sound of glass shattering or a low-severity collision from subtle vibration patterns.
“Collision rates and related costs remain unacceptably high around the world,” said Motive co-founder and CEO Shoaib Makani. “Organizations need AI-powered driver safety solutions that can perceive and respond in real-time. We’ve taken what used to be two devices and added three times more compute, industry-first stereo vision, and hands-free communication, all in one system, so organizations can detect more risks and act faster.”
