What your telematics data can say about you in court
Commercial vehicle telematics serve as a double-edged sword in litigation, providing objective evidence that can either exonerate...
After a serious crash involving a commercial truck, the plaintiff’s attorney will almost certainly ask for the carrier’s telematics data, and the request often reaches well past the minutes before impact.
It may include driver safety scores, months of alert data, and notifications sent to supervisors when the system flagged speeding, hard braking, or driver distraction. The goal is to show what information the company had about the driver and what steps it took based on that information.
Fleets often adopt telematics to reduce crashes and lower insurance costs, and the technology can be effective in doing so. It also creates an objective record of driver behavior. That record can help explain what happened in a collision, but it can also show what an employer knew about safety concerns and whether appropriate action was taken. Telematics is, in that sense, a double-edged sword.
In commercial vehicle cases, plaintiffs frequently add negligent hiring, training, supervision, retention and entrustment claims against the carrier. Those claims turn on what the company knew or should have known about the driver and how it responded. Telematics can make those questions concrete.
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