Verizon Connect has found that commercial drivers operate vehicles without a seat belt fastened in one out of every ten instances, according to research conducted in May by the Data Science Team at Verizon Connect. The team investigated more than seven million videos from Verizon Connect’s own dashcam footage. The report’s conclusions mirror a connected pattern: an increasing occurrence of fatalities involving unrestrained commercial drivers, where 64 percent of truck drivers who lost their lives in accidents were not utilizing seat belts.
The Verizon Connect study also revealed that 40 percent of all videos showed a vehicle exceeding the posted speed limit. For more than two decades, speeding has contributed to approximately one-third of all motor vehicle fatalities, the press release notes.
Verizon Connect says this is why it announced a series of new AI Dashcam enhancements delivered in Q2 2023, which include new AI tags for speeding and unfastened seat belt detection.
Verizon Connect’s Cloud AI (Video Analytics Engine) provides additional context to each video so that fleet managers cut down the time needed to understand what needs their immediate attention, according to the company. Fleet managers can view each video with severity labeled alongside additional tags including tailgating, rolling stop and phone distraction, the company notes.
Additionally, the company’s Camera Health makes Integrated Video customers aware of issues with their dashcams, and provides self-remediation steps to resolve the problem, according to the press release. Verizon Connect now offers a 256 GB SD card option, meaning the dashcams can now store approximately 170 recording hours on a road-facing camera and 115 hours on a dual camera.
