Transportation incidents account for 38 percent of all U.S. workplace deaths, yet many commercial fleets still collect driving data without acting on it. The Nationwide 2026 Driving Behaviors Survey found 77 percent of commercial drivers report more distracted driving around them than a year ago. Ken Anderson, technical director of business auto risk management at Nationwide, outlines how telematics, dashcams, and continuous motor vehicle record monitoring can turn raw data into genuine loss prevention.
The Nationwide 2026 Driving Behaviors Survey puts numbers to a problem drivers describe every day. Forty-seven percent of company drivers report feeling stressed, exhausted, and frustrated behind the wheel. Sixty percent worry an aggressive driver will cause an accident, and 70 percent fear being killed, hurt, or held liable in a collision. Roads have filled back up since the pandemic, and drivers are logging longer days in traffic they describe as aggressive and unpredictable. Ken Anderson, technical director of business auto risk management at Nationwide, also identifies an internal pressure: companies that maintain distracted-driving policies but still call drivers mid-route undercut those same policies. "Companies have to be careful that if this is their policy, they need to make sure they're following it and not distracting the drivers," Anderson says.
Early telematics use centered on vehicle location to support dispatch and routing decisions. Fleet operators now draw from the same data feeds to track speeding, hard braking, and hard cornering, all of which raise collision risk. Anderson says the central question for fleet managers has shifted entirely. "What can we learn about unsafe driver behaviors and what safer behaviors we can coach drivers on to help reduce those dangerous behaviors?" he asks. That shift matters practically: drivers with the most aggressive braking and acceleration patterns typically cost a fleet the most in fuel and mechanical wear, on top of the accident exposure they create. Commercial fleet driving data, used this way, connects the financial cost of unsafe habits to real-time coaching opportunities for every driver on the road.
A crash creates losses that multiply quickly and reach well beyond the vehicle itself. A disabled truck or van stops generating revenue immediately, cutting productivity from the moment it leaves the road. An injured driver triggers recruiting, onboarding, and training costs for a replacement. Anderson also points to a less-obvious exposure: a branded commercial vehicle at the scene of a roadside accident can attract media attention a company never anticipated. With repair, fuel, and labor costs already climbing, that exposure is more expensive than at any recent point. Anderson is direct about the risk of ignoring available data: "If companies have telematics and dashcam data and they're not acting on it, they're really not getting the best benefit of what they're spending on that system. They could also increase their liability risk in the event of a claim if they are not acting on information they're collecting."
Early dashcam systems mostly documented incidents after they occurred, providing evidence rather than prevention. AI-enabled cameras now monitor the cabin as closely as the road, identifying distraction and fatigue in real time before a collision happens. The technology has also gotten better at building driver acceptance. Anderson recalls a fleet where drivers were initially nervous about the cameras. Once the drivers understood the system was not deployed in a punitive way, he says, but instead "to identify what unsafe behaviors we are seeing among our drivers and what things we can coach the drivers on," resistance faded. The Nationwide 2025 Driving Behaviors Survey found that 65 percent of company drivers say dashcam use is now mandated by their employer, up 27 percentage points year over year, signaling a broad shift in safety culture across commercial fleets.
Annual motor vehicle record checks leave a wide window of undetected risk for employers who rely on them alone. Anderson makes the math plain: "If you pulled an MVR in January and that driver had a serious violation or a license suspension in February, you go 11 months without ever learning about that as an employer." Every day that driver gets dispatched, the company has no idea the record has changed. Seventeen states now run pull-notice programs that alert employers when an enrolled driver's record is updated. Commercial vendors also offer continuous monitoring covering drivers in states without those programs. The Nationwide 2025 Driving Behaviors Survey found that 71 percent of company drivers already report their employer uses continuous MVR monitoring, suggesting the industry is moving toward real-time record oversight as a standard practice.
Nationwide compared construction fleets that actively coached drivers using telematics data against fleets using the same tools mainly for scheduling. The loss ratio for the coaching group was roughly 30 percent lower. "We're seeing it pay out in real results," Anderson says. That gap illustrates why passive data collection misses the point entirely. Gathering commercial fleet driving data and not using it to change driver behavior wastes technology spending. It also exposes a fleet to greater liability when a claim arises, because the company demonstrably had information it chose not to use. Survey data and Nationwide's own book-of-business results point to the same conclusion: coaching, not just collecting, is where the return on telematics investment is found.
Hardware advances are changing what a modern commercial vehicle can do independently of the driver. Adaptive cruise control can now bring a vehicle to a complete stop without driver input. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that forward collision warning paired with automatic emergency braking cuts police-reported rear-end crashes by up to 50 percent. Anderson welcomes those advances but draws a firm line on their limits. "They're not a replacement for safe driving. The drivers still have to be safe," he says. Technology built into the vehicle adds meaningful protection, but sustained driver coaching, grounded in commercial fleet driving data, remains the foundation of a sound fleet safety program. Vehicle safety hardware and behavioral coaching work best as complementary layers, not as substitutes for each other.
Ken Anderson: technical director of business auto risk management, Nationwide; responsible for commercial fleet risk management strategy and driver safety programs.