Director of Safety, Security, and Training George Gerth of Grammer Industries shares how video evidence helped exonerate an innocent driver. Listen to his video telematics story or read the transcription below:
"Grammer Industries has the best drivers in the industry. The Indiana Motor Truck Association has a program called the Master Truck Driver award. To qualify to be a Master Truck Driver within the state of Indiana, you have to have 1 million safe driving miles or 10 years of being accident-free. Only 2% of the trucking population will ever meet that criteria.
So, out of the 250 drivers that we have here at Grammer, 55 are Master Truck Drivers with one million miles or 10 years of safe driving history. Our reputation is absolutely important to our customers.
The biggest reason we like using Lytx’s video technology is for mitigation and exoneration purposes for our company and our drivers. The thing that Lytx has done for us is that it has given me the opportunity to see what happened in the event of an accident or an incident.
Before it was strictly gathering the information and trying to put the puzzle pieces together. We had a driver who was traveling East through New Orleans and it was 10 o’clock on a 5 lane interstate. My driver was in the third lane from the right and we're traveling along. My driver is going to make a lane change to the right into lane number 2.
In the video, you’ll see a reflection of the lane change as he has his signal on that's reflecting off the exhaust stack. At this point, we’re already in our lane and maintaining it when the passenger vehicle runs into the trailer tires on our far right side.
It was such a small bump that our driver never felt the car make contact with the tires and my driver continues on. At this point, the passengers in the vehicle call the New Orleans police department. The police stop my driver and tell him that he had hit someone when making a lane change.
At this time, my drive called safety at 10 o’clock at night and I realized that I had video shooting forward through the windshield and on both sides of the truck shooting down the right side and the left side. The District Attorney, when he saw the video footage, he immediately threw it out of court. We then sent the video footage to the opposing attorney for the parties that were claiming injury and that particular attorney also threw that case out and sent us a drop letter on those individuals.
So, video footage exonerates the driver, exonerates Grammer Industries, and it exonerates me as the Director of Safety. It absolutely takes the mystery out of things in a great way! A picture is worth a thousand words."
Lytx Video Services can help take the mystery out of an incident. Learn more about Lytx Fleet Management.