Fleet liability playbook shifts from defense to proof

“I’m not going to mince words here. This is an industry that is failing to mature and failing to acknowledge the risks it faces,” Kriete said. “I don’t care if you’ve got thousands of trucks on the road or if you’ve got one truck on the road.Your risk is essentially the same.”

An Industry Failing to Mature

Every vehicle with a company name on the door is a target, and Kriete says each headline verdict widens the pool of people who see one.

Kriete notes that if you have a commercially branded vehicle, you’re at risk, as there now is a positive feedback loop where the more nuclear verdicts against commercial motor vehicles, the more the general public is aware of the opportunity for themselves to get more damages if they’re in an accident involving commercial motor vehicles.

The staged rear-ending scam is the clearest case of this legal incentives cascade.

“You wouldn’t believe the number of times we’ve had accident exoneration on forward-facing cams. A customer of ours is sitting at a stoplight in a commercially branded vehicle, and what happens?The reverse lights come on in front of them and someone rams back into them,” Kriete said. “When the police show up, the other driver’s account to the officer: ‘What? Guy rear-ended me.’”

Footage ends that argument at the curb. “I love it when our drivers are able to walk upto the officer and go, ‘Let’s go to the tape, shall we?’” he said.

The Fleet Liability Question and Reptile Theory

Damages turn less on the crash than on the paper trail preceding it. Two awards exist, and the gap between them is documentation.

“A lot of it comes down to what you can prove you did to prevent this in the first place in court.,” Kriete said. “There’s a big award that happens for willful or knowing negligence. And then there’s the other award that happens when you can say, ‘Oh well, this company was ahead of it and they were doing this, and this, and this to try and avoid those things.’”

Without that record, the defense is a shrug. “Essentially, ‘I gave this guy a truck, and I don’t know what happened from there.’ If that’s your story in court, that’s not a very good story.”

Kriete adds that plaintiff attorneys use what’s called reptile theory to attack the company for negligence. A hallmark of reptile theory is to claim fleets don’t adequately train their drivers or maintain their trucks. While telematics and cameras record crashes, they also are creating the documented court-admissable paper trail to help with proactive mitigation. 

Fleets must now show a jury how they continuously coach drivers and rigorously track vehicle inspections. 

With a companywide safety program behind it, the story changes. “You’re standing up in court with a track record of: We’re aware that we live in a high-risk world. We’re aware that we have a social responsibility to other motorists on the road. We’re aware of these things and these are the things we do in day-to-day operations to prevent this from being an issue.”

When Safety Data Runs the HR Workflow

One Zonar customer, a private utility provider running tens of thousands of vehicles, has automated the entire escalation chain through standard APIs. Zonar’s AI-powered driver safety system handles coaching on the bulk of incidents. The fleet’s own policy sets the threshold at three.

“If a driver commits three minor infractions, it automatically triggers a write-up for them in their HR platform,” Kriete said. It can even lead to cases where drivers may be terminated, depending on the company’s policy.

What that buys the fleet is a defense built years in advance. “Here’s the number of drivers that we let go for not adhering to our safety practices over the course of the year,” Kriete said. “This was a freak accident. This was a safe driver. We got the whole record here every infraction they’ve ever done, all the coaching we’ve done on even the minor-est of infractions. Everything.”

Inspection data is the other half of that record. Electronic verified inspection reporting, or EVIR, is the product Zonar first launched with, and it remains the company’s largest inspection and compliance solution. The same utility customer gates vehicle assignment on it: no completed inspection, no keys.

“If you had an equipment failure, you want to be on the side of the coin where go in and say inspection was done,” Kriete said. “It’s the difference in negligence versus, ‘No, we have a process for this.’”

A Dozen Vans, the Same Exposure

Zonar also customizes EVIR inspection configurations for owner-operators in residential field services: plumbers, HVAC contractors, landscapers. A dozen vehicles, sometimes fewer. From big rigs to cargo vans, the verdict math does not care.

“These nuclear verdicts are devastating to any size company,” Kriete said. “This can be entire livelihoods destroyed without these protections in place.”

Those operators also have no safety department. “They don’t really have the manpower. They got a business to run. They got toilets to replace and air conditioners to replace,” he said. Most hand the problem over whole: “Give us a full end-to-end mitigation.”

The recurring obstacle is not budget. The biggest obstacle for many fleets starting out is getting the dashcams in the cab. Change management and overcoming driver pushback remain key obstacles.

“The biggest problem we have, and I think one of the number one detractors fora lot of people is they go, ‘Oh, my drivers don’t like to be recorded,’” Kriete said.

He argues the industry has framed that backward. In field services, the owner is not screening footage. He adds that the dashcam doesn’t actually record footage unless it detects one of 11 specific unsafe events.

“The video is not going to my boss but it is going into an AI engine which is giving me feedback, helping me, creating coaching opportunities for me and letting me know that at some point my boss is going to care,” he said. “Certainly if I was out there driving I would want to have one of these to protect me.”

Premortem the Courtroom

Kriete’s answer to hesitant fleets is that hesitation often comes from a lack of information. While fleet adoption rates for forward-facing cameras are increasing, they remain less than one in three for driver-facing cameras, despite data showing how forward- and driver-facing cameras save more than they harm in legal dealings.

The record extends past cameras and inspections into routing. Left turns cannot be eliminated, but the intent lands on the record.

“We have customers that mitigate the percentage of left turns they take via the route planning using our software,” Kriete said. “You can go in court and say, ‘We actually plan to do these as infrequently as possible.’”

“You really have to premortem this situation and ask, “What do I want to be able to say?” Then find the companies that can help you implement a workflow like that to give you that story should that day come,” Kriete said.