Samsara report finds 10% of risk-ranked drivers account for 47% of crashes

The report is based on Samsara’s Risk Model, which evaluates more than 50 factors across areas including driving behavior, exposure, situational context and driver development. The model looks at factors such as speeding, harsh braking, distracted driving and mobile phone use, as well as conditions such as night driving and weather conditions.

Instead of evaluating each safety event on its own, the model looks at how those factors occur together. Samsara refers to this as “compounding risk.”

“It’s like the combination of speeding plus it’s raining. Plus, it’s dark out. Plus, you’re at the end of your shift, and those things compound in ways that are really dangerous,” Podduturi said.

The report found that combinations of behaviors were associated with higher levels of risk than individual behaviors alone. Drivers exhibiting mobile phone use alone were 2.7 times more likely to fall into the model’s highest risk tier than the overall driver population. That figure increased to 4.5 times when mobile phone use was combined with harsh braking and 5.4 times when mobile use, distraction and harsh braking were present together.

The report also found associations between individual behaviors and crash risk. Harsh braking was associated with a 1.8 times higher likelihood of a crash, while mobile phone use and distracted driving were each associated with a 1.7 times higher likelihood. Speeding events were associated with a 1.5 times higher likelihood.

Samsara said the Risk Model ranks drivers by relative risk and is not designed to predict whether a specific driver will crash on a particular day. The findings describe statistical associations and do not establish that the behaviors themselves caused a crash.

Using risk data for coaching

The Risk Model also powers Samsara’s new Coaching Priority feature, which is designed to help fleet managers decide where to focus their coaching efforts.

Coaching Priority brings the model’s risk factors into a single view, allowing managers to see the drivers, behaviors and other factors contributing to elevated risk.

“These are the top drivers that you should prioritize to coach them. And then we’re saying you should coach them on behavioral patterns, not isolated events,” Podduturi said.

Instead of responding to individual alerts as they occur, managers can use the broader risk profile to identify recurring patterns and determine where additional coaching may be needed.

“It’s who needs the human-to-human coaching, and where can you automate? I think that’s really the key thing that fleets need to internalize,” Podduturi said.

The model also showed a potential signal before crashes occurred. When comparing drivers who were subsequently involved in a crash with those who were not, Samsara said the model prioritized the crash-involved driver about three out of four times. The result held across both next-day and seven-day evaluation windows.

A focus on driver safety

Samsara said the findings are intended to give fleets another way to approach driver safety by identifying patterns that may warrant intervention before a crash.

Separate analysis identified aggressive driving, distracted driving and speeding-related patterns as the most consistent and credible behavioral contributors to crash risk, according to Samsara. Other factors, including night driving, freezing temperatures and urban exposure, can amplify risk but are not coaching targets on their own.

The company said Coaching Priority is intended to help managers focus their time on the behavioral patterns most associated with elevated risk, while self-coaching can reinforce safer habits across the rest of the workforce.

The report is based on aggregated data used to train and evaluate Samsara’s Risk Model from July 1 through Dec. 15, 2025. The dataset spans drivers and fleets across multiple industries and regions.

Samsara’s broader goal is to use the data to help fleets move from reacting to individual safety events toward identifying patterns of behavior and targeting coaching where it may have the greatest impact.