GPS Insight Blog » detecting unauthorized vehicle usage

Nov 15 2010

$3 million legal verdict for not having GPS tracking

Category: detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Fleet Tracking,Google Earth,Mapping,Reports,Safety — rdonat @ 2:01 pm

Well, to be accurate, if St. Louis had installed GPS in its vehicles, might not have lost a recent $3 million verdict in court.

Here’s the story:

A jury ordered St. Louis $3 MILLION to a woman who claims a municipal truck cut her off and led to a single vehicle crash.

She did not have any evidence about the vehicle, department, or employee other than the fact that “a municipal truck caused her to swerve and avoid a collision.”

The crash time and location were certainly determinable.

If St. Louis had GPS on its vehicles, it would be trivial to determine if (and/or who) was the truck in question.

You could run a landmark report for a 2 mile area around the crash location at the exact time (20 minutes between 14:50 and 15:10 near the landmark called “Mesa Riverview” in this example):

Check to see if any vehicles were near the accident at that time

We quickly see there was no activity:

No activity near the crash at that time

Then you can pull the entire day to see if ANY vehicles went nearby that landmark, and when:

Pull the full day's history into a map

Zooming in on our “pretend crash” landmark, we see that that there was NO ACTIVITY for that day, & the closest to that landmark was the “Scion” at 10:03 driving by on the freeway, and “Adam 4000″ at 12:20 several roads away from the incident.

Conclusive proof no city vehicle caused the accident

Now it’s entirely possible that the vehicle DID in fact cause the accident — however, right now it is the word of an unfortunate accident victim against the City — and apparently that word is worth $3,000,000.

That $3,000,000 would buy a city of 1,500 vehicles GPS Tracking for every vehicle for 5 years based on my calculations.

Plus they would have the benefits of GPS Tracking instead of just a way to avoid a jury verdict. And maybe if the drivers knew they were being tracked, the accident wouldn’t have occurred in the first place if it was in fact caused by a city worker.

Rob.

Tags: $3M jury verdict, avl tracking, Fleet Tracking, fleet tracking software, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, tracking hardware, vehicle accountability, Vehicle Tracking, vehicle tracking device

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Nov 04 2010

GPS Tracking is also cheap insurance! (which even pays off if you let it lapse)

Category: Company Efficiency,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,Stolen Vehicle Recovery — rdonat @ 10:46 am

Last month we had 2 customers benefit from their GPS devices, even though they had canceled service to save money.

One customer’s vehicle was stolen, and within an hour of us reactivating the device and giving them access, the police found it and it was recovered.

The other customer needed proof of their having performed service from the year prior when they were tracking their vehicle. It was needed to be paid out of a bankruptcy distribution, and we were able to run the report for them that day.

Obviously we prefer that customers don’t cancel with us, but even when they do, GPS tracking can still benefit them.

The moral of this story is that companies and fleet administrators need to ALSO think of GPS tracking as an insurance policy as well as an operational tool.

Knowing where your vehicles are currently is ESSENTIAL, as well as knowing where they have been historically (we store 5 years of history).

Unfortunate “insurable” events include:

Vehicle theft/recovery
Proof of delivery/service when there is a billing dispute
Proof of delivery/service when there is a LAWSUIT
Proof of speed and time whenever an accident takes place with a company vehicle
Proof of driver actions during termination
Investigation into illegal/competitive actions such as side jobs or selling of company materials
Finding a driver who has been stranded/wrecked in a remote area

Many of these types of situations aren’t considered when GPS tracking ROI is estimated or computed. But they have a tangible “lottery” effect on ROI when they occur. Quickly recovering a vehicle, proving service to end legal action or get paid, saving a life, or having data to refute a lawsuit are MASSIVE wins for a company. Simply tracking vehicles BEFORE these things happen makes the difference between a major financial or legal problem and a quick and hopefully painless resolution.

Think of GPS tracking as a mobile surveillance system for your fleet — you wouldn’t dream of doing without security cameras in your warehouse/sensitive areas for theft prevention and safety/security. Why do without the equivalent for your mobile assets and drivers? A GPS tracking system is very inexpensive insurance against many unthinkable possibilities — take out a policy as soon as possible.

Every vehicle, every 2 minutes of every day — you’ve got complete proof of where they were at and how they got there.

Week History for a fleet of vehicles

Rob

Tags: Fleet Tracking, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking discount, gps vehicle tracking, insurance, insurance discount, travelers insurance, vehicle recovery

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Oct 25 2010

New Hours of Operation Graph

Category: dashboard dashlets,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Graphs,New Features — rdonat @ 5:42 pm

Here is another new graph we’ve introduced for customers interested in knowing what time of day their vehicles are moving:

New Hours of Operation Graph

We’ve also allowed you to sort based on “most to least,” “least to most,” and alphabetically by vehicle label for all of our group graphs.

Here is what it looks like for our “all vehicle” group:

Note that the 3 devices in the Scion (same vehicle, 3 different device types) all show the exact same profile, and note the few “early morning blips” which may warrant investigation if your drivers shouldn’t be using the vehicle off-hours.

New GPS Insight Hours of Operation Graph

We have plenty more graphs to come for our customers who like to see their fleet’s activity visually.

(Incidentally, the dots are sized proportionate to the number of times per week/month the vehicle drove during that hour)

Rob.

Tags: dashboard graphs, Fleet Tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking solution, graphs, Hours of Operation Graph, Vehicle Tracking

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Aug 14 2010

GPS Insight has sent out over two million alerts based on driver behavior!

Category: Alerts,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Extreme Return on Investment,Identifying and eliminating speeding,reduced idling — rdonat @ 5:06 pm

We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.

This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.

Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”

Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.

So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!

This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.” You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.

We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so! They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.

Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.

Good examples include:

Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours

Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight. We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: Alerts, Extreme Return on Investment, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, two millionth alert

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May 18 2010

Sneak peek at our new Trip Efficiency Report!

Category: Alerts,Company Efficiency,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,Extreme Return on Investment,Fuel Savings,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,Reporting,Reports — rdonat @ 10:21 pm

This is a REALLY exciting report, and is the culmination of months of work on top of years of getting ready for this report.

>>> REALLY — It’s A BIG DEAL <<<

This suite of reports will essentially pinpoint your inefficient drivers on an overall as well as a trip-by-trip basis.

Here’s a an early version (the final reports are on the way & will also include an overall vehicle-by-vehicle comparison/summary):

Run the Efficiency Summary Report:

New GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Report

Up comes a graph showing all your drivers’ trips for that period of time (a work week in this case) & how efficient they are relative to both SHORTEST and FASTEST routes which we determine WOULD HAVE BEEN IDEAL:

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Graph

Then looking at the detail, we pick on the top “most inefficient” driver (sorting on # of unnecessary miles beyond the fastest route from A to B):

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Detail

Then hovering over an entry, it tells us that the “James – Garmin” vehicle went 34.2 miles, but only needed to go 19.03.

Difference between actual and ideal fastest route

By clicking on the 3 entries, we instantly pull up the actual (pink), shortest (red), and fastest (blue) routes for a visual comparison:

Visual Representation of Driver Inefficiency

In reality, the “turnaround” out of the way is where several of our employees meet to car pool every day:

Reason for inefficient driving is a carpool drop-off

So this behavior is all right, since it saves a lot of miles and cars on the road.

But look at #2 and #3 on the list (and there are countless more inefficient trips):

Driving way out of way (in Purple) to get from A to B

Driving way out of way (in Orange ) to get from A to B vs. fastest/shortest routes in blue & red

These are our employees & our own cars, so it’s not exactly the end of the world that we’re sometimes driving all over the place inefficiently, & we have our reasons.

But if you run this against your fleet, you will find drivers who:

Get Lost
Make Wrong Turns
Intentionally Take the Long Way (padding hours)
Literally Drive In Circles (and should be probably be fired for fraudulent wasting of fuel/mileage and padding of hours)

This report will be available in late May, and is going to surprise a lot of customers. And probably a lot of drivers too.

It will save our customers a HUGE amount of money on drivers they didn’t know were this inefficient, or were specifically defrauding them of labor hours.

Additionally, it will be available in June as a real-time alert to supervisors as well as drivers to “coach” them on better ways to complete their trips when they do so inefficiently.

Oh, and by the way, on a slow development server, for all 50 of our vehicles for a full work week, that report only took 1/3 of a second to run:

FAST (.36 second) Report

Look forward to it soon!

For more information on our main GPS Fleet Tracking Reports visit our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: fleet tracking comapnies, gps fleet reporting, gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps tracking reports, gps vehicle tracking

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Mar 28 2010

We use GPS Insight all the time OURSELVES!

Category: Alerts,cell phone capabilities,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,GPS Insight Employees,Stolen Vehicle Recovery — rdonat @ 1:31 pm

One of our salespeople, Alissa, just sent me this. Nice to know we are getting use out of our own product. She was waiting for her car to be towed & didn’t want it stolen over night (the radiator died).

using an alert to ensure a vehicle isn't stolen

We get hooked on all the various uses of GPS Insight ourselves as well! Learn more about our tracking alerts or the rest of our GPS vehicle tracking solution by visiting our website.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, odd-hours, tracking alerts

Comments (1)

Dec 24 2009

Story about a city vehicle being used to sell drugs!

Category: detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,Safety — rdonat @ 6:35 pm

Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Detroit city employee’s vehicle which had been used to BUY crack cocaine.

Now in Key West, FL, an employee was just arrested for selling cocaine, near a school or church, even!

We are seeing quite a few municipalities show interest and purchasing GPS tracking systems.

With problems like this, I can see why! We hear a lot of stories, but these two in the last couple weeks are pretty shocking.

Use GPS Insight! Know where your drivers are at all times! And let them know they’re being tracked. Then they won’t do this type of thing most likely…

Rob

Comments (2)

Dec 10 2009

Which of your vehicles has been to the crack house?

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Fleet Tracking,Fuel Savings,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPSI-4000,Landmarks,Safety,Trimble — rdonat @ 2:50 pm

I used to use this as a far-fetched example when talking about the benefits of retroactive landmark reports:

“Let’s say you catch one of your drivers buying crack at a crack house — don’t you want to know which others may have visited there in the past year or more?”

Well, in Detroit, they actually found a city employee’s vehicle at an actual crack house.

It’s detailed in this Automotive Fleet article.

So, now that there is a real life example of this, how would you use GPS Insight to easily determine the other vehicles which have visited that same crack house?

Here’s how:

First, find the exact location by looking at that vehicle/date/time and create a landmark with the convenient link from that point (we’ll pretend my house is a crack house).

First, run a 3D history map for that day (pretend yesterday):

Use GPS Tracking to find out who's buying crack with your vehicles

I’ll pick the “crack stop” at my house (really me coming home from taking the kids to Buffalo Wild Wings, a different kind of crack) and blur the street names in case anyone wants to come see for themselves — then I click on “Landmark: Create from Point”:

Pick a stop & create a landmark around it

Now I choose a Polygon landmark, change the color to green (why not?), and outline the areas a vehicle might PARK IN (not my house, which is a common mistake — you want landmarks to be where people park, not where the actual landmark is!).

I call it “Crack House.”

Now when I refresh my menu to pick up the new landmark under “Reports: Landmarks” I can run a 1 month at a time landmark report (note clicking the month name selects the entire month):

Run a GPS Tracking landmark report on a crack house in GPS Insight

Other than my wife & I, no other vehicles show up in December, so I go to November and see that a few other vehicles have been tracked in that exact area. Note the “Passing through” option which is checked — this means the visit will show up even if the ignition is not turned off while there (e.g. a drive by drug buy — my guess is crackheads like to idle too).

There was too much activity for my vehicle (with 3-4 devices), my wife’s & the company Scion (3 devices), so I created an “all but robs” group and ran the report against that:

Quickly create a vehicle group in GPS Insight

So Elliot and Ryan were in the crack house zone in November:

Elliot & Ryan at the crack house?

You get the idea. Obviously this is just a simulation — Elliot was dropping off a credit card we had forgotten at a restaurant the night before, and Ryan was dropping my wife off after her car needed service.

But what is important here is GPS Insight allows you to go BACK in time to check for landmark activity.

Several competitors do NOT (including two of the largest/oldest ones in our space). They will only allow you to report on landmark activity in landmarks which you created BEFORE the activity took place.

That means you would need to know all the crack house locations in advance! I hope our customers don’t have that information handy.

Although, I’ve often said you would have to be smoking crack to go with another solution…

Rob.

Tags: Fleet Tracking, landmark reporting, unauthorized usage, using vehicles to buy crack, Vehicle Tracking

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Oct 31 2009

I’m guessing this is not authorized usage…

Category: California,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,Driver Accountability,Fuel Savings,Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 2:34 pm

Funny, we saw this truck on its way home from Disneyland. I think I’ll have a salesperson call to see how they keep tabs on unauthorized usage on Monday:

Unauthorized usage of Company Vehicles

GPS Insight prevents this! Not only will you prevent your drivers abusing/using their take home vehicles on weekends and at night, but you won’t have to worry about your drivers causing accidents when couches fall off of YOUR vehicles. Plus you won’t have to pay for the fuel to move their apartment.

Rob.

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Sep 14 2009

New Panic Alert and Power Cycle Alerts

Category: Alerts,detecting unauthorized vehicle usage,New Features,Stolen Vehicle Recovery,Switches — rdonat @ 9:09 am

We have had a few customers require alert for both panic buttons which they wire to our GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 devices, as well as “power cycle” alerts (due to tampering, battery changes, etc.).

They are now there, and here is how to use them:

First, open the Alerts Manager:

GPS Insight Switch Alerts

Then choose the “Switch-Based Alert” option:

GPS Insight Switch Alerts

Here is where you can then choose either a panic switch based alert, or a power-cycle-based alert:

Panic vs. Power Cycle Alert

The next time a Panic Switch is detected (or a Power Cycle of the GPS Insight device), you will receive an email and/or an SMS text message letting you know.

This capability will be very helpful for customers with high-risk environments (cab drivers, etc.), as well as to help detect if/when drivers are intentionally disconnecting the GPS Insight device in order to escape being tracked.

As always, call for details at 866-GPS-4321, #2,1 for Tech Support.

Thanks,
Rob.

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