For years, commercial auto insurers have looked to personal auto telematics for inspiration. The formula seemed clear – collect driving data, calculate a score, and win clients by rewarding safer behavior.
But it fails time and again.
Great American and the IoT Insurance Observatory looked at why commercial telematics programs struggle to repeat personal auto's success, and pointed to customer value:
Personal auto worked because drivers could see the payoff: a discount for safe driving.
Commercial fleets are too different from one another for a single program to deliver the same clear value.
Personal auto measures drivers
In personal auto, the individual driver is the risk.
The insurer wants to understand how safely that person accelerates, brakes, corners, etc. Driver behavior becomes a strong predictor of future claims, making telematics scores a foundation for usage-based insurance and premium discounts.
Commercial auto measures exposure
Commercial auto is different.
A fleet's risk isn't one driver's habits. It's vehicle class and weight, mileage, radius of operation, territory, hours of service, dispatch patterns, seasonal volume, etc. Hundreds of variables, shifting week to week, sometimes across hundreds of vehicles under one policy.
Then, an insurer needs to consider:
Have operating territories changed since the policy was written?
Has the fleet grown or shrunk?
Are vehicles being used differently than originally disclosed?
Is exposure increasing or decreasing during the policy period?
All of that is not about driver behavior, but exposure. The score may remain stable while the exposure changes dramatically. And exposure is what ultimately determines whether an insurer is pricing and managing risk accurately.
What commercial auto actually needs
It requires a much richer understanding of risk than a single behavioral metric can provide – a validated, standardized picture of fleet safety and operations, benchmarked against the insurer’s appetite and the rest of the portfolio.
That’s exactly what Draivn provides. It collects data from 300+ telematics platforms and converts raw data into validated, structured risk exposure profiles that include:
Portfolio KPIs: High-level overview of your portfolio KPIs, including scores, fleet composition, exposure, behavior, and accidents.
Frequency & severity scores: Bluewire GAP severity score and Milliman Accurate actuarily validated frequency score.
Fleet composition: The number of power units (age, GPS, cameras, and ADAS), trailers (age, cameras, and GPS), and drivers.
Geographic exposure: Distance driven, home base, radius of operations, state distribution, country, urban vs. rural area operations, and road types.
Driving and behavior data: Operating hours and night driving; speed profile and speedings, speed vs. traffic, harsh and safety events.
Insurers can use these dynamically updated profiles directly, without additional interpretation or changes in their existing processes.
The future isn't driver scoring
Driver behavior matters. But commercial auto shouldn't try to recreate personal telematics programs with larger vehicles.
Its opportunity is in creating better visibility into fleet exposure.
That may sound more complicated than calculating a single number, but Draivn has made it far more accessible than many insurers assume.
