Interesting Fleet Stuff
I am an insurance guy, and we do a lot of fleet, truck and commercial vehicle business. Because of this, I decided to go to an exhibition that focussed on carious “green” or “Eco friendly” aspects of the transport market place to see if there were any good ideas for help me make insurance cheap. The exhibition was at Earls Court. It wasn’t particularly well attended, but there were some very interesting stands and some excellent ideas for fleet operators and commercial vehicle and truck operators.
One of the stands was exhibiting a “black box” for vehicles. The idea was that you installed this gadget, and it would help you in cases where the value of a claim was in doubt. The representative on the stand told me that evidence from such boxes is admissible in court.
In the case he recounted to me, a truck driver has been in a collision with a car. The owner of the car, and all the passengers (more than the lorry driver remembered being in the car!) were claiming for whiplash. The truck driver claimed that it was only a minor bump, and was surprised that the driver and passengers were making such claims.
The box was able to prove to the court that the velocity with which the truck hit the car was not sufficient to have caused the injuries that were being claimed by the passengers, and this ruling saved the insurance company a lot of money.
I don’t know whether the case study is true or not… but the theory seems sound. If Fleet operators, truck and commercial vehicle owners can combat insurance fraud in this way it will save insurance companies a lot of money. This, you might say, is not very important, because they have loads of money. The reason you might want to save them money however is because if the cost of claims goes down, so will the premiums. At the moment, unscrupulous insurance claims fraudsters are costing us all money.
This was a really interesting conversation and made the exhibition well worth attending. There were other good stands too, and I will write about these in future notes. I was impressed with the idea that we would be able to reduce the cost of fleet insurance, commercial vehicle insurance and truck insurance by keeping claims to a minimum.
