Fleet Insights | System Health
Are My OEM Collision Mitigation Systems Offline?
Factory installed collision mitigation systems capture and report massive amounts of vehicle data. This edition of Fleet Insights addresses the question that allows you to access all that vehicle data. It's probably the most important question: are your systems even working, and if not, how do you find out?
First things first.
Ask a safety manager how many collision events happened last month, and most can quickly produce a number. Ask that same manager how many units had an offline radar, or a disabled safety feature, at any point last month, and the answer usually gets a lot slower.
The gap exists because system health data lives in a different place than where operators get their critical information, and most fleets built their process around the systems they use daily. What is not getting out to decision makers is 100% of the data generated by OEM safety systems. The reason: not all OEMs provide this data to telematics providers.
- Event Data: Something happened. The system warned, the system braked, or the driver reacted.
- System Health Data: Whether the system is functioning.
The risk is this. A truck can drive thousands of miles with a perfectly clean safety event log because the collision mitigation system was offline the whole time. No warnings. No brake events. Nothing to review, because the system that would have generated data was not working.
The trap: thinking an offline system is a people problem
Safety systems being offline is not a people problem. It is a process problem.
Radar gets blocked by mud, ice, or a misaligned deer guard after a minor impact. A camera gets obstructed by a sun shade or a dirty windshield. A device gets unplugged during a repair and never gets reconnected. None of that is a person doing something wrong. It is just what happens to equipment in the course of running a fleet operation.
The problem is fleets all have to develop their own solution for managing offline safety systems. They also have to figure out what is causing systems to go offline, determine how long they are offline, and develop solutions to remedy the offline systems.
Why all of this matters
Say a system goes offline mid-route and stays that way for a few days before the truck comes in for service. Here is what legal counsel will be looking at.
The head-in-the-sand version: "We didn't know the system was offline."
The documented-response version: "We saw the fault come in. We logged it, scheduled the repair, and confirmed the system was back online before the next trip. Here is the timeline."
Counsel will defend the second version. The first one leaves the fleet explaining why nobody was watching.
The record is not the liability here. It is the defense. The moment a fleet can show it caught the fault and acted on it, the conversation shifts from "did anyone know" to "how the fleet manages its equipment."
How Fleet Coach applies our fleet insights
Fleet Coach helps fleets build this visibility using an approach developed after years of watching how OEM and telematics data actually gets used, and how often it doesn't.
The goal is not a human staring at a status board all day. It is a defined check, on a set cadence, with a name attached to it, so that "offline and unknown" stops being the default bucket.
Let's keep the conversation going
Fleet Coach helps your fleet improve visibility and control, creating more predictable operations.