Calling All Fleet Managers - Installing vehicle trackers into company cars

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I manage a fleet of vehicles around 40 in total, which are made up of cars, vans and hgv's.

These are driven by the Executives, Sales Managers, Site Managers and HGV Drivers. The cars and vans are both allowed to be driven for business use and personal use. The HGV's are only allowed for business use.

Now I know its quite common for HGV's to have trackers installed into the vehicles, but the company want to install them into our cars and vans. The main reason behind this is our insurance premium has gone up by 30% because our new provider has stipulated that we must install trackers because our vehicles are of high value.

Now I imagine this will cause a **** stir among a lot of the drivers of these vehicles, because they will think we will be spying on them during business and personal hours. Most of the vehicles are under contract hire or have some form of rental agreement, but it is still our responsibility to track our 'assets'.

I have found a company which are apparently the UK's leading provider in trackers and all seems good, but iv been doing some research into the laws behind trackers , I.E Privacy, GDPR and Human Rights and it says that the trackers must be turned off or in privacy mode when used on personal use. Now I asked this provider if they could be turned off or if they have a privacy mode button and they told me no they cant be turned off during certain times nor do they have a privacy mode button.

So I am left baffled as how I go about implementing trackers into a Fleet of company cars which are compliant with laws and regulations.

So calling any Fleet Managers or anyone else, please help me.
 
Are you looking for Just a security solution or something that allows you to manage your fleet better gives you live and historic locations of your vehicles.
 
At the end of the day the vehicles are the responsibility of the company and so you are perfectly within your rights to monitor them as you see fit!

Having said that, in my experience it is unusual for an insurer to insist on all vehicles being tracked - most insurers have a value (and sometimes vehicle group) threshold that triggers a tracker requirement.

For example I've just added two £76,000 Range River's to a fleet and understandably the insurer are asking for trackers - so unless all the vehicles are worth north of £50-60k, I'd say it is unusual! (unless the claims experience is particularly poor or there are other reasons??)

I'm terms of the GDPR perspective - as long as the business has a company vehicle policy that sets out the company's intentions in terms of monitoring then you should be fine!

To be honest it's more of a legal question so you should really seek legal advice to be sure!
 
there two types of trackers. We have both at where I work. Trucks and business use only vans have the only trackers where managers at work can download history, see where the vehicles are at all times etc. This has nothing to do with our insurance, its purely to monitor the vehicles and their usage for own purposes.

The insurance company insists on security trackers for cars over £50k, trucks over £200k and oddly double cab pickups (no idea why and they wouldnt budge on the requirement). This is in addition to whether we had monitoring trackers fitted to the vehicles for work purposes.

For these we have thatcham 5 gps trackers (https://www.trackingmycar.co.uk/pro...e-protect-connect-s5-vts-gps-tracking-system/) fitted to them (cars were easy as all the car manufacturers offered it as a factory fitted extra at around £500, the trucks we have retro fitted at around £1000 a go). There is a £150 per annum cost as well for the subs.

Now we dont have access to these trackers or their history or whereabouts and they are purely there as an anti theft measure so hence we had no issue with GDPR when our staff are doing private stuff or upsetting our staff.

Now obviously if your insurance company is wanting trackers due to the value of the vehicles and for anti theft reasons, having trackers with privacy mode which can be switched off away from work wouldn't satisfy them so it would be a waste of time and money for you to get that type fitted. There are lots of monitoring trackers which offer privacy mode - https://www.gofleet.com/privacy-mode-fleet-vehicle-tracking/ but again I don't think this is what your insurance company is after.
 
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chroniclard said:
This seems to cover the GDPR aspect.
https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/the-gdpr-will-logistics-companies-still-be-able-to-track-drivers

We are just starting to use Trakm8 for telematic/tracking data.
Click to expand...

Likewise we use Trakm8 as well but as a delivery company we are well within our rights under GDPR to do so. However, putting it in company cars and monitoring private use I am not sure that is covered under any of the 5 legitimate reasons under GDPR to monitor the vehicles esp since its only for insurance purposes and there are other trackers which can do that job without the employer having access to where the employee has gone.

Which is why we only put the Trakm8 in the vans and trucks. And even then Trakm8 was not accepted by our insurance company as a suitable anti theft tracking device for vehicles over 50k.
 
What's the potential saving in insurance vs the cost of purchasing, installing and paying subscriptions for all the trackers? Does it actually make financial sense when looking at the payback period?
 
Greebo said:
Likewise we use Trakm8 as well but as a delivery company we are well within our rights under GDPR to do so. However, putting it in company cars and monitoring private use I am not sure that is covered under any of the 5 legitimate reasons under GDPR to monitor the vehicles esp since its only for insurance purposes and there are other trackers which can do that job without the employer having access to where the employee has gone.

Which is why we only put the Trakm8 in the vans and trucks. And even then Trakm8 was not accepted by our insurance company as a suitable anti theft tracking device for vehicles over 50k.
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Ah, we are more from the telematics/driver risk assessment side rather than insurance/tracking.

We will have to check all the GDPR stuff before we code the full project then. :p
 
alx said:
What's the potential saving in insurance vs the cost of purchasing, installing and paying subscriptions for all the trackers? Does it actually make financial sense when looking at the payback period?
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Thre is that. If they want Cat 5 Thatcham devices at £1000 initial cost plus £159 per annum and you keep you cars/vans for three years then the annual cost will be £492 per vehicle. Our vans cost £800 per annum to insure and our cars are £500 per annum so cleary with us, if faced with a 30% premium increase then it would be cheaper to pay the extra premium.

In our case it was "we won't insure these vehicles at all if you don't fit them" so had little choice and all alternative insurers were £30k per annum more money (even if they didnt insist on the same restrictions)
 
chroniclard said:
This seems to cover the GDPR aspect.
https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/the-gdpr-will-logistics-companies-still-be-able-to-track-drivers

We are just starting to use Trakm8 for telematic/tracking data.
Click to expand...


This is the same company I have been looking into, the sales person I spoke to seemed to think it was an Insurance benefit to have them installed, so a vehicle could be easily located after being stolen.

Yet when I looked into it, the black box (tracker) simply plugs into the OBD-II port, so if a theft was to steal one of vehicles it would take them a matter of seconds to simply remove it and it would stop transmitting data.
 
StevieP said:
At the end of the day the vehicles are the responsibility of the company and so you are perfectly within your rights to monitor them as you see fit!

Having said that, in my experience it is unusual for an insurer to insist on all vehicles being tracked - most insurers have a value (and sometimes vehicle group) threshold that triggers a tracker requirement.

For example I've just added two £76,000 Range River's to a fleet and understandably the insurer are asking for trackers - so unless all the vehicles are worth north of £50-60k, I'd say it is unusual! (unless the claims experience is particularly poor or there are other reasons??)

I'm terms of the GDPR perspective - as long as the business has a company vehicle policy that sets out the company's intentions in terms of monitoring then you should be fine!

To be honest it's more of a legal question so you should really seek legal advice to be sure!
Click to expand...
Most of the cars are 40-50k in value, we do have some that are worth 70k (Audi SQ7) and 80k (Nissan GTR) which are owned by the chairman. I will have to gain clarification from the new Insurers.
 
Bounce said:
Most of the cars are 40-50k in value, we do have some that are worth 70k (Audi SQ7) and 80k (Nissan GTR) which are owned by the chairman. I will have to gain clarification from the new Insurers.
Click to expand...

Some insurer's thresholds are lower - I can think of a couple that require trackers for more than £40k so it's entirely possible they are required on all!
 
Bounce said:
This is the same company I have been looking into, the sales person I spoke to seemed to think it was an Insurance benefit to have them installed, so a vehicle could be easily located after being stolen.

Yet when I looked into it, the black box (tracker) simply plugs into the OBD-II port, so if a theft was to steal one of vehicles it would take them a matter of seconds to simply remove it and it would stop transmitting data.
Click to expand...

Which is why our insurance company wouldnt accept it for the vehicles they insisted were tracked properly.
 
.Most of the vehicles are under contract hire or have some form of rental agreement
Click to expand...

Do you mean the employees pay to to use the cars for personal use or do you mean your company hires the cars?
 
sanaxe1 said:
Do you mean the employees pay to to use the cars for personal use or do you mean your company hires the cars?
Click to expand...

The employee has a choice of either cash allowance for a car or company car (fully paid for, including maintenance, insurance costs) The only cost they would pay would be the BIK tax if they go down the company car route which goes straight to HMRC.
 
Any system where a manager (or any employee - things will certainly become a legal liability if any old employee manages to get access) can track the position of a personally used company car while not being used for business is going to be problematic.

Dunno whether something like some of the services provided by Automatrics would cover the insurance case while not providing the ability to real time monitor the position of company cars.
 
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