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.

 

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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.

Both really, I wasn't aware that there were two types of trackers?

 

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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.

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.

 

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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!

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.

 

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Do you mean the employees pay to to use the cars for personal use or do you mean your company hires the cars?

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.

 

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Which is why our insurance company wouldnt accept it for the vehicles they insisted were tracked properly.

Wheres the best place to get Cat 5 Thatcham devices fitted to a fleet of 40 vehicles?

Trackm8 it seems are not the right fit if indeed all the vehicles needed to be fitted with CAT5 Thatcham devices. The proposal was only £10 per vehicle per month for 36 months, which I did think seemed cheap.