Episode 062: Democratizing Safety with CEO Rashid Galadanci of Driver Technologies

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined with my co-host, Jeff Jenkins. How you doing?

Hey guys, how's it going?

All right, today we've got a fun special guest. Introducing Rashid.

How are you doing, Rashid?

Good, thanks so much for having me, guys.

Yeah, and Rashid, where are you from? Remind— for our audience here.

Yeah, absolutely. I was born in a small town called Hancock, New Hampshire. I've lived all over the world: Nigeria, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., New York City, and most recently Eastern Long Island.

All right. Well, and you're from a company. What's the name of your company that you're with?

Yeah, Driver Technologies, Inc. Driver Technologies, Inc.

So a little bit about, as we were talking to Rashid about today's podcast episode, today we're talking about democratizing safety. And Rashid, as you're talking about safety, you know, you're working with Driver Technologies, Inc. What does that mean to you as we talk about democratizing safety and how that kind of impacts the world that we're in today?

Yeah, absolutely. So growing up, I always, for a whole host of reasons that we don't have time to dig into all of them today, but I've been very passionate about car safety. And I got very excited about the coming of autonomy, right, when it relates to vehicles and related capabilities. And I was on the venture capital side investing out of a fund in New York and started looking at companies that were involved in data and helping autonomous cars come to life. And I suddenly realized that the kind of marketing conversation that was coming out of that industry was very different from the reality of what was going to happen on the road. And so I started to think, well, you know, Maybe if we're not going to get real autonomy, the kind of advanced driving assistance capability that you get in a Tesla, for example, would be great, right? That'll still save millions of lives potentially if everyone had access to it. And I started to study more about, you know, what a tragedy really vehicle safety is globally. Over a million lives lost a year, over 50 million lives impacted by serious injury every year. Unbelievable economic effects to fleets and to, frankly, whole countries based on all the different accidents that are happening within the economy. And when you look at, you know, total statistics, you've got cars or vehicles in general as the only top 10 cause of death that isn't a disease. And pre-COVID, the only top 10 cause of death that was getting worse. All the other ones we were making good progress on, and hopefully we'll do the same here with COVID Uh, and so I just started to think, well, this is really a shame that if you have $100,000 as an individual, or if you're a fleet that's flush with cash, you know, cause every fleet owner is just wondering what to do with their extra cash. Right. Uh, you could buy a bunch of systems or a bunch of vehicles that could actually save your life and save your business. Uh, but unfortunately that's not just like the 1%, but it's like the 1% of the 1%. And so we started to think, you know, is there something we could do with this supercomputer that so many people are walking around with in their pocket in the form of a smartphone? You know, you go to take a picture of someone and it focuses on their face, right? It puts a box around their face and focuses. So the technology is there to— for the phone to understand what's going on outside of the cabin, what's going on inside the cabin, and to alert someone to a potentially risky situation in terms of a collision, in terms of falling asleep at the wheel, in terms of being drowsy. And so we just decided to sink our teeth into working on, could we make a system that would actually provide that kind of safety much the way a Tesla does, looking around the world for potential risks? And then again, similar to a Tesla, not to just totally rip them off, but if you are in an accident, you know, you can take your Tesla to the dealer or put a thumb— special thumb drive in it, and you can get the video and the speed that you were going at and the location to show your boss or show your employee, you know, your insurance that you weren't at fault. But for most people, it's just a matter of their word versus the other person's word. And last but not least, I think, you know, when you look at the commercial side of things, it's such a difference to a business if there's an accident and you're held liable, that these kinds of safety capabilities are critical, but again, just out of reach for most people. So our goal is really to democratize all of that.

All right, so yeah, definitely we know Tesla's kind of been at the forefront of a lot of the autonomous features. We've seen a lot of those kind of features leaking their way into other OEMs, you know, like automatic braking, collision avoidance, those kind of things. Um, You know, we've— I know there's a lot of different camera systems that are out there. You know, we've seen a bunch of different camera systems out with, you know, like DriverEye and a couple of the other— Samsara, I think, has one as well. You know, it's got like the AI collision avoidance and recordings and all that stuff. But it sounds like, you know, you guys have really focused on, well, how do we just use what we already have, you know, with a smartphone and build an app that kind of taps into those those sensors and those cameras.

Exactly. So I think, you know, there's nothing wrong with those systems. Those are, those are great systems. Uh, and if you as a fleet owner have the money to, you know, put Mobileye in every vehicle or Samsara in every vehicle, that's great. But on the flip side, we feel like there's a redundancy there. You know, not only do all of your drivers probably have a brand new iPhone that they're using for Instagram and Facebook, uh, instead of Driving safety, uh, but also increasingly we're seeing fleet owners, uh, providing a smart device to their drivers anyway. And so for example, um, we partner with Apple and T-Mobile and can get everyone in a fleet a new iPhone or a new iPad with an unlimited data plan for less than $50 a month, which is way below kind of the cost of most of those hardware devices. And as a driver, you're way more excited about, "Hey, my boss is giving me an iPad that I can use at home. I can do whatever I want with it. He's just asking that when I drive, I throw it up on the dash and have it there using the driver app," rather than having some device that feels like it's just monitoring me from a privacy perspective. And happy to dive into that too, but I think for us, privacy is a big part of our approach.

And I think that's probably true for anybody that's adopting camera systems, right? It's like that's the obstacle that they usually run into first is, is the driver mindset towards cameras, right? And Jeff, did you guys ever do cameras when you were at Fleetwood or any of those others?

We did. In fact, when cameras first became very popular, at least they were coming up to have them inside and outside the cab, there was major pushback, but it's perception from the drivers of Big Brother looking at them. So they got really, I guess, standoffish when they talked about it. We did a test where we got 50 cameras at Fleetwood and we put them in the driver's cabs and we had front-facing and rear-facing cameras. And when we were talking about doing it with them, you know, doing that communication, we had a whole bunch of people, "Oh, I'm going to quit if that goes in there. You know, I don't want any part of that." What we found is no one quit. In fact, most guys were appreciative when there was some sort of an incident that happened that vindicated them from any wrongdoing.

Yep. Absolutely.

And Rashid, I'm guessing you've probably seen something similar with your clients as you've gone through that process.

Absolutely. I mean, to be honest, I think our biggest point when it comes to this is, is about transparency. So we just feel like the opportunity that we have is to provide a product that's incredibly flexible, that the fleet owner knows their team, right? They know what works for them and what doesn't work for them. And, you know, What kind of conversations with them will get them excited about it? And to really make it feel like it's the driver's decision, you know, what data they're sharing and how they're sharing, et cetera. So what our product allows you to do is, you know, maybe you have a fleet where, you know, it's the, the assets are all owned by the boss. The content of the vehicles is highly sensitive or expensive or, you know, hard to, hard to replace. Uh, and you want to be able to like really monitor what's going on in those, those vehicles. And you can talk to the drivers about, you know, the risks associated with, with driving those types of vehicles. And very much to the story you, you guys, uh, provided, it's like, hey, here's an iPad for everybody, just give it a try, let's talk about it, you know, let's give it a try. Uh, on the far other extreme, we have fleets, uh, in our in our driver base where they're like a pizza delivery company. They've got 50 drivers, but they're all driving their own vehicle. You know, they're young kids usually, and they definitely don't want any monitoring and things like that in their own vehicle. And so we allow a system where, oh, okay, you're going to share a video and the data around it if you're in an accident and you want to defend yourself about it, right? But we're not gonna monitor 24/7, but maybe we'll do analytics across the whole fleet on an anonymous basis so that we can understand things like, hey, everyone's speeding, or a lot of people are hard braking, and we can talk about why that's not safe. And then lastly, we have lots of nice juicy examples that can get everyone excited about, you know, hey, maybe there's a way where I'm getting alerts for distraction and drowsiness because hear some real stories of, you know, really bad outcomes basically from those scenarios. Um, but I'm not gonna, you know, it's not gonna immediately ring to my boss if I, you know, am drowsy once or go slightly over the speed limit once. These are all kind of—

Rashida, on that second example you gave where you talked about, you know, the pizza delivery, are there legal ramifications behind that if, if you are monitoring, um, let's say they're speeding, right? Uh, and you're looking at those analytics and you have everybody speeding. And so, you know, there's a pattern that's there and that's developed, but there's zero action taken based on that. And then a catastrophic event happens.

Absolutely. Yeah. We have a lot of partners who I think feel like they want to know that their drivers have the technology to be alerted if they're falling asleep, be alerted if they're tailgating, be alerted if they're excessively speeding over and over again, but they don't want to be constantly managing that data, right? And maybe even if there's an incident, because of the kind of sharing economy model or because of the relationship that they have with their fleet, they don't want to just immediately be holding on to the data around the accident. So again, it just kind of goes in this whole thing where I feel like the future is one that's driven a lot more by the actual driver wanting to be protected for their own version of the story, as opposed to sort of a Big Brother type model. And in fact, we've had a number of folks in our network of drivers drive for a fleet where they are being mandated to use some sort of hardware capability, and they use our app as their own version of the story. They want to own some of that. So it's pretty interesting.

So Rashid, as you go through, I mean, what are some, What are some like specific examples or some things you've seen where it's, you know, our listeners really like to hear stories, you know, Jeff and I will tell stories all the time. What are some stories that you got that you could share, you know, protect the innocent, but, you know, cases like when you're making the case for, hey, you should really invest in a camera system. And like, if you go with this iPad solution or just buy an iPhone, you know, how do you kind of make the case for everybody?

Yep, absolutely. So the most obvious case is just, hey, you could get started with this for free, right? You just tell all your drivers to go download the app. Hey, that's an amazing cost savings. We also have really nice white glove experiences where you get an iPhone and a mount and charging cable, and we make sure everyone gets set up properly, et cetera. But in terms of actual examples of incidents, two come to mind. One happens all the time. Which is interesting, which is our driver, you know, the person using our app, is driving along. They could be on a highway, it could be on a regular street, and someone pulls in front of them in such a way that they end up rear-ending that car. And in the classic case of, you know, what law enforcement is going to see from that scenario when they show up, what your insurance company is going to see from that scenario, is that the back vehicle, our driver, is at fault.

And all the time, 9 times out of 10, that's what they're going to do.

Absolutely. And all it takes is the front person saying, I was just driving along normally, minding my business, and I stopped normally at this light and this guy rear-ended me, you know. Uh, and so we've had so many cases where that's what started to happen, and our driver whipped out their phone and said, no, look at this video, this is what this crazy person was doing. And the law enforcement on the scene their attitude shifts suddenly, and then the insurance implications are not only in terms of the outcome being much better for our driver, but the time. So it's about how long does it take for this disagreement to go through all the processes, God forbid, go to court, before you actually get paid back. Whereas when your insurance company says to the other insurance company, Hey, we've got not only video, but we have video, a map of the location, accelerometer data, the weather information. Like, we have this perfect picture on a dashboard of what happened. The other side just drops the case. So that's like a recurring theme for us. A more rare but, but probably very relevant to your listeners example is one where we have a partner who actually in this case, they were using one of their insured fleets. So they're an insurance company for the trucking industry. And one of their fleets actually had a Samsara device. So we partner even with folks who aren't using our app, but we can still leverage our, what we call the driver cloud, which is our platform for looking at the trips and sharing the trips and, you know, managing your data. Basically, they had a Samsara device and they had a situation where one of their drivers in a larger truck took a left, an unprotected left turn, and gave plenty of time for the oncoming vehicle. And the oncoming vehicle struck them. It didn't slow down at all even though it should have slowed down for them. And what that other driver said is that this guy didn't leave him any time and he slowed down a bunch. Slammed on the brakes and still hit them. And our driver was just like, I've been doing this for 18 years. I really don't think that's what happened. It just didn't feel like a normal interaction. So we were able to look at the trip and put it through our computer vision pipeline. You know, imagine what a Tesla sees in the world and how it makes decisions about when to go and when not to go. And we were able to show that the oncoming vehicle, even though we didn't have any data from that vehicle, didn't slow down. So we don't know if that means the guy was drunk, he was distracted, you know, he had road rage, who knows what the issue was, but it just showed that it wasn't our driver's fault and what the distance was to the vehicle ahead when he started to make the turn and all that stuff. And so the outcome there again is just a much faster resolution and the other side basically dropping the argument.

Well, you kind of mentioned, you know, like the faster resolution, but I'm sure you had it on the flip side where it has been like our driver's fault, right? Like you could probably very quickly, okay, yeah, we're just going to settle this.

Exactly. That's a great way to put it. And, uh, I think what's interesting is, as you mentioned earlier, depending on what kind of liability or setup you want as a fleet owner, as an insurance company, You know, you can really empower the driver to share what they feel like sharing in a given situation, right? If you, or you can do, you know, the monitoring approach too.

There's pros and cons in that, in that sharing, um, that you're talking about. Do you happen to know like what percentage of drivers are actually willing to share data on their own personal phone if they're using it for, you know, company purposes?

Yeah, in our experience, just because of how we've kind of approached the market as being very different from the traditional hardware tools, uh, particularly when someone's using their own phone, you know, we really empower them to think of it as this is your app, this is protecting you, it's, it's your driving, you know, we can generate a score for you. And maybe what you've agreed upon with your boss is, hey, I'm going to share my general location and my score, which by the way, we're like not trying to harshly score people and make them look bad, right? The point is to point out that generally speaking, you don't blow through stop signs, you don't blow through stoplights, you don't tailgate people, and you drive within a reasonable speed for your industry, right? If you do those things, you get a great score. And so I think people are actually, once they understand that that's the criteria and that's the kind of control you have over your information, then they can make a deal with their boss effectively. And most folks are very comfortable with sharing that level of information. What they don't want to share is, hey, here's where I am after work. Here's where I go to sleep. Here's where I stopped on the way back from my lunch break. And what's nice is we make that all controllable so you can kind of be in personal mode or work mode and share what you want to share.

Yeah. So what's funny is most insurance companies now on their apps, you can go ahead and sign up for that program to where they'll discount count your premiums if you allow them to study and record your driving habits. I will tell you that I do not allow that because I am a very aggressive driver. I speed. I mean, there's like— my insurance would be through the roof if I allowed them to track it, right? But one of the things that, you know, when you talk about fleets and improving driver safety and helping your risk management is the training that goes— that's involved with capturing some of this data.

Yup.

And you kind of, I think you lose out on some of that when you're using a driver's device and then they really want to keep that data a little bit closer to the chest. Is there like a, is there a way to talk them into doing that for those training purposes or is there a way to mitigate those concerns?

Absolutely. So we have a range of things there. I mean, I think the one thing is just Really looking at it as education around, you know, what, what, what kind of driving behavior is going to be seen as good or bad. And, uh, why are we, why are we doing this as a, as a team, as a fleet? Uh, that, that can be the approach. If you really need to do the 24/7 monitoring, what we really push people to think about, even insurance companies, is do you really need to monitor? Do you really need to know all the time? Do you need to know specifically for a given driver? So for example, with the pizza delivery team I mentioned before, you know, at the end of the day, they said, you know, what we really want is to know if across the fleet people are being insane, or if it's generally that our team is driving better than most pizza franchises. That would be, that would be a first step. Two, what we want to know is that our our guys are protected and that they are getting coaching. And so what our system does is on the edge without even hitting the cloud, it's letting you know if it thinks you're going to hit something in the road—car, bicycle, truck, pedestrian, van—and if you're falling asleep or being distracted. If it feels like you're tailgating, it's giving you that active coaching. And then if you are in an accident, you know, you have half a chance of having someone believe that the pizza delivery person with the, you know, whatever company— I'll keep them off the record for now— uh, you know, sticker on the top of their car, um, you know, isn't at fault. And then from an insurance perspective, very similarly, like, we have insurance partners where they are subsidizing the cost of our product to any of the drivers in their insurance portfolio that want to use it, and they're not monitoring it at all. But from their perspective, if there's an accident and if their driver is not at fault, their insured is not at fault, it's totally worth it to not have, uh, to have a video evidence and data around that, that trip.

That's something I hadn't thought about before, was the insurance subsidy, you know, as a way to help offset some of the cost of this as well.

Oh yeah. And for those folks, they're not giving them a phone, they're just saying You know, hey, if you want access to the driver app and the cloud service and the roads, you know, we also do roadside and gas discounts. You know, we've got you covered. It's only something like $9.99 a month per driver. And now they have the peace of mind that those drivers have, uh, you know, protection.

Yeah. Now in the case that they're self-insured, obviously that wouldn't be as, as big of a sway, but you're looking then at the, the ROI on just reducing accidents or reducing the cost of accidents when they do happen.

Exactly. And just, you know, even if you're self-insured, it's still an incredible cost to you to manage the claim, right? And, and to basically go into arbitration if the other side is choosing to tell a story that maybe isn't 100% what happened.

So as we go through, we talk about a lot with risk management And, you know, we define that in our pillars as, you know, it's the proactive identification, mitigation, controlling of threats to the organization and its stakeholders. This is something, you know, and Jeff, I think you'd agree with me, like we've— we're very big proponents on doing in-cab camera systems, you know, investing in your placement schedule so you can get some of the newer technologies like collision avoidance, even going so far as to say, hey, you should you can go out and get aftermarket ones that bolt on. It would still save you money, right? And so, yeah, definitely looking at this from a, you know, another angle, which is there's more than just, you know, like it's not just going out and getting a big camera system and having to go through that whole process. There's other alternatives out there, like Rashid over at Driver Technologies, that you can use technology that's readily available, that's, you know, that's open. I know one of the questions that a lot of our city shops would hit is, well, we've got union issues. Right? And they're not gonna use a, you know, they don't want a company thing in there, or they don't, they don't want to let personal use, you know, personal device use. You know, they have that whole personal device policy. You know, so I know that there's people that run into that, but I'm sure as you've dealt with those issues, you know, you've kind of been able to smooth over some of those obstacles. And in those cases, you know, you could go the more expensive route, but this definitely seems like a much more affordable option. Um, you know, when you talk about— I'm just envisioning this though, is like putting an iPad on top of my dash, you know, like that can get a bit, uh, a bit bulky, I'm sure. So the iPhone might be the better option there.

But yeah, I would say most of our serious drivers who actually get, you know, take the deal that we have with Apple and T-Mobile, um, first of all, some of them just drop using their home, their original phone because it's such a good deal. Phone, but a lot of them end up choosing the iPhone SE because it's so small. It's like a little— it's the size of a little camera, you know, and you can mount it anywhere you want. But, you know, we either suggest right on the dash where it's not actually obscuring the window at all, or way up your rearview mirror where it's, you know, not obscuring your view. And kind of just— you can almost set it and forget it. You know, it starts recording automatically when you drive. When you have it plugged in, you know, it often, depending on your car system, but it'll turn on by itself, which is pretty cool. So all you have to do is press the driver app button and let it go.

Yes. So Rashid, a lot of what we've talked about is just like, you know, front-facing camera. Is there an opinion, I guess, in the industry that you've heard, or just people saying, hey, well, we also need driver-facing? Right. So like, because I know that a lot of people feel that that is an invasion of privacy, although it does help on distracted driving. If you know that there's a camera pointed at you, you're probably not going to do things that you shouldn't be doing while you're operating a vehicle.

Yeah, I think what's super interesting about this is, again, we really try to lead with the privacy thing here. If you have a fleet of folks who are just going to absolutely hate it if you put in, you know, one of those hardware driver monitoring systems, like, great. Like, put, you know, let, let them use our app. They'll get the alert if they're distracted or drowsy. Maybe even at a fleet level, you could get information on whether the training, the safety training you've been doing, or even using this app is, you know, improving performance, but you can honestly tell them, hey, we're not going to monitor that Rashid was tired on Tuesday night, kind of thing. Right. That's an option. Too, I think one of the things that's really interesting is there's all this data and all these studies around when you implement a system like that, even just a dashcam with no computer vision, you know, safety capability at all, people's driving does improve. And about 3 days after they start driving, it goes back to normal. And so I think one of the things that our system you know, really does well despite being way cheaper than any other option is this kind of ongoing monitoring, ongoing reminders in like a nice, not annoying way to a driver that, hey, you're, you're drowsy, you're distracted a lot. Um, and we also can monitor if, if you've set up the device in such a way that, you know, effectively you're obscuring the capability of it. So I think a lot of people with like a Samsara device or other devices run into problems with their fleets where the drivers are just like hanging their hat on it or blocking it somehow. And so we can, you know, using computer vision, understand if we're not seeing a face.

But will it detect if I'm high on cocaine? Like, I just gotta know that.

We haven't written that algorithm yet, but I'll put it on the list.

All right, just, you know, eye dilation, you know, shakiness, like whatever, like just, just curious, right?

Totally doable.

Rashid, you're like 4 years too late for me on that one.

Again, I will protect the innocent. All right, there you go.

Well, hey Rashid, this has been an absolute pleasure. I want to thank you for coming on and joining us today. For all of our listeners, again, that's Driving Technologies Inc., right? Is that drivetechnologies.com, Rashid? drivertechnologies.com. DriverTechnologies.com.

Driver Dash Cam in the App Store.

Driver Dash Cam. There you go. Go look in the App Store.

Number one dash cam app, most downloaded, best reviews, been downloaded in 170 countries. And I think for fleets, our ask is just like, you know, like you said, it's a ti— now it's a tiny, tiny amount of money to protect your fleet from something that could be catastrophic cost. And you can try it without having to install any hardware or do anything. If you don't like it, No problem. Like just try Driver. That's, that's actually one of our domain names and try Driver. Yeah, exactly. And if you've had issues with your fleet and privacy stuff, let's talk about how you can, you know, keep your drivers really excited and happy about it while still getting the information you need.

All right. Well, that's going to wrap it up for us. As always, if you guys have any questions on today's episode, you can email us at podcast@fleetlogistics.com. @RTAFleet.com. And until next time.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @FleetSuccess. See you next time.