The last piece. Your tachograph says who was driving and for how long. Tracking says where the vehicle was. Until now nothing told you what actually happened — and that is the part people argue about.
A tachograph record, a GPS trail and a video clip are each worth something on their own. Together they are worth considerably more, because each one answers the question the other two leave open.
A harsh braking event arrives from the vehicle. The tachograph tells you which driver was at the wheel and how long they had been there. Tracking tells you the road and the speed. The camera tells you a car pulled out. That is a complete account, and it took no one any time to assemble.
Run the same three against an insurance claim, a driver's account of an incident, or a stretch of mileage nobody can explain, and you get the same effect — the question stops being whose word to take.
The intelligence runs on the device in the cab, not in a data centre afterwards. The driver hears the warning while there is still time to act on it.
The unit has a speaker, so the alert is spoken aloud as it happens. A driver drifting out of lane hears about it from the cab, not from a manager three days later. That is the difference between a camera that improves driving and a camera that only documents it.
A cab-facing camera is the part drivers object to, and the objection is reasonable. How it is configured matters more than whether you have one, so this is a decision we make with you rather than for you.
Road and cab cameras both accessible, including live view. The only thing that turns the cab camera off is the power being off. Simple, and the hardest to defend to a driver.
Live cab footage is permanently switched off. Cab footage can only be opened when the camera has flagged an event — phone use, drowsiness, severe braking, a collision. No event, no access. Nobody can sit and watch a driver work, because there is nothing to watch. You still get the footage in the moments that actually matter, which are the moments that end up in a claim or a disciplinary.
Road-facing only, cab camera permanently disabled. You keep the collision evidence and the road-facing warnings, and you lose fatigue and distraction detection — which is the part that prevents the incident rather than recording it.
Whichever you choose, tell your drivers which one it is and put it in writing. A camera policy nobody explained is the one that causes a grievance; a camera policy that says we cannot watch you, and here is why tends not to.
One unit, both cameras, fitted to the windscreen. It needs a power feed and an ignition line; a fitter does it in well under an hour.
DDIR already covers the daily walkaround, maintenance and inspections, driver licences, medicals, drivers' hours through TachoParser, and vehicle movement through tracking. Each answers a different question an examiner or an insurer might ask.
The camera was the gap. Not because footage is interesting in itself — most of it never gets watched — but because it is the only one of these systems that can say what a road looked like at a given second. It is what turns a set of records into an account somebody else will accept.
If you already run DDIR, it goes on the same bill and appears in the same place. If you do not, it is still worth a conversation, because a camera bolted onto nothing is just a camera.
