5 digital trucking insurance initiatives in 2023

February 22, 2023 6:43 AM

Truckers at the Port of Oakland protesting changes to labor law, June 2022.

The American supply chain has been stretched to its limit since the COVID-19 pandemic began in February of 2020. Even though the worst of the pandemic has passed, pressure on fleets has stayed high. Insurers and vendors are working together to ensure that safety is top of mind in the return to a normal flow of goods on American roads. Here are some recent partnerships and launches working to solve that problem from the insurance side. And click here for a more in-depth look at a boom in fleet and trucking insurance innovation.

Cover Whale/Nexar

Nexar makes dual-vision – that is, pointed in the cab and out the windshield – dash cams. It is offering those cameras to participants in Cover Whale's Driver Safety Program. Cover Whale is an insurtech that offers trucking insurance. "As one of our newest partners, Nexar takes a tech-forward approach, which goes hand-in-hand with Cover Whale's objective. We've had a rich dialogue about what it means to truly understand safe driving, and what we'll need to build together to get there. We're dealing with a high volume of data - beyond typical for the industry - to gain insights into the minutiae of what constitutes safe vehicle control. This is nontrivial; it's an open-ended problem requiring cutting-edge infrastructure and first-class data. Their engineering team is effective and nimble: they work to understand our asks/needs thoroughly, then quickly deliver results," Cover Whale founder and CEO Dan Abrahamsen tells Digital Insurance via e-mail.

Sentry/Motive

Sentry, a trucking insurer, is offering a five-percent discount to truckers who have the Motion Driver Safety Solution installed and share certain data from it. The Motion offering includes dashcams and electronic logging information for which Sentry will exchange the discount. "We've got about 48,000 trucks on the road, of which about a quarter already have Motive installed in their vehicles in some way," says Nick Saeger, assistant vice president, transportation products, pricing and underwriting, Sentry Insurance. "The hope is twofold: To get those customers that have Motive to share their data with us, and expand on our current customers, get them involved with Motive and get them in the current customers' trucks and then new ones as well as we roll new customers onto our policies."

Canal Insurance/CLARA Analytics

Commercial transportation insurer Canal is implementing CLARA's Triage and Litigation modules for commercial auto, the companies said in a statement. The offerings use AI to monitor claims and highlight claims cases that may be at risk of escalation.

HDVI

HDVI (High Definition Vehicle Insurance), an insurtech that launched in 2020, is revamping its usage-based insurance product, HDVI Shift. The company says that in its first 18 months of use, Shift customers had 40% fewer predicted crashes than the industry average. The new version ups the potential discounts for users, provides a 90-day lookback on existing telematics data to provide day-one discounts, and a newly introduced "Safety Score." We have very loyal and dedicated customers to our product. They love not just the insurance savings, but the dedicated support that we provide with our fleet services team. We help them with the technology by upfitting their fleets with new cameras if they don't have camera technology, or subsidizing the cameras that are in their trucks today," says Reid Spitz, co-founder of HDVI.

VisionTrack

This video telematics and connected-data company has launched a new AI platform, NARA, it announced via press release. NARA – representing "notification, analysis and risk assessment" – integrates with vehicle cameras to evaluate the safety of drivers.