Unfortunately for carriers, they cannot opt out of the trend. What a fleet can control is the experience data sitting underneath its own renewal. For Dohrn, a Midwest LTL carrier with about 2,000 employees, that data now comes from AI cameras.
The company finished converting its fleet to dual-facing event recorders roughly a year ago. Accidents have fallen almost 20% since. Robert Howard, president and CEO of Dohrn, told FreightWaves that nobody outside the building forced the decision.
Insurers are not the ones pushing hardest on fleet insurance costs. Instead, carriers themselves are. "No, it's definitely us pushing it," Howard said in an interview at Samsara Beyond in June.
"I mean, the insurance costs are skyrocketing, there's no question about that, but it's all based on experience." Dohrn is a standalone subsidiary of Chuck Hammel's Pitt Ohio Transportation Group, which acquired the carrier in 2014, the year Howard joined. It runs about 25 terminals from Indianapolis to Nebraska and Minnesota down to Missouri, with 1,100 drivers, 900 trucks and 1,800 trailers. Howard treats the insurance line as an output to help with insurance costs.
"What we want to do is be as safe as we can and use technology that we can implement, such as the event recorders and the AI and everything else that we add to newer equipment, to make us as safe as possible," he said. "And that in turn helps us keep the insurance costs down." Claims resolution is the secondary yet tangible benefit. Video is taking the guesswork out of the fight-or-settle decision.
"Definitely if you know what's happened, if you're at fault, we settle it and we move on," Howard said. "But the ideal for us is to be as safe as possible." Customers run the same evaluation. Safety now sits next to price in Dohrn's RFP conversations, alongside sustainability.
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