Fleet safety reporting has traditionally focused on obvious measures such as speeding, harsh braking and acceleration. But after analysing more than 379 million kilometres of real-world fleet driving, Euclidic Systems believes the next step is understanding the context behind those events.
The Australian-owned telematics provider has analysed seven years of data covering more than 33 million trips, 379 million kilometres and 12 million driving hours across Australia and New Zealand.
The dataset, collected between 2019 and 2025, is helping Euclidic refine how it benchmarks driver behaviour, identifies higher-risk situations and helps Fleet Managers decide where intervention will have the greatest impact.
For Euclidic founder Chris Witt, the objective is not simply to generate more fleet data.
It is to help organisations identify the behaviour that warrants attention.
“The question always is: what do the best performers do?” Witt told Fleet News Group. “What do they do that we’re not doing?”
It is part of the approach that has helped Euclidic become a finalist in the 2026 Fleet News Group Fleet Supplier of the Year Award.
Not every driver faces the same risk
One of the strongest findings in Euclidic’s research is that a single national driver benchmark may not tell Fleet Managers enough.
The company benchmarks drivers using both geographical region and vehicle Gross Vehicle Mass, recognising that a driver operating a lighter vehicle in a metropolitan area does not face the same conditions as someone driving a heavier vehicle in remote Australia.
Euclidic uses ABS-standardised regional classifications ranging from Major Cities through to Very Remote Australia, while vehicles are grouped into weight classes between 1.5 and 4.5 tonnes.
The differences identified in the data are substantial.
When operating region was held constant, Euclidic found that Major City drivers experienced 40 per cent more risk events when moving from its lightest WC1 vehicle class to WC4.
For Very Remote drivers, moving from WC1 to WC4 was associated with 149 per cent more risk events.
The effect also works in the other direction.
When vehicle weight was held constant, a WC1 driver recorded 19 per cent more risk events when moving from Major City driving to Very Remote operations.
For someone operating a WC4 vehicle, the increase was 112 per cent.
The fleet implication is important.
A driver who appears to perform poorly against a broad national average may be operating in a materially different risk environment.
Conversely, comparing drivers solely within an organisation may hide performance problems if everyone is operating below the standard of an appropriate peer group.
Euclidic is therefore working towards benchmarking drivers against groups facing similar operating conditions rather than relying solely on fixed fleet-wide targets.
Finding the people who need help
Euclidic’s research also supports a more targeted approach to driver improvement.
Rather than trying to coach an entire workforce at the same intensity, the company recommends identifying the drivers who sit at the bottom of the performance distribution and concentrating resources there.
Its Journey To Safer Roads 2026 paper suggests focusing improvement programs on the bottom 15 per cent of performers using internal rankings, coaching and targeted intervention.
Higher performers can then be recognised and rewarded to reinforce the behaviours the organisation wants to encourage.
That approach can be seen in Euclidic’s analysis of three major fleets between 2023 and 2025.
Two were mature users of fleet safety technology, with six to eight years of experience and established WHS alert and monitoring processes.
A third fleet began its rollout in 2023, allowing Euclidic to observe the change during the first three years of implementation.
The research found measurable movement in driver behaviour scores while reinforcing the value of continuously identifying outliers rather than treating telematics as a one-off technology deployment.
Witt says fleet safety improvement is less about achieving an instant perfect result than establishing an ongoing process.
He describes it as a “commitment to continuous improvement”.
When a speeding alert isn’t necessarily speeding behaviour
The size of Euclidic’s dataset has also allowed the company to question some common telematics assumptions.
One example is speeding.
A conventional telematics system can record a speeding event whenever the vehicle exceeds a threshold. But Euclidic wanted to understand whether every recorded event represented deliberate or sustained driver behaviour.
It developed a two-sample method that looks for consecutive speeding observations.
With data sampled every 10 seconds, a single reading is classified as momentary speeding. Two consecutive speeding readings are treated as indicating a more persistent pattern.
The methodology was tested across 764 vehicles in a corporate fleet during September and October 2024.
Euclidic found that 42 per cent of measured speeding samples were momentary, while 58 per cent involved consecutive readings indicating a more sustained event.
After the revised logic was introduced, peak daily driver alerts fell from approximately 2,400 to 1,400.
For a Fleet Manager, reducing unnecessary alerts can be almost as important as identifying additional risks.
Large volumes of low-value notifications can create alert fatigue, while distinguishing momentary behaviour from repeated patterns makes it easier to focus coaching and management attention where it is most likely to make a difference.
Moving beyond speeding
Euclidic is also encouraging fleets to broaden the definition of safety reporting.
Its Fleet Gate platform can produce dedicated WHS reporting covering fatigue, duress and accident events alongside traditional driver behaviour measures.
The company’s guidance argues that deliberate reporting on these events gives fleet and safety teams immediate visibility of potentially critical situations instead of treating telematics as primarily a tool for monitoring speed.
This is particularly relevant for organisations operating in mining, oil and gas, industrial, healthcare and other environments where employees may work alone or travel through remote areas.
Witt says operational fleet visibility and WHS have become the two core areas around which Euclidic has developed its offer.
That can include understanding unusual periods of vehicle inactivity, responding to duress alarms, detecting high-impact events or reconstructing an incident afterwards.
Euclidic also uses telematics data as a vehicle “black box”, with its research paper showing how speed, location and vehicle movement can be reconstructed as part of an Accident Investigation Report for police, insurers or courts.
Turning fleet data into decisions
Euclidic’s research is ultimately making the company more cautious about simple fleet safety scores.
More data does not necessarily mean better safety management if Fleet Managers cannot distinguish between meaningful risk and background noise.
The 379 million kilometres analysed by Euclidic suggest that where a vehicle is driven, what it weighs and whether behaviour is repeated can all affect how the underlying information should be interpreted.
For fleets, that changes the question.
Instead of asking how many speeding, braking or acceleration events occurred last month, the more useful questions may be which drivers are genuine outliers, which operating environments are creating additional risk and where management intervention will produce the greatest improvement.
That is where Euclidic believes telematics is heading — away from simply measuring drivers and towards giving Fleet Managers enough context to make better safety decisions.
