We must unite to tackle dangerous driving

As an independent company, we are lucky to have the freedom to use our expertise and knowledge to develop partnerships that have a positive impact on the community; and there is nothing more motivating that creating a partnership that actually saves lives.

We realised early on that Dash Cam technology had huge potential to improve road safety and reduce road traffic accidents and injuries by acting as a deterrent to reckless and unsafe driving. However, going back a couple of years, the major challenge was how to get Dash Cam footage safely and efficiently into the hands of traffic officers who could then use it as evidence. At that stage, a member of the public would call the police saying they had footage of someone, for example, driving past a school irresponsibly, which was clearly dangerous and illegal, and the police’s hands were tied - they couldn’t accept video on a USB stick for fear of a virus infecting their IT systems.

From our privileged position, at the junction between the public and the police, we saw a real opportunity to make a big difference by helping police to identify dangerous drivers and get them off the roads. We were able to bridge the gap between the public’s desire to provide video evidence and the police’s lack of resource for collecting and processing it through the creation of the National Dash Cam Safety Portal, our lifesaving partnership with 39 UK police forces (to date).?

Surprisingly, and somewhat frustratingly, one of the biggest challenges we faced with the launch of the National Dash Cam Safety Portal was the reluctance of police forces to accept that the partnership on offer was completely free to them. It was, genuinely, a completely ‘free lunch’!?

Each individual police force, and there are 48 across the UK, operates autonomously, with its own chain of command and decision-making processes. So, it has taken longer than we would have liked – but, one by one, we have used the success stories of individual police force partnerships to attract other forces to the Portal. West Mercia police were the pioneers and understood the real benefits of the Portal from the start.?

?It is a fact that there are significantly less traffic police on the roads. Going back a few years, there was a feeling that drivers could ‘get away with’ bad driving because of that. Now, there may still not be enough traffic officers out there but drivers have witnesses all around them, thanks to Dash Cam footage to evidence bad behaviour and accidents. Of all the videos that are now being delivered through the Portal to police forces across the UK, roughly half result in an action being attributed – that might be anything from a warning letter, through to a prosecution for a stolen vehicle, or a ban for dangerous driving. It’s a massive deterrent and the resource required by the police is minimal compared to a ‘manual’ process of collecting evidence. We estimate that we’ve saved around 29 years of police time since the Portal was created and saving police time is freeing up police to do other important things.

It’s great to see how the public has got behind the Portal – anyone can be a victim of a dangerous driver and there are now millions of Dash Cams out there that are sources of evidence and hopefully we are managing to turn the tide. Maybe just in the nick of time too, with UK roads changing rapidly: COVID-19 has meant more cyclists; e-scooters are on the rise; new modes of transport are emerging; smart motorways; poor road surfacing on smaller roads; and so on. For someone like me, who learned to drive decades ago, the roads are very different and more dangerous, and with semi and fully automated vehicles on the horizon there will be even more need to prove who is at fault than ever.

The National Dash Cam Safety Portal is just one of the successful partnerships we have formed in our battle to make the roads safer for everyone to enjoy. Others include our relationship with the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) offering free driver training e-modules for Nextbase Dash Cam customers; I took one of these myself and now have a better understanding of the roads and road safety, thanks to the IAM’s many years of knowledge and expertise.

We have also partnered with Project EDWARD – Every Day Without A Road Death – on our joint Vision Zero mission of reducing road deaths to zero, and also support the Brake road safety charity with donations of 3% from our online sales.

By partnering with other like-minded organisations, we can amplify our message to reach more people and be better placed to respond to the changes on UK roads to make the roads safer for all users.

Simply put, more awareness means more lives saved.??