What is an acceptable crash rate?

Quite frankly no crash is acceptable! Having said that, the truth is that humans make errors. The challenge for driver training companies is to motivate people to drive in such a way that these errors do to not translate into crashes.

There are many ways to gauge the performance of your fleet, although some techniques are far more reliable and accurate than others. Streets Ahead recommends the number of claims per million kilometres as the best option because this determines your crash rate based on your exposure.

Other techniques that can be used include the following:
  • A comparison of your at fault multiple vehicle collisions rated against any third party at fault collisions. This simplistic approach is based on the notion that all crashes represent 100% of your exposure. If the at fault crashes recorded against your fleet exceed third party at fault claims then you are performing worse than average.

  • You may like to compare yourself to world best practice established by companies who have a safety culture embracing all facets of the workplace. Dow Chemicals have a crash rate of 4.02 collisions per million miles (yes that is miles). DuPont are nominally better returning a rate of 3.94 per million miles.

  • In Australia the Lumley benchmarks are a good indicator of fleet vehicle performance. The current Lumley benchmarks are as follows: accident rate per 100 vehicles = 20%, driver at fault = 30%, client vehicle only = 10%, unknown third party at fault = 10%.