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Scoring That Reflects Behavior, Not Noise
Most safety scoring counts events. A driver with ten hard-braking alerts this month gets a worse score than a driver with two — regardless of whether those ten events all happened on the same afternoon.
S.A.F.E. scores differently. Driver and fleet safety scores are built on behavioral pattern analysis across every data category the platform tracks: camera events, ELD compliance, training engagement, inspections, violations, and incidents. The scoring methodology comes from managing hundreds of fleets and observing which data points actually predict risk — not from a product team theorizing about what should matter. The result is a score that identifies habitual behavior, not bad days.
The Driver Safety Score
Every active driver in S.A.F.E. carries a safety score that updates as new data enters the system. The score draws from six dimensions, each designed to surface patterns rather than isolated incidents.
Camera and VEDR behavior
Camera scoring measures how frequently coachable behavior shows up — not how many events a single day produces. A driver who has one bad day with multiple events but is otherwise clean looks fundamentally different than a driver whose events are spread across the month. Raw event counts treat both the same. S.A.F.E. doesn't. Only validated events factor into scoring.
ELD and HOS compliance
ELD scoring follows the same pattern-based approach as camera — identifying how consistently violations and process failures occur over time rather than counting individual instances.
Training engagement
Scored on completion behavior — not just whether a course was finished, but how promptly. Responsiveness to coaching and training assignments is a leading indicator of whether a driver is engaged in the safety program or ignoring it.
Inspections
Inspection scoring reflects the ratio of clean inspections to those with violations over a trailing window. A driver with a strong inspection history who picks up one violation is in a different position than one whose inspections consistently produce findings.
Violations
Federal violation history scored with time-based severity weighting that mirrors how FMCSA evaluates carrier risk — recent violations carry more impact than older ones, and severity matters.
Incidents
Incident scoring accounts for severity classification — fatality, injury, tow-away, and other — with time-based decay. Near-miss events are also factored as early indicators.
Patterns Over Counts
Every dimension in the driver safety score is built on the same premise: habitual behavior predicts risk, isolated events don't.
A driver who triggers a cluster of camera events on one difficult day and then operates clean for the rest of the month is not the same risk as a driver whose events show up day after day. An ELD violation on a single trip is not the same signal as form-and-manner errors appearing week after week. Raw event counts penalize bad days and miss bad habits. S.A.F.E.'s scoring model does the opposite — absorbs the noise and surfaces the signal — so that coaching and escalation resources go to the drivers who actually need intervention.
The Fleet Safety Score
The fleet safety score evaluates how the operation performs as a whole — measuring the dimensions that determine carrier-level risk.
Incidents
Fleet incident scoring accounts for every recordable event — fatalities, injuries, tow-aways, property damage, non-accident incidents, and near-misses — weighted by severity classification with time-based decay. Incident scoring is normalized to fleet size, so a 200-truck fleet and a 20-truck fleet are evaluated proportionally rather than penalizing larger operations for having more absolute events.
Inspections
The fleet's clean inspection rate over a trailing window. A fleet where most inspections produce no violations is in a fundamentally different position than one where findings are routine.
Violations
Severity-based weighting that accounts for fleet size, so a single serious violation at a 10-truck fleet registers differently than the same violation at a 500-truck operation. This prevents small fleets from being disproportionately impacted by isolated findings while still surfacing risk concentrations at larger carriers.
Camera, ELD, and aggregate driver scores
These are the aggregate of all active drivers' individual scores. This design is deliberate: when a fleet addresses a problem driver — through coaching, training escalation, or removal — the fleet score reflects that improvement immediately. The score rewards action. A fleet that identifies and resolves behavioral issues sees the benefit in real time rather than waiting for trailing averages to catch up.
How Fleet Scores Connect to FMCSA BASIC Categories
S.A.F.E.'s fleet safety score dimensions map directly to the data that drives FMCSA BASIC percentiles. Camera event patterns feed Unsafe Driving. ELD compliance feeds HOS Compliance. DQF tracking feeds Driver Fitness. Inspection and violation history feeds across categories.
This isn't coincidental. The fleet score is designed so that improving it improves the metrics FMCSA measures — because the underlying behaviors are the same.
Scoring Means Nothing Without Action Behind It
The score is the starting point. What matters is the coaching, training, and compliance workflow that the score triggers — and the trajectory it produces over time.
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