Looking for ROI in the wrong places
Any safety manager who has rolled out in-cab coaching technology across their fleet knows the pattern. The vendor promises real fuel savings and fewer crashes with their platform, the technology gets installed, and months later the numbers come in well short of the projection. The instinct is to blame the platform.
However, the platform may have performed as designed, with the gap being with the drivers who never bought into the system. Some push back because they think the coaching will slow them down and cost them miles. Some take it as an insult to years of safe driving. Some see a score that ranks them below other drivers running an easier route and decide the whole thing is rigged. Whatever the reason, a driver who tunes out the coaching never changes how they drive, and the savings that driver could have produced never materialize.
Driver resistance is a major risk factor, and it is the one thing a business case rarely prices in. But resistance is not always what it sounds like — it is rarely flat refusal. In one industry survey, more than 95% of drivers said they were open to safety programs. The problem is that most rollouts are not built to make it easy for willing drivers to adopt the new technology, with scores that feel unfair, no clear reason for the change, and little follow-up once the system is installed.
This article covers why drivers push back, what that resistance costs in fuel and safety, and how the fleets that get it right win over the skeptics.
Why do drivers resist telematics, and how does it affect ROI?
Quick answer: Drivers resist telematics mostly out of fair worries: that following the coaching will slow them down and cost them the miles their pay depends on, or that a system that does not know their route will give them a bad score they did not deserve, affecting their bonus in the process. A fleet manager rarely connects those worries to the ROI number, but their effect is real. In‑cab coaching technology is paid for up front, yet its benefits and return are earned one driver at a time, as each resistant driver is won over and starts following the coaching. The savings depend on how many drivers a fleet convinces, not on how much it spends on the technology.
Why it matters: If drivers think the scoring is unfair, a fleet loses money every day those drivers stay disengaged. Each driver is scored, and their score only climbs when they change how they drive, so a driver who has dismissed the system is a driver whose fuel and safety numbers never improve. Multiply that by the number of drivers who feel the same, and the loss is real and ongoing.
What to do next: Focus on getting drivers to buy into the coaching. Once they do, the fuel savings and safety gains follow. Winning drivers over rests on three things: coaching, communication, and incentives. Read on to discover how successful fleets address these key items.
The real reasons drivers push back on coaching
Pushback is usually justified, and dismissing it out of hand is the first mistake a manager can make during a rollout. Most resistance comes down to three concerns and here is how drivers themselves put it:
- Time and pay: “This thing is going to slow me down, and I run tight enough already.” Miles are money to a driver, so a system that costs minutes costs pay.
- Pride: “I’ve driven a million safe miles. I don’t need a box telling me how to do my job.” Years of clean driving feel like proof enough, so coaching can land as an insult to drivers rather than an offer of help.
- Fairness: “That system has no idea what my route looks like.” A score that ignores the specifics of a driver’s route, their load, or their reality reads as rigged before it reads as useful.
All three concerns are workable, but only by addressing them early on, not by waiting for them to fade. It helps to understand where these worries come from, because they are not abstract. They come from experience. Most drivers lived through the ELD mandate—they were told the switch would not cost them time or money, and for many, it cost them both, at least at first. So chances are that a new device on the dash isn’t received as a neutral tool, but as the latest idea that looked good to someone who never had to drive with it.
“Most of the time, I hear the same reasons why drivers choose not to follow the ISAAC Fuel Coach. One is that following it is distracting them from driving. So I bring up how they drove when they first started: they used to spend so much time watching the RPMs to shift and downshift at the right point, and with time they started doing it just by the sound of the engine. The ISAAC Fuel Coach is the same. In time, following the indicators stops feeling like one more thing to watch. Instead, it becomes second nature.”
Sylvain Binette, Technical Solution Specialist at ISAAC
What resistance costs in fuel and safety
Resistance has a price, and a fleet can put real numbers to it. When every driver is scored, those who never engage leave a measurable gap compared to those who do, namely in the fuel they could have saved. And for those involved in more crashes than the average, in‑cab coaching could have plausibly reduced the odds. These are the very savings the business case promised when the fleet signed off on the coaching system.
On ISAAC’s platform for instance, each point of a driver’s ISAAC score is worth about 0.5% in fuel and, per a 2023 Traffic Injury Research Foundation study, a 4% reduction in collision odds. So a fleet can quantify the coaching resistance impact for every driver — with low scores translating directly into unnecessary fuel waste and potential safety incidents.
The size of what is at stake is worth stating plainly. According to an analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cited by the U.S. Department of Energy, driver behavior alone can influence fuel economy by 15% to 30% at highway speeds and 10% to 40% in stop-and-go traffic.
The takeaway: how a driver drives is the single biggest lever a fleet has over fuel consumption. Coaching is what moves that lever, and every driver who stays unengaged is a hand holding it back.
How to get drivers to buy in
A coaching program does not change anyone’s driving on its own. The fleets that get real fuel savings and safety gains do the same handful of things: they ensure scoring is fair, they coach drivers instead of policing them, and they keep leadership involved past system launch.
All of it starts with the question every driver asks first—is this fair to me?
Fairness is where the ISAAC Fuel Coach earns early trust. Scoring drivers on raw fuel economy alone puts anyone on a hilly or heavy route at a disadvantage versus drivers running on flat, light ones. The ISAAC Fuel Coach accounts for different driving scenarios, such as driving up a hill or carrying a heavy load, thereby removing factors outside the driver’s control and basing the score strictly on driver performance. A driver who understands that the system will not penalize them for a mountain grade or a headwind is far more open to what it is measuring.
While a fair score gets a driver to give the system a chance at the onset, it does not keep them engaged month after month. That takes deliberate effort, and most fleets underestimate it.
Jean-Philippe Bertrand, ISAAC’s Open Platform Experience Vice President, points to what successful fleets do differently:
- Make leadership’s buy-in visible to drivers. A company-wide email about a new program is something a driver deletes without reading. It lands differently when a manager they respect stands in front of them and says, in plain terms, why the program is here and that the score is there to help them, not to get them in trouble.
- Have answers ready before the questions come. The first thing drivers ask is whether the score can cost them pay or land in their file. Fleets that decide that in advance and say it plainly at kickoff avoid the rumors that derail a rollout in its very first week.
- Keep at it after the launch. The fleets that treat go-live as the finish line often stall. The ones that succeed put a standing rhythm in place, such as a weekly score review or a regular check-in, so coaching stays a conversation instead of a one-time announcement.
As Bertrand puts it, “The fleets willing to test new ideas, even if not every idea will be successful, tend to see better outcomes and sustained improvements.”
Two fleets that turned resistance into results
West Side Transport, a US dry-van carrier based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, hiring more than 575 drivers, shows what adoption looks like when a fleet handles the rollout of coaching technology well. West Side built a performance bonus plan using the ISAAC Fuel Coach and tracking four specific behaviors the system measures: proper use of the accelerator pedal, coasting, hard turning, and hard braking. The company set the bonus targets using data from its top 25% of drivers, levels the operations team believed were challenging but achievable for every professional driver on staff. As bonuses were paid out, more drivers bought into the plan, and fuel efficiency rose across the fleet.
West Side Transport burns more than 6 million gallons of diesel a year, so even a small per-driver gain, multiplied across the fleet, turns into real money. Its CFO, John Dalrymple (now retired), put it plainly. “In our proof of concept, the first driver we sent out with an ISAAC unit showed a 20%-plus increase in fuel efficiency. Using a much more conservative number across the fleet made the ROI an attractive proposition.”
In the story just shared, a single driver showed what was possible, but the fleet only gets full results as more drivers adopt the coaching.
West Side tested the logic — another fleet, VA Transport, put hard numbers to it with a 12-week pilot with 50 drivers. Over the pilot’s duration:
- The average ISAAC score improved by close to 8 points (from 77.0% to 84.8%)
- Harsh braking and harsh turning dropped by 50.6%
- Fuel efficiency improved by 3% (from 6.6 to 6.8 mpg)
- In three months, the group saved more than 4,226 gallons of fuel, worth over $17,000 US (more than $24,000 CA)
What turned individual gains into a fleet-wide result was the social side of the program. VA Transport ran a weekly team scoring competition, with drivers grouped into roughly a dozen teams, and paid a bonus to the winning team’s drivers in each phase. Drivers started stopping by the safety and compliance director’s office to check their own results and their teammates’, and to trade tips on raising their scores. Adoption became something drivers did with each other, rather than something imposed on them.
Strip away the details, and West Side and VA Transport ran the same playbook.
- Score drivers only on what they control, their braking, acceleration, and cornering, with the factors they cannot control, the hill, the load, and the weather, taken out of the score.
- Put real money behind it, tying recognition and bonuses to score improvement.
- Start with the best drivers, whose results motivate their peers more than any management memo can.
- Make it social, with team standings and score comparisons that turn adoption into something drivers do together.
- Keep the loop going after system launch, using the data for specific conversations, not one-time warnings.
Conclusion: ROI is in the people, not just the technology
A coaching system does not save a fleet money — drivers do, once they buy into it.
The equipment is the easy part. You buy it, you install it. Realizing the savings is the hard part. They come in slowly, over months, and only from drivers who get on board. Fleets that quit paying attention to coaching results and adoption after system install get a fraction of the savings and may blame the technology.
Fleets that treat driver adoption as a priority get the full return — the kind of result VA Transport saw, with thousands of gallons and tens of thousands of dollars saved in a single quarter, on top of the harder-to-price value of crashes that never happened.
Driver resistance to adopting technology is not a side issue. Winning drivers over is where the ROI comes from when implementing a driver coaching tool, so the fleets that treat it as a key component are the ones that get paid back many times over.
See how real-time coaching works in the cab. Explore ISAAC’s Real-Time Driver Coaching →
Driver resistance and telematics ROI: common questions
Why do drivers resist telematics, and how does it affect telematics ROI?
Drivers resist in-cab coaching with telematics for reasons that are usually legitimate—a fear of losing time, losing pay, or being judged by a system that does not account for their route. Their fear and resistance affect ROI directly, because coaching returns are tied to score improvement, and a driver’s score only moves when they engage. Resistance does not so much delay the ROI as remove part of it. Only the drivers who change how they drive achieve the desired fuel savings and reduce their odds of being involved in crashes.
Does driver resistance to coaching fade on its own over time?
Driver resistance to in-cab coaching rarely fades on its own. It takes deliberate work to soften it. When a coaching system is installed and then left to fend for itself, drivers tend to read the silence as either surveillance or indifference, and resistance hardens. Adoption grows fastest when a fleet pairs the coaching program with three things: 1) a fair scoring model that accounts for route difficulty, 2) visible proof that following the coaching pays the driver back in a higher score and the bonus tied to it, and 3) peer influence from drivers who are already seeing results.
How much ROI do you actually lose when adoption stalls?
The ROI lost due to in-cab coaching resistance has no single percentage, because it depends on how many drivers disengage and how far their scores sit below where they could be. A useful way to think about it is per point. Since each 1‑point score improvement is associated with roughly 0.5% in fuel savings and a 4% reduction in collision odds, every point a resistant driver’s score fails to gain is a measurable loss on both fuel and safety. A fleet loses ROI point by point, driver by driver, across all drivers who never engaged.
What separates a fleet where coaching sticks from one where it stalls?
Management follow-through is the major factor that separates fleets where in-cab coaching sticks from ones where it stalls. Fleets where adoption stalls tend to launch the program and step back, leaving drivers with no feedback and no reason to keep engaging. Fleets where it sticks start with their strongest drivers, run incentives that reward real improvement, and use the score data for specific, factual conversations rather than generic warnings. VA Transport’s weekly team competition, and its drivers comparing results in the safety director’s office, are what that looks like in practice.
Is real-time driver coaching just surveillance by another name?
Real-time driver coaching will act as either a surveillance or coaching tool depending on how a fleet uses it. Used as a fairness tool, it scores drivers only on what they control, adjusts for load, grade, and wind, and pairs those scores with support instead of punishment. That is coaching, and drivers feel the difference. The same technology aimed at catching and punishing drivers, with no allowance for the conditions they drive in, reads as surveillance, no matter what the fleet calls it. The intent behind the new technology, and the way it is run day to day, determines how a fleet’s drivers experience it.