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Bill Dorfner: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today as we dive into a critical component of commercial fleet operations, and that is the vital importance of driver training. To help us explore this topic, we’re thrilled to be joined by an absolute industry expert, Jeremy Randall.

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Bill Dorfner: Jeremy brings an exceptional depth of experience to the table. Since 2009, he’s served at In Control, now as the Operations Director and Chief Instructor for In Control Crash Prevention Training.

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Bill Dorfner: Leading specialized programs, including Crash Prevention 101, close quarter maneuvering, trailer training, and community visit instructions. For those unfamiliar with their work, InControl is a recognized pioneer in practical, hands-on risk reduction. Moving beyond traditional classroom theory, their closed-course, behind-the-wheel methodology, excuse me, often taught one-on-one.

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Bill Dorfner: Exposes drivers to real-world emergency physics.

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Bill Dorfner: Their training drills heavily target critical hazard responses, including emergency braking, advanced handling, obstacle avoidance, and distracted driving awareness, which has been statistically proven to drastically cut crash rates across the fleets.

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Bill Dorfner: Beyond this vital safety training work, Jeremy is an accomplished racing driver and educator. He serves as an instructor for high-performance driving events with Sports Car Driving Association and as a race instructor for the Sports Car Club of America. His competitive accolades are equally impressive, including titles as an SCCA Northeast Division Champion and an SCCA New England Road Racing Champion in Spec Racer Fords.

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Bill Dorfner: His Ford guy. I love that. Jeremy’s unique combination of high-performance car control mastery and dedicated safety instruction makes him uniquely qualified.

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Bill Dorfner: to discuss how rigorous driver training saves lives, protects assets, and elevates fleet standards. So please join me in welcoming Jeremy Randall.

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Jeremy Randall: Oh, thank you, Bill. You, you flatter me there.

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Jeremy Randall: I haven’t heard that many things… nice things about me in a long time in a row there.

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Jeremy Randall: So, welcome everybody, thank you guys for having me. What I want to touch on today… I’m gonna mix things up a little bit. I know, I think the majority of you guys are safety managers, fleet managers, that sort of thing.

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Jeremy Randall: And I want to talk to you guys about, you know, a mixture of how important your job really is, and also, you know, what are some of the things that your drivers really need to know that they might not fully know now?

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Jeremy Randall: So I’m gonna go ahead and give a little presentation for a while, and then we’ll go into Q&A after that, so…

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Jeremy Randall: Please make sure everybody can see my screen here. Bill, is my screen up, sir?

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Bill Dorfner: It is, yes, we’re sitting down.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright guys, so, you know, driver safety overall, crash prevention training is, again, where I’m going to, sort of concentrate on. Like, what do our drivers need to know? What are the skills that they really need? And then what are the best ways of delivering that, and how can you help them support that in general?

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Jeremy Randall: So, the attitude of your employees really matters, and that starts from the top down.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? So, you know, getting your owners on board, your high-level executives on board with how important this operation, how important your position actually is, and making sure that message gets all the way down to the drivers through every single aspect. Like, the safety-first mindset needs to be…

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Jeremy Randall: You know, the continuous message all the way through.

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Jeremy Randall: And that can mean that sometimes you have to go up to be able to get down to your drivers, meaning you gotta really get to those, those people sort of making the decisions, creating the culture, and understanding that the mission needs to be, you know, a zero, crash policy whenever we can possibly get there.

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Jeremy Randall: So, kind of looking from that level, you know, looking at you guys as, again, those safety managers, fleet managers in general, creating that strong relationship with the upper management to make sure that that’s the attitude coming down, and they’re supporting you in this endeavor.

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Jeremy Randall: You know, something as simple as just even terminology that we can utilize, and understanding the difference between an accident, and a crash.

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Jeremy Randall: So, accidents happen, right? They look a bit like this.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? You know, you’ve got a truck out there in the field, and it’s parked, and a tree falls on it. It’s at a stop sign, and something happens. You can call this an act of nature, an act of God, something along these lines.

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Jeremy Randall: There are… there’s no driver responsibility necessarily here in this scenario, but this is only about 6% of the close to, you know, 16 million incidents occurring every single year here in the United States. And that’s sort of when you combine crashes, accidents reported, and unreported. There’s a heck of a lot of them actually happening.

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Jeremy Randall: But this, you know, compared to a crash, there is responsibility behind this somewhere. This is a driver error. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was the front car or the rear car, could have been either one of them.

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Jeremy Randall: you know, if I was to ask you guys to think about for a moment what could the cause, what could the error mistake be made here, we could talk about this for the next hour for sure, right? It could easily be speeding, it could be distracted driving, or some other form of impairment, like…

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Jeremy Randall: Drinking and driving, drugs and driving, driving drowsy. We could say the, front truck there backed into the van. I mean, that’s a pretty good hit, but it’s possible. There’s a number of different mistakes that we can make. In fact, really an infinite number of mistakes or errors that we could describe to cause situations to occur like this.

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Jeremy Randall: And so, knowing sort of the difference between fault and at-fault and that sort of thing is really important, beyond what insurance or the law says.

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Jeremy Randall: So, I don’t know how many times I’ve been doing a, you know, running a class.

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Jeremy Randall: Where somebody said something like, I’ve been in 6 accidents, but none of them are my fault. And I’m like, well, what sort of timeframe are we talking about? If you’ve been driving for 60 years, maybe that’s not that bad, depending on the environment which you’re in, versus, like, you know, in the last 6 months, there’s something you’re doing very wrong to create these situations to continually occur. And so, changing behavior is extremely important in understanding not only the knowledge base that’s required to be able to operate a vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: safely.

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Jeremy Randall: but also the skill set to be able to do something about it when it comes up. So, important distinction we want to make

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Jeremy Randall: Accidents, aren’t preventable.

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Jeremy Randall: Right, that small 6% might not be something we could do. Maybe we could help reduce the severity of the situation, but they might not be preventable overall. But 94% of the time, when it’s a driver error, these crashes are absolutely preventable. And there’s a lot we can do to sort of work towards that.

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Jeremy Randall: It could be as simple as, you know, a basic safety feature in our vehicle. Are all of your drivers wearing seatbelts all the time? I know they’re supposed to, right? I know you tell them they need to, but what sort of follow-up is there? Are they actually doing it, and do they understand what the point of a seatbelt really is? So again.

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Jeremy Randall: when I’m running classes, you know, we’ll have this conversation. What is the purpose of a SEPA? What’s its primary job?

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Jeremy Randall: And I don’t want to say 100%, but 90-something percent of the time, everybody’s going to tell me they’re… they’re to prevent injuries in a crash. And absolutely, that is part of their job. They do that well. But it’s sort of the last part of their job.

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Jeremy Randall: Where I believe the primary purpose of a seatbelt is to allow the driver to have refined control over their vehicle. And so let me explain that a little bit further.

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Jeremy Randall: You’re, you’re driving down the road, and

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Jeremy Randall: A triaoxel 80,000 pound dump truck, right? Air brakes, you know, commercial vehicle, obviously, and a little kid runs out in front of your vehicle. You’ve got two main options at not hitting this kid, right? You could either hit the brakes or turn the wheel, or some safe combination of the two.

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Jeremy Randall: Without your seatbelt on, right, you go to hit that brake pedal hard, obviously your body’s gonna start moving forward, which means the only thing you can really do is now use your legs and your arms to hold your body in place, which should have been the seatbelt’s job.

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Jeremy Randall: Or if you decide to turn, and you turn to the left, your body’s going to the right, you’re going towards the center console, or the, you know, the gap between the two seats in the front, whatever it might be, depending on the truck, and you are going to have to, again, use your arms and your legs to attempt to hold yourself in place, which should have been, again, the seatbelt’s job.

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Jeremy Randall: So the big, you know, change in, you know, mindset from your drivers to understanding seatbelts is they allow the driver to use their knowledge and use their skill to actually have control over the vehicle. And I keep using the term, you know, refined control.

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Jeremy Randall: Today, in our vehicles, these are active restraint systems. They… they lock in when you brake, yeah, sure. And if there’s a crash, absolutely.

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Jeremy Randall: But they also lock under acceleration, and they lock under, you know, steering, especially aggressive steering, to, again, hold the driver in place to have that refined control. So, a different mindset that I want to create in drivers that come across, you know, come in front of me. Oh, you think you’re a good driver? Great! Then we better have that seatbelt on.

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Jeremy Randall: You know, we even… we work with law enforcement, we work with military.

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Jeremy Randall: And, you know, those are two big industries where, you know, culturally, they don’t wear their seatbelt. Oh, I gotta get in and out, I gotta be able to get out fast. These are not real excuses. There’s always ways around this stuff, to make sure that we have safe operation of our vehicles at all times.

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Jeremy Randall: So, I thought this was important to bring up.

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Jeremy Randall: Especially from the positions you’re in, how are you using the information you’re gathering from your, you know, from the area in which you operate, from…

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Jeremy Randall: any telematics you might be utilizing in your vehicles. You know, are you being proactive? Are you addressing the issues that are most common for your drivers? So, two different states, InControl’s based in Massachusetts, INFINITI’s based in Texas, so I want to look at these two different numbers. Very different problems overall that we need to sort of look at.

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Jeremy Randall: So.

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Jeremy Randall: When we look at the crash rate in Massachusetts, or the fatality rate, I guess I should say, out of every, you know, or… look at this, alright. 349 total deaths

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Jeremy Randall: In Massachusetts, compared to 4,150 plus in Texas in the same year.

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Jeremy Randall: Now, obviously, there are more drivers in Texas overall, but we start looking at the percentages, right? Percentage of total crashes that were fatal, 0.26% Massachusetts versus more than double in Texas. And so, what’s going on? Is Massachusetts just a much safer place to drive?

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Jeremy Randall: Actually, the exact opposite.

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Jeremy Randall: Interestingly enough, you know, we have the bottom 5 in the entire country, cities for most frequent crashes.

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Jeremy Randall: And our crash data, like, the number of crashes we have per people here, is sort of crazy.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? So, you know, we have way more crashes per 100,000 miles are driven, or I saw it listed as, every 3.57 years, the average Massachusetts driver will be involved in a crash. Right? That’s crazy.

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Jeremy Randall: But the speeds are lower.

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Jeremy Randall: Because our highways are poorly designed, for lack of a better term, and the traffic is so extreme, right? We’re driving in the Boston area on highways, you know, rush hour is not 60, 65, it’s 6, 7, maybe, miles an hour, right? And so we also spend the most… these same cities spend the most time sitting in traffic, is another way of looking at it, too.

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Jeremy Randall: Where, in Texas, Alright, so many crashes, because they’re related to speed. The speeds are so much higher.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? There’s all kinds of things going on here. And so when you look at the data, it’s an interesting scenario where you don’t have the most crashes per, you know, per mile driven, or, you know, the same sort of average when it comes to how many, how, you know, how many years before you’re likely to get into a crash, but the death rate’s extreme.

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Jeremy Randall: You know, we’re looking at, out of around 40,000 deaths, you’re looking at 10% of them, just in your state alone.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? And so, I know you guys are potentially from all over the country, but it’s interesting to look at what are the problems, and then how do we address those issues.

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Jeremy Randall: So, here you could say, in Texas, it’s speed, right? I mean, we’re probably going too fast, that’s a huge major contributor to fatalities overall, and certainly to crashes in general. And in Massachusetts, are we paying attention? Are we staying engaged when the traffic’s going so slow? Obviously not.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? And are we, you know, there’s obviously a lot of other problems we could dive into there, too. But it’s important to look at what the different problems are in your area, or specific to your company. What kind of crashes are your drivers getting into? Are they in… are they, you know…

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Jeremy Randall: at a loading or unloading zone, where they’re hitting other trucks, and they need, you know, tight space maneuvering, understanding mirror use things. You know, what is it exactly that’s causing the crashes? And then really try to define and create training for those goals, or to correct those goals.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright, here’s a big one. This is more about what we would teach to drivers. ABS braking. I can’t believe how many experienced drivers, and commercial drivers, CDL drivers in some cases, don’t actually know what ABS stands for.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? So this is an anti-lock braking system. It’s not automatic braking, it’s not assisted braking, it’s an anti-locking system for your brakes. So I don’t want to go too far into this, again, I’m not, you know, talking to the actual drivers here, but understanding how this system works and feeling comfortable and confident with utilizing it when it’s needed is extremely important.

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Jeremy Randall: to your drivers.

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Jeremy Randall: If there’s an emergency, reacting with aggressive braking.

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Jeremy Randall: is generally the right response. I’m not gonna say, you know, overall, always, depends on, obviously, a number of different variables, but something happens right in front of your vehicle and you don’t want to hit it. Reacting with an ABS braking system, whether it’s hydraulic or pneumatic, is extremely important.

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Jeremy Randall: So, its biggest benefit, by far, is the fact that you can still steer.

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Jeremy Randall: So, I’m assuming that there are at least some people on this call.

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Jeremy Randall: with a bit of driving experience, and maybe your first vehicles that you were driving didn’t have ABS brakes. Certainly, my first 4 cars didn’t have ABS brakes at all.

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Jeremy Randall: And so we used to have to choose between breaking.

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Jeremy Randall: or steering to avoid something. But if we combine them in any sort of aggressive way, we were almost certainly going to be, losing control and creating a more difficult or more dangerous scenario and situation. So the biggest benefit of ABS brakes, right, it’s an anti-lock braking system. It prevents the wheels from locking until the car fully stops, which means if the wheels

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Jeremy Randall: are still rotating. You still are maintaining grip and traction on the road, allowing you to stop at a fairly short distance, but it also means you have that steering control as well.

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Jeremy Randall: So, being able to combine these is a huge, major benefit.

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Jeremy Randall: I would consider the driver to be the best safety feature any vehicle has, then the seatbelt, because it’s allowing them to use that, those controls, and then it’s the ABS brakes. So, making sure that they’re fully functioning properly, that they’re being maintained properly, that our drivers know how to use them and feel comfortable and confident with using them.

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Jeremy Randall: is all extremely important. You know, in doing it, I think, is, an extremely beneficial…

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Jeremy Randall: way of learning it. Now, I come from a world of hands-on training, right? Everything we do is hands-on, but we need to understand, you know, what things are gonna feel like, what’s gonna sound like, what sort of reaction you’re gonna get, and that generally speaking, you’re not hurting the vehicle, you’re not damaging it at all.

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Jeremy Randall: you are wearing down wearable parts, but in a way that they’re meant to be worn down. So, again, we’re not going to be doing any damage to the vehicle there.

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Jeremy Randall: It really should be considered easy to learn.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? How do you hit the brake pedal in an emergency with ABS brakes if your goal is to stop the vehicle in the shortest possible distance?

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Jeremy Randall: destroy that brake pedal. Hit it as hard, as fast as you possibly can, leave it all the way down, ignore the feedback. Or actually, this says overcoming feedback. I’m gonna say lean into the feedback.

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Jeremy Randall: The obnoxious and horrible sounds and feedback that some of our commercial vehicles can provide when we’re using ABS brakes can be quite intimidating, especially when a driver doesn’t know what it is, but we should look at it in a different way.

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Jeremy Randall: as long as we’re hearing that feedback from the vehicle, the pedal’s vibrating and pulsing, steering wheel shaking in our hands, we hear that noxious grinding sound, or air ABS sound, which can be a little bit different,

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Jeremy Randall: It means it’s working right. It means the vehicle’s gonna be able to stop in the shortest distance possible, and it means that we still have potential steering control over that vehicle if we need it.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright? So it’s important to think about.

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Jeremy Randall: Transfer of weight’s just kind of on here at this point, because obviously this is an extremely important thing, depending on, on, well, you know what, overall, doesn’t matter what we’re driving, but can be more important, let’s say we’re driving a tanker truck, how important that weight transfer and how that, load can actually change and move.

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Jeremy Randall: And then sort of hit the front of the truck and push it forward. You know, we need to understand how weight’s gonna shift.

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Jeremy Randall: The way we should be hoping our drivers drive

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Jeremy Randall: you know, when there’s not an emergency, should sort of be, only what you need and not more mindset whenever possible. Meaning, ask for the least amount.

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Jeremy Randall: accelerate, you know, lightly, brake lightly, steer lightly, because you’re looking further ahead, you’re thinking further ahead, you’re driving at appropriate speed. When that’s the overall goal, you don’t get a ton of weight transfer occurring.

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Jeremy Randall: And so, if that’s the way your drivers drive every single day, great. It means they have the most spare control, it means, again, they’re not asking that much of the vehicle, so there’s more if they need it.

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Jeremy Randall: But when you ask for the extremes in a crash prevention situation, you get the extremes of the weight transfer occurring as well, which can have a major impact on the handling of the vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: So if I ABS brake, and I ask for the vehicle to stop in the shortest distance it can, obviously the weight of the vehicle’s gonna wanna try to keep going. We’re going to put a ton of weight over the nose of the vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: The nose of the vehicle, the front wheels of the vehicle, always has the largest brakes on any car, because that’s… or vehicle in general, because it’s always going to transfer forward, they’ve engineered it that way. So it’s not a bad place to have the weight if it needs to be somewhere.

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Jeremy Randall: If you think about it, even sort of accelerating aggressively, right, takes the weight off the nose, the car’s not going to steer as well in a situation like that. And if you just ask for steering alone, we let all the weight go to the side, that can be the most negative of any of these scenarios and situations where, obviously, in a lot of our commercial vehicles, they may roll over. But even something lower to the ground.

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Jeremy Randall: we could be transferring enough weight where the tires could lose grip, and we could either spin around, or the car could push, right? Understeer or oversteer. So understanding this stuff’s important.

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Jeremy Randall: Obviously, manual transmissions, this is important, just keeping in mind 2 feet in in this emergency scenario. Right, take the pressure off of the transmission by putting the clutch all the way in when you hit that brake pedal as hard as you can. You can always let the clutch back out, put it in the proper gear, get out of there if you need to, but you don’t want to let the vehicle stall and potentially lose important

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Jeremy Randall: functions of the vehicle without it running, like ABS, or, you know, just power braking in general, depending on the vehicle.

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Bill Dorfner: Jeremy, while we’re talking about ABS.

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Jeremy Randall: Yes!

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Bill Dorfner: I just want to kind of bring something up, because I know that, you have a wide variety of students there at In Control, from

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Bill Dorfner: Very, very experienced drivers, folks that are there from commercial classes, as well as brand new drivers with their learner’s permits.

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Bill Dorfner: And you get a chance to see, you know, all different ages in these cars, and you’re testing these cars out on your range, you know, at, what, 60, 65 miles an hour, slamming on the brakes. Have you noticed a difference in, like, the different age groups and stuff, and how they handle ABS and their familiarity with it?

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Jeremy Randall: Yeah, so a new driver usually has no idea what it stands for, no idea what it is, and have never used it before, but oddly, at least in a training environment.

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Jeremy Randall: That means, like, actually doing it and getting comfortable with it is easier.

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Jeremy Randall: They’re blank slates

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Jeremy Randall: Right? So, I have them drive down the course, and I say, hit the brake as hard as you can. And then they do it. I mean, they’re using their whole body, you can see them, you know, slamming on the brake pedal, and they’re like, is that okay? I’m like, yeah, that was great, that’s perfect, that’s all you need to be able to do. And they get really comfortable and confident with it really quickly.

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Jeremy Randall: Then, I’m training a, you know, potentially a CDL driver that’s been operating vehicles for, you know, longer than I’ve even been alive.

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Jeremy Randall: And… but they’re not as familiar with that system, right? They’ve used it before, potentially, but they don’t like it, right? And sometimes I even get arguments, I can do it better. I wish it didn’t have it, I’d be doing a better job. You’re not going to do better than a modern ABS system, whether it’s air or hydraulic. It’s making hundreds of refined adjustments per second, independently of every single wheel in the vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: And so, we just need to make sure we’re comfortable and confident with using it. And you usually get that experienced driver, first couple runs, they hit the brake pedal, sort of like with a medium amount of pressure. And they’re like, was that alright? I was like, no, I want you to do it as hard as you possibly can. Because the idea would be.

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Jeremy Randall: the system will adjust to the conditions, right? The system will adjust. If it’s raining, if there’s sand on the road, if it’s dry, you know, whatever it is, right? The system will make very fine adjustments very, very quickly, so as long as you hit the brake pedal as hard as you can, each time.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? It’s going to react and get you stopped in the shortest possible distance. So, they have a lot of… they have a hard time, adjusting or… or understanding

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Jeremy Randall: the system, because it feels wrong, it sounds wrong, it’s not the way it used to work. And so even though they’ve been driving vehicles like this for a long time, they often don’t have the real-world experience of actually operating it and feeling it, especially in a safe environment, to get more comfortable with it. And that can be a big problem. So that’s a good question, Bill. I mean, it’s interesting, but…

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Jeremy Randall: You know, being a new driver has its advantages, where you’re a blank slate.

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Jeremy Randall: Where experienced drivers come with a lot of baggage, and sometimes not…

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Jeremy Randall: not in a positive way, right? They have a lot of bad habits in some cases, or just prior knowledge standing in the way of how the new technology works, and hard to even call ABS a new technology at this point, but yeah, I think that’s important to sort of distinguish, for sure.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah, and I think that’s important to point out, because, you know, we’ve got clients from, you know, all over, as far as, like, you know, wheels-based clients. Yes, trucking’s a big thing, school buses, but, you know, also smaller vehicles, you know, box trucks, and even fleets with, you know, you know, work vans.

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Jeremy Randall: Keep chill.

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Bill Dorfner: trucks, just driving a car. If you’re at a business where you’re issuing vehicles to, you know, employees of any kind.

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Bill Dorfner: Yes, they may have had their driver’s license for many years, but technology has changed. They might not actually be driving. You, actually, if you’re on this right now, you might not actually be driving your vehicle the way it’s meant to be driven because of the new technologies that are put in, and ABS is one of those, that’s one of them that, you know, I know the first time I felt it.

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Bill Dorfner: I was in a rental car, I actually took the rental car back and said, hey, the brakes aren’t working right on this thing, because I wasn’t familiar with it at the time. So, just wanted to make sure I pointed that out.

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Jeremy Randall: A couple years back, we were training a complete police department in a good-sized city, you know, top 10 city in Mass, and we had maybe half the department. It was like, you have no idea how many times I’ve sent my cruiser in for service when I felt that grinding and that pulsating.

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Jeremy Randall: And it’s like, man, just think about the dollar values that cost that, in this case, this department. But were they utilizing it properly? Or each time they felt it and thought that it was wrong, were they releasing brake pressure? And then how many crashes resulted as a, you know, an end result of that?

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Jeremy Randall: Yeah, I mean, regardless of the vehicle size, you know, ABS brakes are going to be extremely important, from 18-wheelers all the way down to, you know, your small sedans.

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Jeremy Randall: Understanding how they work and how to utilize them. And that’s a great point in just saying, hey, they’re an experienced driver, they have a clean driving record, they must be good to go. No.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Not when… not when the… you know, driving commercially, you’re so much more time on the road, often you’re in heavier and higher vehicles, the risks are higher. The risk to the organization can be extreme. I mean, think about what one crash could cost an organization. And that’s actually a good, you know, think about you guys as all safety managers, think about your independent companies right now.

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Jeremy Randall: Could one crash… One… one bad, you know, mistake by one employee puts you out of business.

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Jeremy Randall: Right, how many millions of dollars could one crash cost you, technically?

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Jeremy Randall: Especially if it was just, they didn’t check their vehicle properly beforehand, they weren’t doing their logs properly, they were excessively speeding in a bad condition, they took a turn to… you know, they killed a kid walking their dog on the side of the road. Like, you know, could that put you out of business? And never mind the fact that, obviously, a life would be lost at that point, all kinds of negatives.

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Jeremy Randall: But just from… even from a dollars and cents standpoint, which is a cold way of looking at it.

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Jeremy Randall: But sometimes that’s what upper management’s gonna look at. Like, from a dollars and cents standpoint, does it make sense to invest in driver training?

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Jeremy Randall: Of course it does. It can only be a positive. Regardless of how much money you put into it, it should reduce crashes on the other side, and reduce exposure on the other side so significantly, it should always be worthwhile.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright, so to sort of keep moving here, and I’ll try to pick up the pace a little bit, I could talk all day to you guys. Total stopping distance. Realize that it’s not just the distance of the vehicle, right, the driver has to perceive.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? So it means they have to be looking in the right place for the right reason, and have their brain engaged in what’s going on. So we’ll quickly touch on distracted driving in a little while.

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Jeremy Randall: But that’s part of that persistent, perception, excuse me, distance, or time, perception, you know, reaction time.

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Jeremy Randall: Reaction distance, so them actually physically going, oh man, I gotta do this, and then doing it, right? The physical action of getting to that brake pedal. And then the braking distance itself. All of that together equals your stopping distance, and sometimes we can forget that. Go like, oh, the vehicle can stop in this distance. Well, it makes a difference.

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Jeremy Randall: Right. Alright, so skipping over this, we already sort of touched on this. How many feet occur, you know, before we really recognize and understand the situation? The reaction time, you know, actually moving your body.

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Jeremy Randall: Right, has a big impact. How much experience, how much, what’s the age of the driver? Right, sometimes somebody older, well, they’re gonna react a little bit slower, for a number of different reasons.

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Jeremy Randall: And the braking distance overall.

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Jeremy Randall: So, you know, looking at this, how speed impacts this is extremely important to understand.

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Jeremy Randall: We have a lot of people out there that assume the relationship between speed and your ability to stop is linear.

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Jeremy Randall: And so we have following distances, like, I was taught in driver’s ed, one car length per 10 miles an hour. Unfortunately, that’s a linear relationship. At 10 miles an hour, 10 feet, at 20 miles an hour, 20 feet, it would go up by that same sort of thing, that’s a linear relationship. But if you look at these distances here, these are growing much more exponentially than they are in sort of a linear way.

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Jeremy Randall: And so, it’s really that reaction time, that, you know, actual car braking distance, and then here, we’re just listing as semis, as I know some of you guys are in much larger vehicles. Obviously, those are going to take significantly longer overall.

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Jeremy Randall: But just to understand that in some cases, it’s getting, you know, here at 65 in the semi versus, the car, we’re looking at, like, double, which is a big deal.

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Jeremy Randall: Right?

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Jeremy Randall: And as we, you know, looking at not quite double from 55 to 65, but we’re talking 10 miles an hour faster.

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Jeremy Randall: and a hundred…

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Jeremy Randall: 180-something feet, my very, very quick math. 175 feet of my very quick math is right, which I don’t think it is. But a lot longer to stop, anyway.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Again, doubling the weight can double your stopping distance. Doubling your speed quadruples your stopping distance. We’re gonna keep coming back to, yeah, you gotta carry a heavy load from time to time. Yeah, you do. It’s part of the job, right? And so you gotta adjust to the vehicle and any changes that are being made to the vehicle, certainly.

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Jeremy Randall: But doubling your speed, right? Speed is something we don’t quite understand sometimes, how fine of a line there is between having control and losing control.

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Jeremy Randall: So, again, at In Control, we’re going to show you this somewhat hands-on. So, we do a slalom course. Again, you’re gonna be weaving back and forth between cones, and just one of our Honda Accords, alright? And just about everybody, as long as the conditions allow for it, you know, we set a speed limit of 35 miles an hour.

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Jeremy Randall: And just about every licensed driver can get to 35 miles an hour. Sometimes our kids that are still on permits can’t quite get there, and we have a discussion about that with them, right? But our experienced drivers all can sort of get to 35. Guess how many of the drivers have control when they go over 35?

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Jeremy Randall: Zero.

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Jeremy Randall: Because they’re beyond the limit of the vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: And so, understanding that, understanding that what being a good driver is, is always being within the limits. The limit of themselves, and that’s how we talk about with the kids on their permits, like, hey, their skill set’s just not there yet. In a 35 zone, you should be going slower, because you don’t have control up to even 35 there.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s limited by that.

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Jeremy Randall: Limits of the vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? So in this case, you know, talking about a… what’s the vehicle weigh, how tall is it, how… what sort of center of gravity does it have, what unique aspects are true in this vehicle, and how do I adjust to them? And then the vehicle… then the,

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Jeremy Randall: limit of the condition, or the road condition overall. And that can include not only is it raining, is it snowing, is it dry, is it hot, you know, what is it like? But also, what’s going on? Where are you? Are you in the middle of the highway in the center of Texas, traveling across the state, or are you in Houston? Are you in Boston? Like, where are you, and what does the situation look like? How do you adjust your speed off all of those?

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Jeremy Randall: If you’re ever higher than the lowest one, you’re beyond the limit of control of that scenario and situation. So understanding that, that 36, 37 in the Honda Accord in our course is too fast for the car.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Sometimes if it’s raining, it might be 28. Well, then it’s too fast for the condition. And then again, when it comes to that newer driver, younger driver, or somebody, maybe sometimes they’re older. That could be the limiting factor as well. So, kind of looking at all those different, areas.

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Jeremy Randall: Now, I’m gonna go through this pretty quickly. I know you guys are driving all sorts of different things, but properly securing loads, now this, obviously, being a semi, right? But it could also be…

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Jeremy Randall: your plumbing truck, your sprinter van, your, you know, transit van. Is everything in that vehicle held down appropriately?

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Are you safe in that way? Is a big factor, because if I’m gonna hit the brakes hard, and I’ve got all my paperwork on my passenger seat, and it starts to go flying, we have this weird human instinct to protect that stuff. And all of a sudden, it leaves us, you know, open to, you know, creating a higher level crash that doesn’t need to be there.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright, so, never exceeding the vehicle’s tongue limit when it’s,

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Jeremy Randall: when you’re towing, you know, InControl does trailer training in general, like a soup-to-nuts thing, where somebody that’s never driven before with a truck and trailer gets to learn all the basics, but also the person with the CDL gets a reminder, and then they’re usually very good at the driving portion, as they do it for a living, but sometimes they’re not aware of some of the…

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Jeremy Randall: the safety conversations and talks, and they’re like, I can’t believe I never knew that before.

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Jeremy Randall: Or understanding that the, with the same mindset that we just touched on, with driving within the limits, you can only ever tow with the lowest rated component in a system.

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Jeremy Randall: And so making sure that somebody’s going through, if you’re somebody who tows all the time, and making sure, like, what is the lowest rated component? Oh my god, I can’t believe we replaced this… this trailer ball last year and didn’t even look at the fact that it’s, you know, 3,000 below

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Jeremy Randall: what we’re towing with. It’s like, yikes, this is a big problem. So, again, looking at things this way. I think I’m probably gonna skip this. This is kind of an… you know what? I’m just gonna show, I’m just gonna let it show. Hopefully it’s on.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? This is where the weight is put properly in the trailer, 60-40 front to back, and then changing it 60-40 to the rear.

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Jeremy Randall: Just a little out of control how quickly things go along.

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Jeremy Randall: Right, so sort of interesting to see, just understanding how important load management actually is, especially when you talk about towing.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Huge, huge change there. Just a small bump in the road can cause a vehicle to go nuts, to go crazy.

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Bill Dorfner: And that’s a great video to actually show, too, because that’s something to talk about, whether you’re just, you know, a smaller fleet, and you never tow anything, or if you’re a commercial fleet and you’ve got 18-wheelers going down the road, just being aware

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Bill Dorfner: of how many people are out there, whether it’s a car pulling a trailer, these folks who are pulling, you know, 32-foot gooseneck RVs around that have had no training whatsoever, you want to be extra aware, and make sure that your drivers are being extra aware of being around

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Bill Dorfner: Those folks as well, because things can go horribly wrong very quickly with an inexperienced driver pulling a trailer.

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Jeremy Randall: So, I was at, Thompson Speedway for New England Region SCCA Championship Weekend. Alright, now, I wasn’t driving at this event, but, you know, I showed up a bit early, and just watching all the trucks and trailers pull in. I mean, everybody’s got a trailer, obviously, you’re not driving your race cars to the track.

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Jeremy Randall: And just trying to watch them back into spaces and, you know, cutting corners, and somebody, oh, stop, stop, stop, stop, right?

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Jeremy Randall: But that means these vehicles are all out there on the road with your, employees.

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Jeremy Randall: And so being aware of what’s around you as well, and maybe you see that trailer in front of you hit that bump and start to sway, what do you do? How do you react to it? So being aware of what’s around you all the time, and understanding that, here’s an interesting stat. Two-thirds of drivers in 2025 took no formal education around driving.

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Jeremy Randall: two-thirds of drivers last year, which means they don’t actually know… they were never fully taught what a stop sign means. Hopefully, they know what it means, right? But right on red, I have students tell me that they have the right of way on Right on Red.

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Jeremy Randall: I… where they heard that, I have no idea, they might have just made it up, right? But the idea… this is crazy stuff, right? Doing ambulance classes all the time. We’re training first responders constantly.

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Jeremy Randall: And having them say, I don’t think people know they’re supposed to move anymore.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Like, that’s ridiculous. An ambulance is coming, and people are just sitting on the road going, I’m in front of you, I get to go first. Like, that’s crazy. So just, again, keeping in mind what your drivers have to deal with on a daily basis.

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Jeremy Randall: And just think about, on your drive to work today, how many bad things did you see? Well, if they’re out there all day, every day, driving, the likelihood of them crashing is so high, they need to be so much better than everybody else.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? And it’s kind of a different mindset, and you know, getting that support from the top means you can get rid of an employee who, you know, with support, who just isn’t… refuses to do it safely.

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Jeremy Randall: And I know how hard it is to find employees, believe me, right? But you need to find good employees, because otherwise it can put your business at a huge, huge, huge risk, and obviously you at a huge risk in many cases.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright, adjusting to the vehicles. I’m gonna start going faster, because as I told Bill before this started today, I could talk to you guys all day. He’ll have to cut me off at some point, I’m sure.

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Jeremy Randall: We… our drivers need to change based off of the weight of the vehicle, the center of gravity of the vehicle, right? What type of safety features and standards it actually has, right? So thinking about what are the vehicles that your driver’s driving, what are they designed for?

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Jeremy Randall: So we do a lot of training at, private schools here in the Northeast, teaching the, you know, the math professor

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Jeremy Randall: that now has to drive the track kids to the new meet in a minibus, basically. You know, how can you do it safely when the biggest thing they’ve ever driven is a Honda Civic before?

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Jeremy Randall: And the interesting thing is, you know, talking to them about they are by far the best safety feature that vehicle has, because when that vehicle came off the assembly line, you know, that minibus, it didn’t know whether it was gonna be… it didn’t know it was gonna be a minibus. It didn’t know it was gonna carry kids. It could have been very easily a U-Haul truck.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? It could have been a tow truck, it could have been a plumbing van, it could have been anything, right? And so it’s generally meant to do work, and that majorly changes what the safety features are actually, you know, what actually is designed in the vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: And obviously, it’s gonna affect your handling as well. And so adjusting based on a, you know, we know it weighs more, we know it’s gonna take longer to stop, it’s gonna have less control, we should go slower.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright, it’s got a higher center of gravity, it’s more likely to roll over. Alright, we gotta go slower.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s built to do work, not to keep people safe.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? It’s bigger, it’s heavier, it’s higher, with fewer safety features and standards. We gotta go slower again.

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Jeremy Randall: And then truly understanding all-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, front-wheel drive.

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Jeremy Randall: You know, I don’t know how many of you guys are driving all-wheel drive vehicles for work, but, you know, these are performance advantages, or performance differences, is a better way of saying it, right? So, performance differences overall. All-wheel drive’s better at accelerating. That’s it. It doesn’t give you better grip or traction under braking or steering.

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Jeremy Randall: Only better traction under acceleration.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright, and keep in mind, grip and traction aren’t the same. Grip’s the relationship between the rubber of the road, the rubber and the road, and traction is how you utilize that grip to ask for change. So all-wheel drive, simply meaning all the wheels can get power from the engine, right, pulling and pushing at the same time. You get better acceleration.

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Jeremy Randall: All these vehicles have, four, you know, four wheels on the vehicle, or all the wheels on the vehicle have brakes.

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Jeremy Randall: And just the front two vehicles in… wheels in general are gonna ask for steering, right? So this, this is just a, you know, kind of going back to that slalom real quick, we’ve got this Jeep Liberty from roughly, roughly 2012 here, up on two wheels. Going 35 in our slalom course.

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Jeremy Randall: 35. Now, it’s already above the limit because, again, it’s not a Honda Accord. It’s not a, it should be going slower because it’s a heavier and higher vehicle in general. What happens to that same vehicle at 37?

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Jeremy Randall: Rolls over.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Now, this was a demonstration, it was done sort of on purpose, but the idea was simply that, you know, we have to change the way we drive, even when it’s somewhat of what might people consider a small change, or in some places in the country, this is a small vehicle, right, compared to what the average person’s driving. So just keeping that sort of thing in mind.

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Jeremy Randall: Conditions! Gotta adjust to them. This is not a difficult slide. If you’re somebody who’s, you know, doesn’t operate vehicles where there is snow, and you end up coming up north and there’s snow, the big secret? It’s not a secret at all. Slow down.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s be as smooth as you can, ask the least amount of the vehicle, and that includes reducing speed. Reducing speeds means you’re asking less of the vehicle in general.

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Jeremy Randall: Because you have… the relationship between the rubber and the road has changed. Your grip has changed. So your ability to do… to have traction, or ability to ask for change is reduced, and the only way to make up for that is to… to slow down. Now, if there’s an ice storm, something like that, or there’s a, extremely bad weather.

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Jeremy Randall: Depending where you are in the country, right? We don’t need to drive in those circumstances unless it’s a life or death situation, because that’s what you’re doing by driving in it. It’s becoming life and death all of a sudden. And so it’s sort of thinking through the risk versus reward of different scenarios and situations.

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Jeremy Randall: Right, rules of the road in general. This is sort of a section, and this is a… I apologize for the kind of poor, poor graphic there. But this is stuff I normally… I wish I didn’t have to talk about.

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Jeremy Randall: It shouldn’t be a mystery that we shouldn’t be using our phones while we’re driving.

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Jeremy Randall: But it is extremely, extremely common. If you drove to work today.

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Jeremy Randall: and you just were generally looking around, or let’s say you were a passenger, you were on a bus, you were on transit, something like that, I’m sure you saw multiple people reading emails on their way to work this morning.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s… it really is an epide… an epidemic, excuse me?

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Jeremy Randall: In this country, as a country, we are addicted to our phones.

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Jeremy Randall: And it can be the worst type of distraction, because it includes all three general types, right? The visual, the manual, and the mental or cognitive. Now, just to be clear, the mental or cognitive is actually by far the worst.

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Jeremy Randall: Because, obviously, we should be looking at the road. I think fairly, obviously, we should have our hands on the wheel, we should be ready to react.

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Jeremy Randall: And if you’re not doing either one of those, if you’re not either looking at the road or have your hands on the wheel, it feels uncomfortable, and it should, it’s not safe. But our brain, our bodies sort of tell us it’s not safe, and so we often don’t do that for all that long a period of time.

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Jeremy Randall: Although, I don’t want to get too far into it, but with autopilot features and self-driving situations that are coming up, this is becoming a bigger problem, where we are taking our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel, because we feel like the vehicle’s doing everything for us. It’s not ready.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s not ready. Whether Tesla has flying cars or not, it’s it’s not quite ready yet, and we still have to be ready. We have to have our brain, right, or that cognitive ability fully as part of that system. How many times, just to you guys real quick, how many times have you guys been operating a vehicle and had your brain go somewhere else just for a couple moments?

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Jeremy Randall: You know, here’s what I do, man, here’s what I’d buy if I won the lottery. Or, man, okay, when I go into work, I gotta do this, I gotta do that, I got that… I got that Zoom meeting I gotta take at 10, or whatever time it was for you, right? And all of a sudden, your brain wanders for a moment, you look around, you re-engage in driving, you look around, you go, how the heck did I get here?

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Jeremy Randall: Just think about how dangerous that would be, but how common it is today on our roads, and how that’s gonna happen to your drivers out there as well.

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Bill Dorfner: Jeremy, you’ve got a great exercise in your CP101 class, involving, texting and driving. Can you just kind of explain what you do there real quick to give everybody an idea of the.

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Jeremy Randall: Absolutely. So it’s very early in the training process. They’ve gone outside, and we do a quick, you know, ABS braking drill.

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Jeremy Randall: So, they’re in one of our cars on our closed course, they’re driving down the course, and when a light on the dashboard, so a bright red light comes on in front of them, they’re supposed to react by hitting the brake pedal as hard as they can. So this is part of our ABS braking drill as well.

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Jeremy Randall: So they do that a couple times, they get really good at it, right? And their reaction is immediate, they’re engaged, their eyes are on the road and looking in front of them so they can see the light, their hands are on the wheel, their foot’s over the brake pedal, and they’re mentally, cognitively fully engaged in the scenario and the situation.

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Jeremy Randall: We then say, okay, let’s do the same thing again. So we set up exactly the same way and explain this ahead of time. I’m gonna hand you this small calculator, which could stand in for any sort of cell phone. You can go ahead and hang on to it, alright?

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Jeremy Randall: We’re gonna do the same drill, I’m gonna say go, I’m gonna say coast, and then I’m gonna put the light on again.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? And I want you to, be able to hit the brake pedal as hard as you can. But, I’m gonna ask you a very simple question at this process at some point, and I do want the right answer. I don’t want them just thinking, oh, this is just a… I’m supposed to ignore the distraction. No, no, try to answer it right, but when that light comes on, hit that brake pedal as hard as you can.

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Jeremy Randall: So…

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Jeremy Randall: What’s amazing is how far off people are. Everybody sort of gets like, oh, this’ll be fine. I’ll see the light come on and I’ll be able to respond, because their eyes are down the road. Even if they’re, you know, glancing at the calculator, they’ll see it in their peripheral vision.

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Jeremy Randall: The average, with over 60,000 people that have done this now.

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Jeremy Randall: Is between 2 and 3 seconds off.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Two to three seconds longer to react.

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Jeremy Randall: Versus not having the, you know, versus not having the distraction. We’re going about 50 miles an hour at that point in the drill. Again, completely closed course, abandoned airport, basically.

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Jeremy Randall: And,

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Jeremy Randall: They’re going 50 miles an hour, that’s about 75 feet per second, just for easy math. So we’re looking at 150 to 225 extra feet the average person goes, and nobody gets it right. Nobody gets it perfect. Nobody just reacts right away.

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Jeremy Randall: Because even when they try to fake it, there’s still that… that mental gymnastics their brain is going through between, okay, the light came out, okay, I gotta, oh, oh, okay, you know, I gotta actually respond.

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Jeremy Randall: And which is sort of… you would think it couldn’t be that bad. Oh, it’s very much that bad. And some people are 8-9, we’re slapping the dash, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, we’re running out of room. They’ve already gone through the line of cones in front of us, they’re just, you know, they just keep on going. It affects everybody differently.

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Jeremy Randall: But I’ve had students ask before, especially kids, that could text under their desk at school, and the teacher would never know.

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Jeremy Randall: They don’t have to look at it, but their brain’s not engaged anymore.

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Jeremy Randall: And so, that’s the big difference, right? That’s… the… their eyes didn’t miss the light coming on, their brain just didn’t do anything about it because they were doing something else. Their brain was otherwise engaged. And so it’s not just to avoid distracted driving.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s stay fully engaged in what you’re doing, which needs to be driving that vehicle.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? It shouldn’t be anything else, and not just to say cell phones are the only thing, they are by… not even close, right? They’re just the worst because of how we all have them when we’re all so attached to them, but anything we’re doing other than driving is a huge problem.

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Jeremy Randall: In fact, there’s research that says hot coffee can be the biggest distracted driving risk.

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Jeremy Randall: you know, how many times is your, you know, you pull up, you get a coffee at your drive-thru, is the lead ever on properly? Right? And you go to pick it up, and you squeeze a couple little bit, and it goes… it pops off, and you’re spilling coffee on the highway? Like, yikes! This could obviously be a huge crash scenario or situation for you.

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Jeremy Randall: So just, I’m not saying you couldn’t have any potential risk or any potential distraction. Obviously, that should be the goal.

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Jeremy Randall: But you need to minimize and manage whatever’s left. Something like a cell phone being used as a GPS for a client or a customer, you know, heading to a new customer? Okay, great, better than a set of MapQuest directions or a map across your lap.

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Jeremy Randall: But understanding and utilizing it properly to minimize and manage that risk, it needs to be something that is addressed, that’s discussed all the time. It’s not just, oh yeah, you can use your cell phone for that, just don’t talk on it. Like, alright, well, don’t put it in the cup holder, make sure it’s mounted, make, you know, all that sort of stuff. Making sure that we minimize that risk whenever we can.

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Bill Dorfner: Yeah, those are all great points about the cognitive distractions and everything, you know, and I’ve had the privilege to work with Jeremy up at In Control when I lived in Massachusetts, and you know, during that drill, there’s been some times where students are, you know, you hand them the calculator, and they’re like, oh, this is a cell phone drill, I get it, you know, I always put mine in the glove box, and I’m like, alright, fine, we’ll throw it in the glove box.

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Bill Dorfner: But then asking them to just change the temperature.

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Bill Dorfner: to something else, and you get the exact same results. So, you know, when you’re talking to your drivers about distracted driving, and you have a policy, you know, in your driver manual or handbook, make sure it’s actually about distracted driving, and not just about cell phones, which is what a lot of companies do. It’s all types of distractions, like Jeremy just had.

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Bill Dorfner: You know, on the last slide, it’s…

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Bill Dorfner: pets in the vehicle, it’s books, it’s, you know, reaching for a CB, it’s changing the temperature, everything that takes your eyes and your mind off the road, and it needs to kind of be addressed in your policies.

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Jeremy Randall: Yeah, I’d even go that one step further. I try… I talk about, like, yes, alright, obviously, distracted driving, right?

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Jeremy Randall: But it’s the engagement. Like, driving engaged is a new term I’ve been using more recently, where it’s like, is this guy gonna stop? What’s happening there? Where’d that car that was behind me go? What’s, you know, like, that sort of thing. Driving properly is super tiring. Mentally taxing.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? You guys ever driven in, like, in bad weather before, where you’re just sort of, like, white knuckles the whole time, like, I gotta keep control, I gotta do it, you know? And then that’s the way we’re supposed to be doing it all the time!

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Jeremy Randall: Right? And when we’re doing that, we have a huge ability to see things early, react to things in a smooth way. You know, we have a huge ability to avoid crashes in general. When we’re sort of just driving, you know, just letting our brain wander and doing this, doing that, we’re just at such a high risk, right? So it is so many things that have to be done right, to stay safe.

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Jeremy Randall: Okay, things that I wish I didn’t have to talk about at all, and just a couple key points I want to make sure I point out, because I think it’s something… I think it makes a difference. We, you know, I don’t know how many of your drivers would think… would answer a question like, is it okay to consume alcohol or drugs and drive this vehicle? Like, nobody’s gonna think that that’s okay.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? But understanding that, obviously, anybody with a CDL, it’s zero blood alcohol content that you’re allowed to have when it comes to, you know, alcohol, but that’s really generally true for everybody, not just CDL drivers, because in just about every state in this country, any alcohol in your system can still

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Jeremy Randall: Create a situation in which you become a drunk driver.

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Jeremy Randall: So, in Massachusetts, right, having a blood oil concentration under the legal limit, so it’s, you know.08 is the legal limit, at .04,

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Jeremy Randall: Right? You could still be a drunk driver simply by getting pulled over because you were breaking a law, or you were, you got involved in a small collision, and all of a sudden you blow a .04, and you’re like, whew, okay, alright, I’m not a drunk driver. And then you find yourself in handcuffs, because the alcohol in your system was deemed to have contributed to the crash.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? And so, just understanding that, and that mentality overall, and then obviously creating a zero-tolerance policy for you guys in general.

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Jeremy Randall: you know, and that’s… those should sort of be easy ones. You don’t have to tell your drivers, don’t do heroin and drive, or at least I hope not. I hope that’s not a situation you’re in. Right? Marijuana and driving, depending on, you know, what legalities there are in your state. So again, Massachusetts has a recreational marijuana law here.

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Jeremy Randall: And so, getting people to understand, you can’t drive high, right? You can’t do it. And you get people that say they’re a better driver high, because they go slower. It’s like, no, no, being a better driver means you have better reaction time, finer motor skills, you’re fully engaged in what’s going on. Being high means all of those are worse. Is it different from alcohol? Of course it is, it’s a different drug.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Everything’s different from alcohol, right? But it’s just another different negative.

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Jeremy Randall: And so making sure that the zero-tolerance policies within organizations are put in place and people are well aware of them.

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Jeremy Randall: Now, one that I’d be more worried about, you know, the average commercial driver actually having an issue with would be more like over-the-counter or prescription medications. And I’m not talking about abusing them, obviously that’s not okay, but do any of your, you know, your drivers have allergies?

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Jeremy Randall: Which, you know, require certain times of year to take an allergy medication. Well, what if they change allergy medications and it puts them to sleep?

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Well, there’s… I mean, this can’t be something that happens, so understanding and having that conversation with them at some point, understanding something as simple as, you know, you take a Benadryl, and it makes you fall asleep, or an Allegra, or a Claritin, or whatever, right? Understanding that anything you put in your body could affect your ability to drive safely, and if that’s going to be a negative effect, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

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Jeremy Randall: You know, on that same kind of standpoint, driving tired.

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Jeremy Randall: basically guaranteed that every single one of your drivers has driven tired before. But to what extent?

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Jeremy Randall: And creating a situation where… and to be clear, I’m not saying this should be an excuse for your drivers to be able to call out of work, right? But your drivers have a responsibility to come to work ready to do their job.

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Jeremy Randall: ready to do their job safely. And if they can’t do that, then they should either be sent home, or, you know, be told, you need to take a sick day, you need to whatever, you need to… again, the legalities of that, you guys can deal with in your own home states, but my point is.

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Jeremy Randall: If they’re falling asleep behind the wheel, you don’t want them operating your vehicle. And I’m not saying there can’t or shouldn’t be repercussions for them, you know, calling out of work for something like this, but you don’t want them driving the vehicle in that situation. So, again, we work a lot with first responders, a lot with ambulance companies.

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Jeremy Randall: And they could be on… they don’t have to follow the same rules that normal CDL drivers have. Or when working with DPWs, right, Department of Public Works, like in cities, and there’s a snowstorm up north, if there’s a state of emergency, they’re on until the job is done.

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Jeremy Randall: That’s crazy. So I have some of them telling me, yeah, but I’m for, you know, 48 hours straight operating a plow truck in a blizzard. I’m like, that’s nuts. And the amount of crashes and increase in crashes that happen because of that is extremely high. Meaning, like, the new driver that comes on shift during the same exact time point in the storm, so it’s not just road conditions.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s, you know, the lack of how long have they been on for, the crash rate increases drastically. And so making sure that they’re, getting enough rest, and making sure this is a priority. Like, you know, what they do the night before matters.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? As far as their job the next day. You don’t control their time at night, that’s their time, right? But making sure that they’re ready and prepared to come into work to do a safe job is part of their job responsibility.

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Jeremy Randall: Tailgating! Alright, and I’m not talking, you know, tailgating at the Broncos game, right? It’s this tailgating situation. This is an extremely common type of crash that we need to make sure we address. Having the proper following distance.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? It’s 76% of the time, on-road truck crashes, they include this as a contributing factor, meaning they were too close.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Not enough space between them and the car in front of them.

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Jeremy Randall: It’s the number one crash type overall in this country, number one crash type for new drivers as well.

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Jeremy Randall: So, using time, I talked earlier about how I was taught one car length per 10 miles an hour being a linear relationship.

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Jeremy Randall: Well, using a time-distance equation, and I’m assuming that you’re all somewhat familiar with this, but I’ll just quickly go over it in case you’re not, a time-distance equation is extremely important here. So, alright, 4 seconds, what does that mean? Well, I’m driving down the road in a truck, I got another truck in front of me, I want to pick a stationary object in front of that truck.

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Jeremy Randall: A bridge, a mile marker, a paint mark on the ground, whatever, right? The truck in front of me passes that object, I start counting.

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Jeremy Randall: And I want to use honest time here, you know, 1 Mississippi, 1 1,000, not 1, 2, 3, right? Trying to use that honest time, and then I want to stop counting when I pass the same object.

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Jeremy Randall: Okay, now, here’s, I think, a little bit of a difference where, at least the way I talk about it, versus maybe some presentations I’ve seen before.

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Jeremy Randall: You can’t leave it there, because they’re not going to count every single time there’s a gun in front of them for the rest of their lives.

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Jeremy Randall: But the nice thing is, you don’t… they don’t need to.

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Jeremy Randall: So, if they commit to this.

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Jeremy Randall: And they understand what the time distance that they need is, and they’ve tried it. As humans, we judge time in terms, or distance in terms of time all of the time. We talk about it that way. If I’m gonna reach for something, it’s a time distance equation. If I’m gonna stop at a stop sign and have a nice, smooth, relaxed stop, it’s a time-distance equation. So we know what these spaces and how we… what we have to do actually looks like, given some,

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Jeremy Randall: some experience. So, in other words, you’ve tried this, you try this, you try this at your normal speeds that your operating vehicle’s at, you’re gonna get very good at determining what that distance looks like. Alright, I bet this is about, I don’t know, three and a half seconds? Time it out, but I bet you’re right on the money. Alright, so that changes

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Jeremy Randall: People’s relationship to actually doing this.

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Jeremy Randall: Because if you just leave it at 4 seconds, oh yeah, count. They’re not going to count every single time for the rest of their lives. But what they can do.

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Jeremy Randall: is trust this a bit, understand that it actually works, and then get those time-distance gaps visually, and then follow through on them, and know, yeah, this is probably not safe, okay, this is safe, I know what the time that I actually need is.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Now,

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Jeremy Randall: you know, we’re saying, if you were… so let’s talk about different vehicles for a moment. You know, we saw that graph, heavier vehicles take longer to stop, increased speed.

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Jeremy Randall: You know, doubling the speed,

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Jeremy Randall: Quadruples the stopping distance, that sort of thing.

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Jeremy Randall: As far as the 4 second go, 4 seconds at a low rate of speed is a very small gap, 4 seconds at a high rate of speed is a significantly bigger gap. It has that same relationship, so you don’t need to necessarily adjust

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Jeremy Randall: the 4 seconds at different speeds. More space is always better, don’t get me wrong there, but 4 seconds at 5, you know, 5 miles an hour, 4 seconds at 50 miles an hour, very, very different gaps, and we can leave the appropriate amount of space.

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Jeremy Randall: The big thing I want to make sure we’re accounting for is the different sizes and different weights of vehicles.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright? If our vehicle’s gonna take significantly longer to stop, we wanna leave 4 seconds. If you’re driving something like your fleet is all sedans, it’s all salespeople, it’s all sedans driving from location to location, it can actually come all the way down to 2 at a minimum.

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Jeremy Randall: Alright? But no… not under 2. Anything under 2 is a dangerous scenario and situation. Let me just see if I have the other stuff up here. I don’t, okay. So this presentation specifically is mostly about trucks, so I apologize for that, for anybody driving things smaller. But the reason we can bring it down to 2 seconds, right? 3 seconds isn’t, you know, for normal cars.

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Jeremy Randall: 2 seconds is the minimum, 3 is your goal.

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Jeremy Randall: For larger vehicles, 3 wouldn’t be the… like, something like a box truck, 3 would be the minimum, 4 should be the goal.

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Jeremy Randall: Something like an 18-wheeler, right, that takes a heck of a lot longer to stop just on its own, especially a fully loaded 18-wheeler, right? We’re talking about maybe, you know, 4 seconds at the minimum, more like 5. But think about that for a minute. Is that always possible?

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Jeremy Randall: it’s not, right? I mean, depending… if you want to drive on…

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Jeremy Randall: Sorry, Massachusetts Highway 495, it’s a big, ring road that goes, like, sort of around the whole Boston metro area. The speed limit there is 65. Most people are going 75 up to 80.

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Jeremy Randall: And if you’re driving a big truck like that at, like, let’s say 3 o’clock on a weekday, where it’s not quite rush hour, speeds haven’t dropped, but all the cars have packed on, so it’s gonna be extremely hard to do, and so the point would be, when you can’t leave even your minimum, do absolutely the best you can, stay to the right, and slow down.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? I mean, that’s all sort of all you can do. But having those realistic conversations, giving people advice that isn’t possible.

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Jeremy Randall: isn’t effective either, right? And so making sure that you’re having those, you know, hey, I’m not telling you to speed, but… or I’m, you know, we gotta be on the slower side of traffic. I mean, having the positive message that your drivers can follow versus something that’s impossible is important to sort of distinguish as well.

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Jeremy Randall: So, 1 second per 10 feet of vehicles over 40… I’m sorry, Bill, did you have something?

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Bill Dorfner: Oh, I was just gonna say, you know, and speaking of time, I know we’re coming up on time. Yeah, of course.

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Bill Dorfner: So, I just was wondering if you could just kind of talk a little bit about, you know, the importance, kind of, to kind of wrap this up, you know, the importance of

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Bill Dorfner: actually doing some sort of training, you know, with your drivers, whether it be online, in a classroom, or, you know, hands-on at a place like, you know, in control. I know you work with a lot of commercial fleets, you know, just…

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Bill Dorfner: Bringing all of this stuff awareness, and just the importance of actually going through that, and what results, you know, your clients have seen from doing so.

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Jeremy Randall: Obviously, somebody coming from the, you know, the hands-on training world, I always think hands-on is the best, and it’d be hard to sort of argue that it isn’t.

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Jeremy Randall: Look, we do have people that come from all over the world to do training with us here in the Northeast. It’s not always financially feasible for every organization, but if it’s something you can do, we’d welcome to have you. Alright, I’m sure my information’s out there for you guys. If not, you know, you can get it from Bill.

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Jeremy Randall: or find something as hands-on as possible near you, again, would always be, I think, step one. In the absence of that, or just it isn’t a realistic possibility for your group or your facility.

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Jeremy Randall: Use the resources that are being offered to you. So, I won’t claim to be an expert at what Affinity does, but Bill is. So, if you can find out what resources

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Jeremy Randall: you know, they offer… that are available to you guys at either a no cost or a low cost, or even a high cost. It’s going to reduce crashes, and it’s going to make a difference.

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Jeremy Randall: So, the more you do with your drivers, the less likely they are to crash. The more you take away, excuses, right? You take away their, oh, I didn’t know.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Well, no, you went through the training, you do know, right? And so, holding them accountable is extremely important. And it… I don’t want to say it makes… well, it does make your lives easier.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? Doing a good job as a safety officer, you know, safety manager, a fleet manager, means that you have an easier job from then on. It can be hard to get your employees there, especially if you’re newer, or it doesn’t have a good record right now, but really engaging with that and doing everything you can. Don’t just check boxes for the sake of checking a box.

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Jeremy Randall: You know how hard that makes your life. It seems easy in the short term, right? And I’m not accusing you guys of doing that, I’m just simply saying as, you know, overall, it can be an easy thing to fall into, where upper management said, you gotta do some training with these guys by next week, and you find this thing, and you just do this very simple thing for them.

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Jeremy Randall: Overall, try not to check a box, unless you, you know, don’t… just don’t check a box, right? Just try to get real training that makes a difference, try to go through… try to be part of it as well, so you can know what they’re learning. All that sort of stuff, I think, is really important.

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Jeremy Randall: I’m just gonna go… I’m not gonna talk about my slides, Bill, I’m just gonna kinda go through them, so if anybody wants the information, they’re here. Do you have anything else?

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Bill Dorfner: No, I think you’ve done an outstanding job, and again, you know, I know not everybody can get up to New England to do a course like In Control. If you are up in that area, or if you’re willing to take some folks to that area, I highly recommend it. It’s actually an amazing experience for everybody that takes the course. I want to thank you, Jeremy, you know, bringing awareness, I think, is the biggest thing that we can take from this, and

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Bill Dorfner: regardless of the training mode that you’re using, you know, even in the classroom, when I’ve sat, you know, and watched you present, listened to the students, things like that, there’s always… somebody’s always learning something that they hadn’t thought about, and we also get complacent, regardless of how good of drivers we are.

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Bill Dorfner: So, do some sort of training with your drivers. Yeah, any closing, any closing words you’d like to share with us, Jeremy?

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Jeremy Randall: No, it’s just… do what you can,

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Jeremy Randall: Push the limits of vehicle safety whenever possible.

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Jeremy Randall: Think about the overall picture, right? Put yourself in your driver’s… you know, kind of… put yourself in the driver’s seat, right? Put yourself in their shoes for a moment, and actually think about how hard their job is in this modern world.

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Jeremy Randall: And then, what tools can you provide to them? Right? Just like any good manager, ask them, what would make this safer? How could we make your lives easier? Right? Things like that can go a long ways with trust as well.

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Jeremy Randall: Right? And I know that sometimes it seems like the fleet manager and the, you know, the drivers are at, you know, they’re on opposite sides, and it really isn’t the case at all. It’s you trying to keep them safe, and you try to keep the organization safe, keep people out of crashes, but we have to be able to let them do their job well, too, and how can we mesh all that together?

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Jeremy Randall: It’s not an easy job. I don’t, you know, I don’t, envy you guys in that way. It’s not an easy thing to do to create these safe leads.

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Jeremy Randall: So, you know, use all the tools you have at your disposal to get that done.

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Bill Dorfner: Absolutely. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for taking the time out to talk to us today. It’s good to talk to you again. I miss seeing you guys up there on the track. But, you know, thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We hope this was helpful. It’ll also be posted on our website soon, and until then…

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Bill Dorfner: Be safe. Thank you.

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Jeremy Randall: Thank you, guys.