AvatarFleet's Transportation Blog

Alfred E. Neuman & COVID-19

MAD Magazine came out in 1952 and, for the next 57 years, successfully lampooned just about everyone and everything in the world. The magazine’s carto...

Professional Driver Safety is a Way of Life

Brian Fielkow wrote a terrific article on the rising cost of liability insurance and the negative impact it’s having on the trucking industry. Fielkow...

Tax Credit for CDL Training Expenses

Finally, a tax break for the trucking industry! This is big. Unlike the old joke that begins with, “Hi I’m from the government and I’m here to help yo...

AvatarFleet President Scott Featured in FreightWaves Video

Why Should You Care About Driver Retention? | AvatarFleet

Mark your calendars: The OTA Annual Conference, held by the Ohio Trucking Association and the Ohio Association of Movers, is taking place September 16...

How to Influence Your Drivers to Stay

One of our clients was telling us a story that we hear a version of all the time. This particular story was about a top performing driver named Nancy....

Prevent Distracted Driving and Save More Lives

Summer is here and with so much sunshine, driving has suddenly become enjoyable. The grey skies and wintery conditions are gone. Everyone is rolling d...

Why Is Driver Turnover So High?

Follow the Data Last month, I read an interesting article in the NATMI monthly newsletter. It was written back in September 2018 by Stephen V. Burks a...

Truck Driver Shortage Argument R.I.P. | AvatarFleet

Well it’s finally happened. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics just published a lengthy report suggesting that there is no evidence of a driver sh...

Restaurants and Driver Retention

What if you ran your trucking company like a restaurant? What if you treated your drivers like customers? Sound like a strange comparison? Maybe, but ...

Truck Drivers Stop The Insanity! | AvatarFleet

I apologize if this title is politically incorrect. However, it comes from none other than Albert Einstein who defined insanity as “doing the same thi...

Safety Leadership: Can Do / Will Do

Safety Leadership: Behaviorism

How to Prevent Accidents at Your Terminal

At AvatarFleet, we love safe drivers. That’s why we always have our ear to the ground when it comes to accident data. It’s also why we hate to see FMC...

Safety Leadership: Management and Safety

Safety Leadership: Norms and Safety

Safety Leadership: Rules and Safety

This is a continuation of our blog series on Safety Leadership. In the last article, we explained Avatar’s five-step risk management model and said mo...

Safety Leadership: The Risk Management Model

This is a continuation of our blog series on Safety Leadership. In the first blog, we defined safety as “Freedom from risk.” And, based on that defini...

Safety Leadership: What We Can Learn From Accidents

Safety Leadership: You Break It, You Buy It

Safety Leadership: Getting Started

For several months my team has been asking me to write an ebook on Safety Leadership. At first, this would seem to be an easy task. After all, we’ve c...

How to Choose a Driver Training Program: Typical Challenges

This article serves as Part 3 of 3 in a series on Choosing a Driver Training Program

How to Choose a Driver Training Program: Desired Outcomes

How to Choose a Driver Training Program: Learning Domains

Creating a Career Path for Drivers: Why It's Important

Distracted Driving - Why I Chose to Die | AvatarFleet

Online Driver Safety Training: What You Need to Know

If you want quality, outcome-based online driver safety training, you need to understand what goes into creating a successful design. It’s all about y...

What is Defensive Driving? And How We Teach It

During the past 27 years we've developed professional driver education and training for dozens of leading transportation companies. Most of the curric...

What is Behind-the-Wheel Training?

The Annual CVSA International Roadcheck: June 5-7, 2018

Bad Bosses Cause Driver Turnover

Being "Better" In Trucking Means Change

Broken Windows and Driver Safety

In 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York City based, in part, on a “get-tough-on-crime” platform. Although he was a controversial characte...

Similarities Between Marriage and Truck Safety | AvatarFleet

Are you married? Odds are, yes. Currently in America, 52 percent of all adults are married. That means at least 121,600,505 of them chose to say “I do...

Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers And Truck Safety

AvatarFleet exists to make the world a safer place. It’s in our DNA. It’s the fire in our belly when we come to work each morning. But what does it me...

Safety Requires Insurance

You will never be 100% safe at your company. It’s a harsh thing to say, but it is a fact of life. Even if you have the best safety team in the world, ...

Keep Your Drivers Without Breaking Routine

Truck driver retention continues to be one of the biggest challenges you face on a day to day basis. If you have read our other blogs on retention, yo...

Trucking Accidents What Are They & How To Prevent Them

There are too many trucking accidents out on the road. According to the most recent data from the FMSCA, there were 97,000 truck/bus injury collisions...

Truck Driver Training

Is truck driver training old school? Is it no longer relevant in 2017? Hardly, but some trucking companies seem to treat it that way. In the never-end...

Truck Driving Is Dangerous, Learn How To Decrease The Risk

The National Safety Council recently issued a report that traffic fatalities were up 9 percent in the first half of last year. The numbers show nearly...

Stopping Driver Turnover During The First Six Months 

Most of the trucking companies we work with have a solid core of veteran drivers who have been with them for years, but almost everyone seems to suffe...

Driver Turnover: Death by a Thousand Cuts 

The trucking industry has struggled with excessive driver turnover for years and has made very little progress solving the problem, but everyone is lo...

Driver Retention and Communication 

Excessive driver turnover has nagged the trucking industry for decades. There are several reasons retention proves challenging, but some of these are ...

The High Cost of Driver Turnover

Andy wanted to spend more on driver retention, but first he had to justify the extra spending to his uncle, so he decided to do a study on the high co...

What Is Driver Turnover? And How to Avoid It | AvatarFleet

Our recent webinar with the Ohio Trucking Association discussing driver retention has had a lot of people asking us just what is driver turnover and w...

The Top Ten Reasons Why Drivers Quit and How To Fix It 

The Ohio Trucking Association recently asked us to present our research findings on the Top Ten Reasons Drivers Quit and How to Fix It. Our blog forma...

Improve Truck Driver Recruiting & Retention | AvatarFleet

Truck Driver Retention Strategies   

Andy started in operations his family’s trucking business right out of school, but he was quickly promoted to Director of Recruiting and Retention. Hi...

The Real Job Title of Safety Director: Director of Impossible 

Mark had enjoyed a meteoric career, quickly rising through the ranks of terminal operations. He’d set records for productivity, load average and on-ti...

What To Do About Increasing Truck Driver Turnover Rates 

A recent CCJ Article featuring the results from the MarketPulse Survey confirms what we already know: truck driver turnover rates rank as the industry...

Truck Driver Training Saves Lives 

We’re passionate about driver safety. We live to reduce the frequency of accidents and injuries for our client trucking companies. That’s why we produ...

The Answer to the Driver Problem (Shortage) 

Is it Otto, or Auto?

The Best Time To Prevent a Driving Accident 

Have you ever wondered when is the best time to discuss an accident? I wanted to do just that a number of years ago. I wanted to dig into the details ...

Don't Be A Victim of Safety Fatigue

There is such a thing as "safety fatigue".

Truck Driver Shortage: Fact or Myth?

You’ve seen the headlines since deregulation in 1980 about the truck driver shortage in America: it’s bad and getting worse.

The Safety Professional’s Paradox: Rules Versus Risk 

We have written extensively on safety and risk management, and the impotence of federal regulations on highway safety. You read that right: impotence,...

Reduce New Hire Driver Turnover By Setting Expectations 

I was waiting for a flight at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport the other day, when I decided to take a pre-emptive strike at the restroom. The airport was bu...

How To Increase Driver Pay Without Paying More Cents Per Mile

This blog post was updated on May 26, 2021.

Vetting Professional Drivers in 2016

Here at AvatarFleet, we’ve often wondered how Uber and Lyft were allowed to come into existence. We’re not quite sure how they have thus far escaped t...