AI could help fleets shift to preventative road safety
Recent government statistics present a mixed picture of UK road safety, with road deaths falling but the number of people killed or seriously injured continuing to rise.
An estimated 1,556 people lost their lives in road collisions in 2025, a 3% reduction compared with the previous year. However, the number of people killed or seriously injured increased by 4% year on year to 29,911.
The longer-term picture is similarly concerning. While fatalities have gradually declined, the number of people killed or seriously injured has remained close to 30,000 each year over the past five years, suggesting that further action is needed to make significant improvements to road safety.
According to Centrad, which provides AI-powered vehicle CCTV and telematics for commercial fleets, the figures highlight the need for fleet operators to adopt a more preventative approach to collision reduction.
Geoff Cross, Managing Director of Centrad, believes that achieving meaningful improvements in road casualty statistics over the next decade will require greater focus on the human factors behind collisions.
He commented: “Despite investment into infrastructure upgrades, safety initiatives and new policies, the fact that incident numbers remain stagnant shows that there is still work to be done.
“Improving road safety requires more than changes to roads or legislation. It also means addressing the human factors that contribute to collisions.
“People will always be at the centre of road safety, but expecting drivers to make the right decision every second of every journey is unrealistic. As a former fleet operator and driver, human error is an unavoidable part of driving, and always will be, which means the next major improvements need to focus on reducing the risks associated with human behaviour.”
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents states that around 90% of road crashes involve some element of human error, reinforcing the importance of understanding and managing driver behaviour.
Many existing fleet safety processes remain largely reactive. Following a collision, footage is reviewed and action may then be taken through additional driver training, changes to company policies or individual intervention.
Centrad believes artificial intelligence could provide a more proactive approach by identifying patterns of risky behaviour before they result in a collision.
Geoff Cross added: “The real value in the years ahead won’t be the hardware itself. The differentiator will be the software, machine learning and the insights generated from the data.
“AI-connected camera systems are already changing the way fleets approach safety. Rather than capturing footage after an incident, these systems can detect warning signs such as distraction, fatigue, mobile phone use or unsafe manoeuvres as they happen, delivering immediate alerts to drivers and fleet managers to help prevent collisions.
“The real opportunity for AI lies in what it could do next. Future systems could combine driver behaviour, working patterns and circadian rhythms to predict fatigue before it becomes a safety risk, allowing fleets to intervene earlier. AI could also move beyond driver behaviour, with connected cameras identifying risks such as vandalism and anti-social behaviour. The technology will evolve from simply recording incidents to both predicting and preventing them.”
The Government’s Road Safety Strategy, published in January 2026, sets a target to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured on roads in Great Britain by 65% by 2035, using the average number of casualties recorded between 2022 and 2024 as the baseline. A separate target aims to reduce child casualties among under-16s by 70% over the same period.
The latest Government figures show that there were 29,918 people killed or seriously injured on Great Britain’s roads in 2025, compared with a 2022–2024 baseline average of 28,925. This means the number of KSI casualties was actually 3% above the baseline in 2025, underlining the scale of the challenge facing policymakers and road safety organisations.
Centrad believes achieving the 2035 target will require new approaches alongside established measures such as safer infrastructure, driver training, enforcement and legislation.
Geoff Cross concluded: “The percentage drop between 2015 and 2024 currently sits at around 17% so to achieve that goal, there’s a lot of work to be done over the next decade.
“We can’t afford to rely on the same approaches that have yielded limited progress. AI technology, such as intelligent cameras, driver monitoring systems and predictive analytics, provides a real opportunity to unlock a completely new dimension to road safety – which is already in progress.
“As this technology develops and evolves, machine learning will become increasingly capable of identifying patterns across millions of journeys, recognising behaviours and circumstances that may increase the likelihood of an incident. But that won’t translate to AI replacing the need for skilled drivers, effective training or safer infrastructure.
“That will always be crucial to any successful road safety strategy. For years, much of the technology used in fleets has helped us understand what happened after an incident. The real opportunity with AI is to move beyond that and identify the warning signs early enough to prevent the incident happening in the first place.”
For fleet operators, the development of AI-powered cameras, driver monitoring and predictive analytics could therefore represent a significant evolution in fleet safety management.
Rather than relying solely on technology to establish what happened after a collision, increasingly intelligent systems could help identify emerging risks during journeys, giving drivers and fleet managers an opportunity to intervene before an incident occurs.
