What Nobody Tells You About Running a Fleet Without Dashcams
A few months back, a fleet manager I was talking to told me something that stuck with me. He said the worst part of his job isn't the accidents themselves — it's the two weeks after, when he's stuck between his driver's version of events, the other party's version, and an insurance adjuster who trusts neither of them.
That's the problem dashcams actually solve. Not the accident. The aftermath.
If you're running any kind of commercial fleet in the US or Canada right now — delivery vans, box trucks, service vehicles, doesn't matter — you've probably already had this conversation with yourself. Do we really need cameras in every vehicle? Isn't that overkill for a fleet our size?
Honestly, a few years ago, maybe. Not anymore.
The insurance industry changed the game
Here's the part a lot of fleet owners miss. This isn't really about catching your drivers doing something wrong. It's about what happens when your driver did absolutely nothing wrong and still gets blamed.
Commercial vehicles are magnets for a certain kind of insurance fraud — brake-checking, staged fender benders, exaggerated injury claims. Insurers know this. That's why more and more of them are quietly rewarding fleets that run dashcams with better premiums, and in some cases, starting to make it close to a requirement for coverage. Nobody's making a big announcement about it, but if you talk to a commercial insurance broker, they'll tell you the direction this is heading.
It protects your drivers more than it watches them
There's a version of this conversation where dashcams sound like surveillance. In practice, it plays out differently. Drivers who've had footage clear them of blame in an accident tend to become the biggest supporters of the system. It stops being "the company is watching me" and starts being "the company has my back if something goes wrong."
That shift matters more than people give it credit for, especially with how hard it already is to hold onto good drivers.
So what actually matters when you're buying these things
If you're sourcing dashcams for a fleet — whether that's ten vehicles or a couple hundred — the spec sheet matters a lot more than the marketing page. A few things worth actually paying attention to:
Dual-channel setups (front and cabin, or front and rear) give you the full picture, not just half of it. Loop recording is standard now, but make sure impact events lock that footage automatically — otherwise you'll lose the one clip that mattered because the camera kept recording over it. Night performance is where a lot of cheaper units fall apart, so it's worth checking WDR quality if your vehicles run early mornings or late shifts. And if you're managing more than a handful of vehicles, GPS tagging on the footage saves a lot of arguments about routes and speed.
The other thing — and this is the one people learn the hard way — is consistency. Buying a mix of camera models across your fleet sounds fine until your drivers all need different training, your support process turns into guesswork, and half your units behave differently in the same weather. Sourcing at scale from one supplier avoids that mess entirely.
Where this fits into CamDashPros
This is actually the exact gap we built CamDashPros around. We work with fleet operators and resellers across the US and Canada, supplying dashcams built for actual commercial use — not just repackaged consumer cameras with a fleet label slapped on them. If you're scaling up and tired of dealing with inconsistent units or unreliable suppliers, it's worth taking a look at camdashpros.com.
At the end of the day, dashcams aren't really about technology. They're about having something solid to stand on the day something goes wrong — because in fleet operations, it's never a question of if, just when.