Survey finds van drivers optimistic about new technology

A new survey from UK insurance website Gocompare.com Van Insurance asked van drivers what they think of the new technology that might affect their business. Safety was a concern when it came to new technology. Over 50 per cent of respondents said they thought futuristic technology might provide a safety risk. This was of particular concern to drivers in both Belfast and Norwich – with 71 per cent of the respondents in those cities naming it as an issue for them. The next most worrying factor for drivers was
April 20, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
A new survey from UK insurance website 5175 Gocompare.com Van Insurance asked van drivers what they think of the new technology that might affect their business.


Safety was a concern when it came to new technology. Over 50 per cent of respondents said they thought futuristic technology might provide a safety risk. This was of particular concern to drivers in both Belfast and Norwich – with 71 per cent of the respondents in those cities naming it as an issue for them.

The next most worrying factor for drivers was the potential for reliance on technology. Almost half said they thought the ease involved in using future van technology would make workers over-reliant on gadgets over their own skills.

Asked what technology would be the most useful for van drivers, only 1.5 per cent were interested in the ability to run apps in their vans, suggesting digital integration isn’t a priority, while other potential inventions such as automatic parking, active window displays and driverless functionality proved more popular.

While automatic parking was indisputably popular, respondents were more conflicted on driverless cars.

But although it made the top three most popular future technology options among van drivers, it was also in the top three for the technology that they felt would have the most negative impact on their business. One in ten said that future technology might be a problem and of them 58 per cent said that they thought it might make their own skills obsolete.

Overall, optimism towards technology is high, with 82 per cent of respondents being interested in at least one of the forms of technology on offer. Forty per cent felt that their efficiency would be increased by the advances and a further 41 per cent were interested in the improvements to their safety as a result of added resources.

Location Based Systems

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Ability to keep in touch on US buses woos travellers
    February 1, 2012
    David Crawford finds evidence of a new trend in American intercity travel: that better access to data sources on the move is tempting passengers away from air travel and onto surface modes. In the US the ease of use of Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) is successfully wooing long-distance travellers away from airlines and onto surface public transport, according to just-published research. Using data from field observations of 7,028 passengers travelling by bus, air and train in 14 US states and the Distri
    Read More
  • The benefits of combining enforcement and traffic management
    February 27, 2013
    Jason Barnes considers how combining enforcement equipment with other traffic management technologies might benefit our future – if only the will were really in place to do so. During the ITS World Congress in Vienna in October last year, Navtech Radar and Vysion­ics ITS announced a strategic partnership that would combine the expertise of Navtech in millimetre-wave wide-area surveillance technology with Vysionics’ machine vision-based automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) and average speed measurement
    Read More
  • Driverless cars will be on UK roads within four years, says minister
    October 4, 2018
    Fully driverless cars will enter the UK in three to four years, says transport secretary Chris Grayling at the Conservative Party conference in the city of Birmingham. A report by Reuters says Grayling is committed to ending the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2040. “Newer diesel cars today are cleaner than ever before and of course there will be a role for diesel for many years to come as technology evolves,” Grayling adds. However, OpenText has carried out a survey of 2,000 UK consumers,
    Read More
  • In-vehicle warning systems ‘reduce risk of run-off-the-road crashes’
    August 27, 2015
    In-vehicle lane-departure warning systems can help reduce the risk of dangerous run-off-the-road crashes, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Minnesota’s HumanFIRST Laboratory. “Run-off-the-road crashes are a huge concern, especially in rural areas,” says project co-investigator Jennifer Cooper, a HumanFIRST Lab assistant scientist. “Crash statistics tell us they contribute to more than half of all vehicle fatalities nationwide and that these crashes occur most often on two-la
    Read More

Highlighted Content