Testing Fleet Safety at 100mph: Samsara Driving Experience Day 2026

Samsara’s Connected Operations technology needs to be seen to be believed. So why not try it from the driver's seat of a Mercedes-AMG, as you brake round a corner at 100mph on the site of the world’s first ever motor-racing track? 

In March, we brought a handful of Britain’s top physical operations leaders together for our Driver Experience Day at Mercedes-Benz World in Weybridge, built on what was once the storied Brooklands circuit. This annual event is our chance to show teams what products we’ve been building to push forward driver safety. So naturally, we fit out sports cars with our dual-facing Samsara AI Dash Cams and send guests out onto the track to test their limits. 

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Testing safety tools to the max

Abrupt stops, sharp corners, mobile use at the wheel, zero-to-100 rev ups; if you can think of a driving risk, Samsara technology can detect it. For one day only, supervised by trained professionals, we give our guests carte blanche to drift, and skid, and slam the brakes. The only catch is that our dash cams are recording it all, and issuing live alerts to let you know you’re pushing the limits of safety. 

The strange novelty of burning rubber while a camera unit tries to warn you off it wasn’t lost on our guests.

“I would say the standout moments from the day would be being told off when I'm accelerating a little bit too hard, which is very, very easy in these cars, and braking too hard as well”, noted Kevin Fortune, Group Health and Safety Advisor at Ramudden Global.

These real-time alerts make it impossible for any driver to unknowingly break the rules of road safety. But they create a video of each infringement, plus detailed stats on vehicle speed and g-force. These clips and their metadata made for very enjoyable viewing among attendees once they’d disembarked. Congratulations to Patrycja Stepien of AAH Pharmaceuticals Ltd for winning our award for Most Relaxed Drifting! 

From AMG antics to artics: tech that gives hauliers peace of mind 

Of course, driving a supercar on a closed circuit is very different from taking a HGV out on the roads of a major city. Most fleet managers aren’t worried that their drivers

are going to start performing donut manoeuvres on the A20. They’re more concerned about cyclists passing by the left-hand side, or their drivers getting drowsy after a long shift. 

That’s why, away from the high-octane thrills of the racetrack, we wanted to show attendees how Samsara technology works in the vehicles they actually use. Our partners, Ocado, kindly loaned us one of their Mercedes HGVs with an LST trailer, in which we installed our 360° AI Multicam

system.

Guests could hop into the cab for a static demonstration of the difference Samsara technology makes in a real commercial vehicle. As soon as they sat down without a seatbelt, or got their phone out, the system responded with a swift alert. That’s the agile “

active coaching” that attendees like Aaron Powell of Speedy Hire told us they appreciate most about Samsara; “the vehicles doing it straight there and then and coaching drivers as they go along”. 

It’s not just what goes on inside the cab that counts. Whenever anything approaches the lorry, whether it’s a pedestrian, a cyclist or another vehicle, the system identifies exactly what it is, displays it on the inbuilt dashboard screen, and warns the driver with a voice alert. 

On the Driving Experience Day, attendees wasted no time in testing out the system’s sensitivity, darting in and out of the camera’s sensor range while their friends sat up in the cab. We’re pleased to attest that nobody slipped past undetected. 

Winning over your workforce 

All this innovation left a big impression on the operations leaders at our Driving Day Experience. But every fleet manager knows that there’s one stakeholder who matters the most, and that’s the one behind the wheel. 

During the afternoon's fireside chat, Samsara's Senior Customer Advocacy Manager, Lydia Raven, spoke with Kevin Fortune from Ramudden Global and Aaron Powell from Speedy Hire about the realities of gaining driver buy-in. 

Kevin frankly discussed drivers’ initial worries that dash cams are just a “Big Brother” for management to spy on them throughout the day. Their views almost always change once they’ve seen first hand how the technology supports them. Kevin gave us a real example of a crew who were involved in a head-on collision at a roundabout. Thanks to Samsara Dash Cam footage proving they were not at fault, the drivers were totally exonerated from a subsequent complaint. As news spread, the mood around the technology shifted rapidly across the team. Kevin even compared Samsara to a “spotter” at the gym who always has your back. 

Reflecting on his experiences working in the transport industry since he was 15, Aaron described a wholesale evolution in working practices.

“When I started, you had two mirrors, and that was it. Now we’re almost expecting these vehicles - laptops on wheels - to do everything for us”, he noted. 

The danger of all this technology is that it becomes distracting for drivers, who become ‘immune to the noise’ of everything going on around them in the cab. In that sense, poorly-designed digital transformation programmes can actually make life harder for drivers. But Aaron was full of praise for Samsara’s anti-distraction alerts, which make it much less likely that drivers will get too engrossed in touchscreen interfaces to keep their eyes on the road.  

Both managers agreed that “the future of logistics is digital”, including customers’ expectations. The only way to meet demand for rapid-delivery online orders is to shift towards automated planning systems. But this requires a tactful process of culture change that takes your workforce along with you. In Aaron’s words, “if you get the most resistant people on board, half your challenge is done.” 

But as Kevin pointed out, internal champions need incentives too. “The carrot must be greater than or equal to the stick. For instance, fuel is our biggest cost, so if we can save even 1 MPG, it’s a huge amount of money. And those savings help us reward the drivers who produced it”.

Pushing the safety frontier forward

Samsara exists to protect the people who power the world. We’re looking out for the physical operations sector’s vast global workforce, without whom no other industry could function. 

As Rhys-Angus Keir of Lanes Group commented during the Driving Experience Day, “having Samsara in the car is almost similar to having a seatbelt... When you are in a situation where something bad does happen, god forbid, at least you’ll have Samsara to look out for you”. 

When our guests look back on the 2026 Driving Experience Day, the first thing they’ll probably remember is the incomparable experience of sizzling around a racetrack in an AMG. Yet we’re happy that attendees never lost sight of the true value of the technology on show: cast-iron safety and certainty for drivers. 

We look forward to returning to the track with a new set of innovations in 2027. 

Missed the Driving Experience Day but want to see our technology in action? Register for one of our ongoing Fleet Safety webinars to find out more.