Cheap memory cards could cost HGV drivers their licence, industry leader warns!

Fleet Focus, the UK AI camera and telematics supplier, says rising flash memory prices through 2026 are increasing the temptation for suppliers and installers to fit low-endurance consumer SD cards never designed for continuous loop recording.

The failure is rarely visible. A camera can be powered, showing a status light and appearing to record normally while the storage behind it is degrading. The symptoms are gaps in footage, corrupted files that will not play, recording that stalls partway through a journey, or a camera that rejects the card. In most fleets none of it is discovered until there is an incident.

“Operators specify the camera, they specify the platform, they check the mounting position, and then the supplier drops in whatever storage happens to be cheapest,” said Robert Fountain, Managing Director of Fleet Focus. “It is a twenty-five-pound decision sitting underneath a claim worth a quarter of a million and, in the worst cases, a driver’s livelihood.”

The consequences reach beyond insurance. Where a collision causes serious injury or death, the driver faces a police investigation and potentially a prosecution for careless or dangerous driving, with disqualification available to the courts. A driver’s conduct can also be referred to a Traffic Commissioner, who can suspend or revoke vocational entitlement separately from anything a court decides. In those cases the footage is often the only objective account of the seconds before impact, and it could have exonerate the driver as readily as it can implicate.

Fountain says the ratings printed on the card are of limited help. Class 10, U1 and U3 describe data transfer performance, not how well a card survives continuous recording and repeated overwriting, which depends on the NAND flash inside. Retention is a second issue: cameras record in a loop, so an incident from several days earlier may already have been overwritten by the time a claim arrives.

“Memory prices are not something any operator can control,” Fountain said. “Whether the system uses that memory reliably is entirely within their control, and when I speak to fleet managers, most have simply never checked.”

Fleet Focus advises operators to specify endurance rather than speed rating, confirm compatibility with the camera, review the recording configuration, establish how many hours of footage each vehicle is genuinely holding, and test that footage can be retrieved and played.