Grand Island Express Eliminates Catastrophic Settlements and Cuts Rear-End Collisions by 86% with Netradyne

Company Overview

Founded in 1967 and headquartered in Grand Island, Nebraska, Grand Island Express is one of America’s most recognized small refrigerated carriers. As a three-generation family business, the company operates approximately 165 trucks and drivers across more than 38 states in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., specializing in irregular-route, time-sensitive, temperature-controlled transportation.

Grand Island Express has earned recognition as a Top 20 Best Fleet to Drive For for more than ten consecutive years and was inducted into the Best Fleets to Drive for Hall of Fame in 2022.

Challenge

Like many fleets investing in camera-based safety tools, Grand Island Express had already built a coaching program focused on following distance and speed. But as the program matured, its limitations became increasingly clear.

Rear-end collisions remained a persistent issue, with seven incidents over a three-year span and settlements reaching as high as $750,000. Hit-and-run events were also difficult to resolve because low video resolution often made it impossible to clearly identify vehicles or determine fault.

At the same time, the safety team led by Safety Director, Lucas Mowrey, and supported by just one additional team member was stretched thin across a 165-truck operation. The existing system required significant manual review, yet still lacked the full video context needed to confidently coach drivers. Hard braking events, for example, could indicate either unsafe behavior or legitimate road conditions, and the system often could not distinguish between the two.

That ambiguity slowed coaching conversations and created friction with drivers.

“We had the tools to coach, but we were working off speed gauges and hard brake alerts, and I knew from my own time driving that those calls weren’t always accurate. When a driver pushes back, you need to be able to back it up.”
— Lucas Mowrey, Safety Director

Grand Island Express needed a solution that delivered greater clarity, reduced manual workload, and strengthened trust between drivers and the safety team.

Solution

Grand Island Express was introduced to Netradyne through a trusted peer carrier during a benchmarking meeting, and the decision came quickly after a live evaluation. During a head-to-head test, a sideswipe incident occurred on the route. The incumbent system produced unusable footage, while the Netradyne dash camera captured the full sequence in detail, including events visible through the hood mirror on the side of the truck. The footage clearly showed the other vehicle leave the roadway, return, and strike the truck. It immediately exonerated the driver and effectively settled the evaluation.

From the start, Mowrey built the program around a simple principle: Netradyne must work for drivers, not against them. When footage cleared a driver, that outcome was shared openly within the organization. Over time, those moments shifted perception. Drivers began to see the system as protection rather than punishment, and early resistance quickly faded.

With trust established, engagement followed. The GreenZone® Score became the foundation of the safety program, directly tied to driver compensation with incentives of up to five cents more per mile each month for strong performance, with full eligibility at a score of 950. Instead of reacting to every alert, Mowrey shifted the team’s focus to patterns, identifying repeated behaviors such as sustained speeding or following too closely and coaching those drivers directly.

Netradyne’s onboard AI analyzes 100% of drive time, capturing compliant and risky behaviors alike, so coaching is grounded in the full picture rather than isolated triggers. A driver with one missed stop sign out of a hundred compliant ones is a very different coaching conversation than a driver missing them consistently. By surfacing that context and using AI to automatically generate a prioritized list of the drivers who would benefit most from coaching, Netradyne allowed a two-person safety team to focus their time where it mattered most, without having to manually sift through alerts across a 165-truck fleet.

As confidence in the system grew, driver behavior changed as well. Drivers began calling in to contest alerts, reviewing their own footage, and correcting behavior proactively before formal coaching was needed. The combination of clear incentives and high system accuracy created a feedback loop where drivers trusted the data, and that trust drove engagement.

“I’ve tested other providers since we’ve been on Netradyne, just to see what’s out there. I haven’t found anybody that has the AI capabilities Netradyne does when it comes to reading signs accurately. That’s a non-negotiable for us.”
— Lucas Mowrey, Safety Director

Results

Since implementing Netradyne in 2019, Grand Island Express has achieved measurable, sustained improvements across safety and financial performance without increasing headcount or operational complexity.

Key outcomes include:

• Zero catastrophic settlements of $250,000 or above since implementation  
• 86% reduction in rear-end collisions  
• Fleet-wide GreenZone® Score increased from approximately 875 to 994  

Beyond safety improvements, HD video quality has also delivered direct financial impact. In multiple incidents, Grand Island Express has used high-definition footage to identify license plates and company markings on hit-and-run vehicles, enabling successful claims recovery that would otherwise have been written off as total loss.

“What Netradyne does with the GreenZone Score makes it easy to see who needs coaching and when. Coaching on following distance and speed alone has saved us a lot of money.”
— Lucas Mowrey, Safety Director

Next Steps

More than six years after implementation, Grand Island Express continues to deepen its use of the platform. Mowrey and his team rely on Premium Reports and benchmarking tools to track fleet-wide trends and compare performance against peers, consistently outperforming industry averages.

While competing technologies have been evaluated over time, none have matched Netradyne’s AI accuracy in interpreting road signs and driving context, an essential requirement for a fleet operating complex, time-sensitive refrigerated routes across multiple states.

Today, Grand Island Express views its safety program as a long-term competitive advantage. With a 994 GreenZone Score, zero catastrophic settlements in more than six years, and a culture of driver self-coaching, the program is built not just to perform but to sustain.

“We’re still finding new value in the platform. The executive summary, the benchmark dashboard, there’s more there than we’ve fully tapped into yet. We’re not done.”
— Lucas Mowrey, Safety Director