What
The setting you are looking at is small, almost buried in a configuration menu, and it quietly decides how much of your team's day gets spent reviewing footage. Set the G-force threshold too low and every pothole, curb hop, and rough loading dock drop produces a clip waiting for review. Set it too high and the collision that matters slides past unnoticed. There is no single magic number that works across a mixed fleet, and anyone who tells you otherwise has probably never managed vans and tractor-trailers at the same time. The work is calibration, not configuration.Start by accepting that a light van and a loaded heavy truck do not experience the same jolt in the same way. A van crossing a broken patch of pavement can register a spike that looks dramatic on a chart, while a fully loaded truck rolling over the same ground barely registers. Meanwhile, a hard lane-change swerve in a heavy vehicle can produce a reading similar to a minor fender bump in a smaller unit. If both vehicle classes share one threshold, you are effectively asking the same question of two very different scales. That mismatch is where alert fatigue quietly begins.So group your vehicles before you touch any values. Classify by weight, body type, and the routes they run. A city van that spends its day in stop-and-go traffic on rough streets is a different animal from a long-haul truck on smooth highways. Once you have those groups, run a pilot with a small number of units in each class. Leave the threshold where it is at first and simply log the events the sensors flag. Then ask your reviewers a straightforward question about each clip: was this a real incident or noise? Their answer is your data. You are not guessing at a number anymore. You are reading the pattern of what your fleet actually does on the roads it actually drives.From there, adjust one group at a time using those review judgments. If reviewers are marking most of a group's clips as noise, raise the threshold for that class. If genuine incidents are slipping through with no clip attached, lower it. Change one variable per group, then wait long enough to collect a fresh sample before you judge the result. Re-verify each time. This is slower than picking a number and moving on, and it needs to be slower, because the consequences of a bad threshold show up weeks later when a claim lands and there is no footage.Once the sensitivity feels right, connect it to your configurable event triggers and alert routing. The threshold defines the severity line. Everything above that line, whether it is harsh braking, a collision impact, or a speeding event, should push a clip with a pre-event buffer straight to the manager who owns that outcome. Everything below it stays stored for later reference without demanding anyone's attention right now. Video telematics best practices come down to this pairing. A tuned threshold without a routing rule still leaves clips piling up in a folder nobody opens, and a routing rule without a sane threshold just sends more noise to the same inbox.There is a point where tuning stops helping, and it is worth recognizing it early. If your alerts arrive late because clips sit on a memory card until someone physically pulls it, no threshold value will fix that. If your platform cannot feed events into your fleet management software integration, or if the review workflow itself has no severity policy, you are past the boundary of what calibration can solve. That is when you look at reworking the data flow or the hardware, not the settings. A well-set threshold also ages. Add new vehicle types, shift route coverage, change your average load profile, and the old numbers may no longer fit. Revisit them when the fleet changes, and treat it as routine maintenance rather than a one-time project.Related FAQs: How do I know if I need a new system or just better devices?