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“Insurers are increasingly using tools like predictive modeling to be able to limit risks and improve underwriting profitability,” said Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, Research Vice President with Gartner. “Using tools to perform real-time data analysis to predict driving risks and accident likelihood will ultimately help insurers meet these business requirements. Used for fleet insurance, this gives insurers the opportunity to distinguish safe drivers from drivers who are simply accident-free, promoting safer driving and accident prevention…”
IVOX’s DriverScore helps companies to reduce insurance costs through the use of a “black box” device embedded within an individual’s vehicle, which gathers ongoing data measuring a driver’s behavior – including acceleration, braking, lane changes and other actions. This data is then analyzed through algorithms to create a risk-adjusted, objective assessment of driver conduct…
DriverScore can be used as – a determinant for driver hiring and compensation.
Golly gee.
Geez, talk about Big Brother…
sounds great! It should reduce premiums for good drivers.
Ya, Like we need this.
George Orwell is weeping once more.
I am wondering what “distinguish safe drivers from drivers who are simply accident-free” means? Isn’t being accident free sufficient from the POV of an insurer? I’ve been “simply accident free” for nearly 50 years, does that mean I might not be a safe driver?
Looks like it’s time to drive someone else’s car and have a little fun! who cares? it’s their insurance that will go up! woohoo!!!
Predictive Driver Risk Management sounds like a good onboard system if it lets you know what the asshole in front of you is going to do.
Still shaking my head over a close call last week. In the right lane at 90kmh at 530AM on hard-pack winter roads and see a Jeep Cherokee pause to merge on the right 100m ahead so I stay in the right lane. (Normally, I’d move to the left lane as a courtesy.) 50m in front of me, he pulls out and obliges me to head hard left for the left lane. Then I realize he’s *heading* for the left lane. Oncoming traffic? An 18-wheeler in the inside lane with a car right beside him. Chicanery. Missed the nose of the Cherokee by centimeters and the grill of the rig by less than 2 meters.
Would a Stability Control system have managed threading that needle? I’ll pass, thanks, on having a computer take over driving for me. I was lucky. Nothing more dangerous on the road than someone who can’t drive in an SUV. Unless it’s a kid in a Neon with a new driver sticker.
Used to think of my Nissan Pathfinder as a “girl’s 4×4” and the poor man’s 4-Runner, but now I love it.
[Duplicate comment. – Deleted. – ed.]
I would never insure myself… 450hp. porsche… “The devil made me do it!”
The devil has a sense of humor though..
I think I would bend the ‘curve’ so to speak…
ha!
“Tick, Tick
Fellow citizens, the truth is that our present can only be as stable as our future.
For too long we have hobbled from decade to decade, generation to generation, and millennium to millennium, myopically adhering to superfluous battles that can never be won. Never once as a species forwarding or embracing an all encompassing path towards a certainly better future.
Our excuses have been many, our reasoning mostly incoherent, and our lack of vision as a species, certainly fatal.
For in the meantime, as each tick of the ages has passed, the critical threats posed and ignored by our species discordance have increased exponentially.
Pandemic famine and disease, massively destructive weapons, fatal atmospheric and climate change, super volcanic eruptions, catastrophic space body impacts, Orwellian societies of unparalleled oppression, and many other global catastrophes too numerous to list here, waiting to befall us at any moment.
In fact, one of the most immediate and ominous threats facing America and much of the world today is the utilization of advanced technologies for the implementation of authoritarian control over societies.
My friends, the truth is that if we do not fight for and secure freedom today, the time will very soon come when it will be almost impossible to do so.
In retrospect, when one soberly considers the critical challenges that we must face together to survive as a species, our differences, at times, can become almost imperceptible.“
-anonymous”
Purely for research purposes, it would be interesting to see what this thing said about my driving habits…
That being said, no insurance company and/or government is going to force me to get one of these things!
#4 One is luck, one is skill. My wife has been accident free for years. Pure luck.
This scares me. You either have to be perfect or you pay out the ass. And even if you are, you’ll still pay out the ass.
I’ll be taking public transportation I see… better paying six bucks every other day for the rest of your life rather than paying 300 dollars every month… and risking an increase in the future.
Owning anything of your own in America is impossible nowadays.
Actually, studies have shown that it’s not speeders that get in the most accidents but it’s people who follow to close. Back-off partner!
#6, Don Coyote, next time move over or slow down. It’s not just a courtesy in most jurisdictions, you are required to make efforts to avoid the traffic coming merging onto the highway. As well, from the perspective of defensive driving, your warning signal was when the merging driver applied the brakes instead of speeding up to merge into a 100M gap… which was initially plenty of room.
#8: We will become a viable species only when we reach the point where we don’t have to fight over issues; we simply do the most sensible thing. And no, we’re not there, not by a long shot. My guess is that we will either foul our habitat to lethal levels, or go out with a bang with unrestricted nuclear warfare. Or both. A shame really, we do have some potential.
As far as this whole driving thing is concerned, private vehicles should be banned, and safe, secure mass transit provided to the people, with little or no charge. The forty thousand or more men, women and children we kill each year on the highways of America would most likely rejoice that the killing highways are no more. Little boys of all ages will just have to find new toys to play with.
And the insurance companies will in time come to view their industry as the credit industy does theirs: No one will have perfect credit/driving records, therefore all will have to pay more in surcharges and fees for poor credit/driving performance.
It’s a shame (but inevitable, I guess) that this is being proposed merely to increase the profits of insurance companies rather than to reduce road deaths.
it’s not big brother. It’s big business and the corporate fascist local despots behind it. Duh!
#4 – Esih
“I am wondering what “distinguish safe drivers from drivers who are simply accident-free” means? Isn’t being accident free sufficient from the POV of an insurer? I’ve been “simply accident free” for nearly 50 years, does that mean I might not me a safe driver?”
That part is specifically intended to make a major profit center out of drivers like myself. I have ~1.2 million miles racked up over 40 years. My per-year average is artificially low, because of 8 years or so of not driving.
Zero accidents and one (1) speeding ticket. So they can’t make any money off me, right? That’s where their self-serving definition of “safe driver” comes in – and consumers like GigG show the poor reasoning that will let them get away with.
It’s as simple as this – I drive fast. Very fast, at times, when conditions permit. I ignore speed limits; well, not entirely – one often has to know what to set the speedometer on to avoid apprehension… but they are defining “safe” as “obeying speed laws” and that does not have a correlation with driving ability or safety. Since bad drivers and good drivers both speed, it is not a proper criterion for whether a driver is competent and safe or not. But not having accidents is proof positive. My car – no matter what the speed – has never collided with another in all those miles – but they can still convince the sheeple that somehow I represent a danger to other drivers, amusingly enough, although many of those other, “safe” drivers HAVE had collisions.
More lawyers and greedheads gaming the system and manipulating public ignorance to make a dishonest buck. Fucking slime.
‘Manipulating’? Sorry – it’s ‘exploiting’. Duh.
Appreciate the fair point on bare roads and in daylight, JimR, but I had traffic immediately behind me in the left lane as well. If I had been the guy wanting to merge, I would have waited for a safe opportunity, given the road conditions–and two lanes of traffic accelerating to highway speed from a traffic light a few hundred meters back.
His choice was to stop, change his mind, and then attempt to get to the inside lane on hard-pack snow and ice. His ‘right to merge’ does not supersede my right to not get rear-ended or forced into a head-on, at least in Canada.
#10 Natefrog – You do realize that if you are driving anything newer than about a 2001 car/truck you already have the computer installed.
So if you are in an accident that you think you may have caused pull the computer out at the scene or beat it into submission with a sledgehammer because the authorities will use it against you.
Now if it’s the other guys fault then point it out to the proper authorities to go screw the other person over.
I doubt if any driver with a year or more driving experience, doesn’t speed sometimes. If I’m on a flat, straight highway cutting through farmland, it’s a sunny day with and there’s no one around but the Three-Headed Cat™ passing me at 175, what does it hurt if I’m doing 110 kmh in an 80?
Long as the Three-Headed Cat™ gets the speeding ticket and road conditions permit, JimR. Far as winter driving goes, always try to remember my dad’s advice and “travel at the speed at which you’d feel comfortable hitting the ditch.”
#20, Don, fair enough. I’m from Canada too. The problem with winter driving here is that everyone drives too fast for the conditions. As you probably know, we has a snowfall of about 15cm or 6 inches. There were 910 accidents in the Toronto area that day, even though the radio and TV stations warned continuously for days beforehand to stay home or drive with extreme caution. Drivers travel too close and drive too fast on city throughways no matter what.
#23, Don, “…travel at the speed at which you’d feel comfortable hitting the ditch.”
That would be 5-10 kmh. 🙂
Regards from Lotusland, JimR. Big debate in BC right now over making winter tires mandatory and getting the rubes with ‘All- Season’ radials–let alone summer tires–off the roads in winter.
One of our favorite winter entertainments is watching the Vancouverites on the evening news sliding like ducks on ice and ready to declare a state of emergency whenever it snows. Work a four-day week myself and drive about 1000km for my ‘commute.’ I keep winter tires with an aggressive tread on year-round and replace them after a year or so. Best solution for the bush and the highway, I’ve found.
Just because you don’t have any accidents on your record doesn’t mean you haven’t left a bunch of accidents in your wake as you change lanes like a maniac on the freeway. I think this system is great, and look forward to my rates dropping.