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TomTom Satnavs To Set Insurance Prices
nk497 writes "TomTom has signed a deal with an insurance firm that will see its satnavs used to monitor drivers. Fair Pay Insurance, part of Motaquote, will use monitoring systems built into the TomTom PRO 3100 to watch for sharp braking and badly managed turns, rewarding 'good' drivers with lower premiums and warning less skilled motorists when they aren't driving as they should. 'We've dispensed with generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."
For all those of us who keep saying that this sort of technology will be abused, and all the folks that keep saying it won't - I guess it is our turn to say "I told you so."
My prediction, sales of this SatNav will plummet if people know that they will be monitored constantly.
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And not to mention _speeding_! The Nav knows what's the speed limit at your location an instead of beeping when you overdo it, it will raise your premium each time, perhaps even rat you out to the cops.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/08/tomtom_insurance/
From the article intro:
>The idea has been hovering in the ether for some time, but TomTom is the first satnav firm to sign on the dotted line and bring insurance to drivers through their GPS.
>The Dutch company has joined up with Motaquote insurers to offer UK drivers "Fair Pay" insurance, where customers pay lower premiums because their satnav monitors how they're driving.
Unless this thing has a gyroscope or accelerometers, I don't know how useful the braking and turning data is.
GPSR's really aren't THAT precise for those things.
Now I know someone's about to chime in with that "dopler shift" bullshit, but all consumer-grade GPSR's use position change over time for all movement measurements.
The speed data makes sense, not the rest of it. Maybe establishing driving habits, like too many hours on the road. Or when you drive, and where.... geographic and time data could show them who drives in high-accident areas.
THL phish sticks
If it's watching for badly managed turns does that mean I get deductions from my next bill every time I nail the apex?
All privacy questions aside, are sat nav devices reliable enough for this purpose?
I purchased a TomTom device new within the last year. On complex intersections - and sometimes just on parallel roads - it can "snap" the car back and forth between pieces of roadway on the display. Sometimes it seems to think you're starting a turn you're not actually making and then eventually snaps the car back onto the correct road later. When exiting a parking lot it sometimes isn't certain about which direction you're really moving in until you've drove a little. It has also tried to direct me down a variety of local roads that don't actually exist. I imagine at least some of these issues are somewhat common among sat navs, and this is only part of my anecdotal experience with one device.
The point is, when these things become a significant input into insurance rates, who can actually inspect them and certify them for such purposes?
Observation: Insurance rates are currently set at a level that the market and competitive pressure will bear, without this additional information.
Prediction: Early adopters will see some benefit in lowered insurance costs, but once most people are enrolled, insurance rates will creep back up to previous levels (that being the established level that the market will bear). Insurance companies will create additional rules that will facilitate a greater rate of insurance claim denial based up the new information, and will see greater profits arise due to this. Consumers overall will see no benefit in the long run.
They can ccululate data of everyone they monitor and correlate patterns against claims. They'll soon know what constitutes risky driving far better than anyone's theories.
...as a "discount" for those exhibiting the behavior they want. In fact, they simply raise prices for everyone at such a rate that the discount is in fact the lack of a penalty. Yet, somehow, dressing it up in this way avoids backlash and consumer protection lawsuits, while convincing people to give up their privacy in ways they would have never considered has it not been for the phantom carrot of a "discount".
Before someone says "free market!", keep in mind that nearly every insurance company does this to some extent, usually with no proof of their claims, and insurance is legally required to some extent in most of the country. The free market does not exist, never did, and never will.
Great Intellect...
I work in the business of supporting software for these sorts of devices. Many models do have accelerometers, which isn't too surprising when you realize iPhones and other smartphones have them too. Dedicated plug-in devices (not the Garmins or other Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs)) also have OBD2 data collection which can then be sent back to the data farm of the service for collection and processing. That's all in addition to the usual GPS tracking. Fleets like Verizon and Sears, as well as thousands of Mom and Pop places already use dedicated devices in their vehicles and reports are run against them by their fleet managers and supervisors to derive all sorts of interesting interpretations.
You'd be surprised how much money you can save in gas when you are a big enough fleet and you make sure your drivers simply shut off their vehicles instead of idling them. And certainly, your business can be helped by direct dispatching of vehicles to jobs via two-way communications to these PNDs instead of the old way of assigning trucks to geographic zones. Depending on how you wire things up, you can even tell if your bucket truck is actually using the bucket and when that happened.
And yes, you can determine when drivers do a lot less innocent things like using company vehicles for private jobs, or more directly, actually stealing gas via siphoning by doing mileage comparisons against actual driven mileage.
For individual consumers, insurance companies do things like check how many miles you drive, into what areas that you drive (ie. more or less risky areas), as well as hard breaking if the devices have that ability (and most newer ones do). With OBD2 devices, they might even be able to tell a normal consumer (and their insurance company) more about their car's functioning than they could get short of visiting a mechanic.
Knowing what I know about how these devices can be used, I assure you, whether or not you benefit, the insurance company is always benefiting from this information. It's not always sinister, though. If you really have a low risk commute and you feel that you might be being overcharged, this may well be the way to go, but I wouldn't put this thing in a sports car or any vehicle you like to have a little fun in on a nice empty road.
Most of the time sharp braking is for something which shouldn't be in front of the car
No, sharp braking is what happens when you are yacking on your cellphone or reading a newspaper, and glance up to see that you are about to rear end the car in front of you.
My guess is that frequent sharp braking is strongly correlated with bad driving.
If the insurance company I use announced they'd start doing this, I'd cancel and switch to someone else immediately, and I'd recommend the same to everyone I know.
JUST SAY "NO" TO BEING TRACKED EVERYWHERE YOU DRIVE
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
This is how privacy dies.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm calling bullshit on your police stats, if you even care to provide them. The complete removal of speed limits has no effect on accident rates.
It's not that complicated. Your personal sharp brake count can be compared to the average count of all drivers in the area. Random events happen to everybody, but if it somehow happens to you a lot more, then either you are extraordinarily unlucky, or you're a bad driver. Either way the insurance company would want you to pay more, assuming they can correlate this behavior with actual accident rates.
Whether or not frequent sharp braking correlates to bad driving is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not it correlates to a higher accident rate.
If the driver is bad, they'll brake sharply often. But even if the driver is good, if they are regularly surrounded by bad drivers, they'll probably brake sharply often. And guess what? In both cases they're more likely to be involved in an accident.
Who knew? I think that's amazing.
Insurance is a business and the more they can cut outlays to premiums the more profits they make. I'd rather they more closely aligned risks with claims than they just denied fair claims, which saves mone on the other side. In case I didn't make this clear: I'm OK with insurance companies making money off me, even if they turn a profit because I have low risk. I'm paying over a thousand dollars a month for medical insurance, and using about $500 worth a year for my family - with no pre-existing conditions or reoccurring need for medical care. And to me it's money well spent because in America today you can't get treated if you don't have insurance. Almost everybody gets sick now and then, kids break their arms or legs or whatnot, and to take them to the emergency room without insurance would cost me my house.
Ten of my coworkers and I could pool our contributions together and BUY a doctor and all his gear - and he'd work six days a year, but that's a whole other issue. We're talking about insurance now.
You can't deny that the closer to fact they gauge the risk, the more they diminish the "uncertainty" that motivates the buyer of their product. Defending against the slings and arrows of uncertain fortune is their value-add.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
From police statistics it is proven that people that speed have a higher risk of accidents. It's a simple as that.
Police statistics also show that driving drunk is unsafe. Of course a sober driver driving home a drunk person who is struck while stopped at a light by a sober person who fell asleep is marked as "drinking related" and used to prove drinking kills. "Too slow for conditions" is included in "speed related" so someone driving 10 mph in the fast lane on a highway at night with no lights on is used in the statistics that prove "speed kills."
Generalising: lower speed makes roads safer. Taken to the extreme to make the point: at walking speed not much can happen, and if something happens the damage is minimal.
Drivers driving 15 mph above the limit are safest (proven by those police statistics you like so much). A stopped car can't avoid a moving hazard.
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Driving in a busy city with bad traffic all around can cause frequent sharp braking
And also results in more accidents requiring payout. The "bad driving choice" in this case is where you drive, rather than your actual skill as a driver.
The insurance companies aren't rewarding you for being better than me. They're rewarding you for being less costly too them.
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