We’ve all seen commercials and ads for discounts available if you allow an auto insurance company to monitor your driving habits. While some of the commercials might be amusing, most show drivers in unrealistic situations but yet, being praised for being a “safe driver”. The most recent is from Allstate where it shows one driver transporting a tall cake in an open air convertible. Slow and steady will get the cake to its destination. However, why would anyone even consider transporting a cake in this style. Forget about the possibility of dozens if not hundreds of bugs getting stuck to the cake during transport. I would be more worried what would happen if an incident forced you into a panic stop. Cake would go everywhere and the driver may be more concerned about the cake than the car (or person) they are about to crash into. Then there is the scene of a mother driving their child to a science fair holding a prop volcano with a liquified goo inside. Again, it’s filled to the brim and what would happen in the event of a panic stop? In both cases, it appears the drivers are being encouraged and rewarded for taking stupid risk.
I’ve personally had devices installed on my cars in an effort to get additional discounts for safe driving. The devices were from Nationwide, Liberty Mutual and Progressive. They have different names for their programs but all essentially monitor the same conditions; number of quick accelerations, number of hard stops, drive distance and time of day of driving. The more incidents of these conditions recorded, the less discount you receive. and in some cases, your insurance rates may actually go up. With all three insurance companies, I was only penalized for “hard stops”. Basically the company is claiming that the driver is not allowing enough time for the vehicle to coast to a stop. But what they call poor driving, I claim that on the contrary, many of these stops should be rewarded for defensive driving or accident avoidance.
My last experience was with Progressive. Using their app, you can see when each incident was recorded. Based on my record keeping, I was “penalized” for stopping to avoid hitting deer, dogs and children that ventured out into the road, or close to crossing the road. I was “penalized’ for braking hard to avoid vehicles that failed to yield the right-of-way or merged into my lane unexpectedly. I am a driver the tries to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front of me. But what do you do when traveling 70 mph on the interstate and an 18 wheeler decides to occupy that space between you and the car in front. You instinctively hit the brakes to avoid a serious incident. On one short drive of four miles to my daughter’s house, I had 5 “hard stops” recorded. One for a deer, one for a lady on a riding lawn mower that turned onto the shoulder in front of me, another for a car that pulled out of a driveway and one for coming to stop at a yellow traffic light rather than run it. The 5th hard stop came when I started to pull out into traffic at a blind intersection and realized another car was coming fast around a blind curve. In all these cases, would the insurance company rather I be involved in an accident rather than avoiding one? You would think so based on their scoring system.
Bottom line is that after using the tracking device for three months, my “scores” resulted in getting a 2% discount on one car and a 4% rate increase on the other. I can confidently say that at least 80% of the hard stops were justified under the definition of defensive driving or accident avoidance. I believe without a doubt, these devices are meant not to encourage safe driving, but instead, justify the insurance company’s reason to deny discounts or raise rates.
