I would, if it would save me about 30 percent of what I was paying now on two vehicles - and if I couldn’t find a comparable plan with another company that didn’t do this.
My online use is being tracked, every time I use a discount card at the grocery store my buying habits are tracked, there’s voluminous information about me in various government databases…I guess I wouldn’t find it nefarious or intrusive to have a device installed in my car. I’m a prudent driver and don’t have anything to hide, so, meh.
Perhaps they will collect such data, one day, but right now it’s not exactly Big Brother.
The parent of the company I work for has required similar devices in its vehicles for years, has long had restrictions intended to limit late-night driving, and has plenty of data indicating that its crash rates are significantly lower as a result.
I’d need to see more about a mileage-based rate structure before determining whether it would make sense for the of driving I do per year, but otherwise, a big Meh.
Hmm. I’m a fairly conservative driver – around here you sort of have to be. Small towns, bored cops. But even if it weren’t for that I am not exactly an aggressive speed demon. I leave that to the tourists.
My insurance company earned my loyalty years ago anyway. I’m not changing.
^This. It’s the discount card of the insurance industry. Or soon will be, if insurers have their way. Discount cards don’t give discounts; they mark down prices that are inflated and wouldn’t be if not for the cards. Once the penetration of tracking devices is high, the same thing will apply for auto insurance.
I wonder how long it’ll be before someone creates a hack for it. Something that sits between the OBDII port and the tracking tool that cleans up your driving so to speak. I’m not sure what’s possible, I’d have to wonder if there’s some way someone could devise something that could, for example, make your quick braking maneuvers seem less severe or when you go out driving at night perhaps it would make it look like the car was never turned on (though that one would probably mess with the mileage and cause problems).
I thought about that, but the problem I see is that if you’re driving then, it could cause problems at that time…I suppose it’ll depend on how exactly it works. For the first generation tracker it maybe as simple as installing a hack that never allows the car to send the time as PM (or anything between 0000 and 0400). But it would depend on how detailed the info is that it tracks.
There’s all kinds of kinks to work out, but I’m sure they can be figured out eventually.
Also, ISTM a really good tracker would have the ability to know when the airbags have gone off (or an ‘accident button’ that could be pressed) and would then dump the legit logs from the current ride into the tracker at which point the driver could pull it from the car. The insurance company might be confused if you got into an accident at 2:30am even though you weren’t driving until 5:30 and never hit your brakes hard.
My guess is that this is the type of thing that’ll sell on ebay for $50-$150 dollars or so and will be installed by a few teens and the same adults that use cable descramblers or buy sports cars with fake back seats because they get lower insurance rates for it. A thorn in their side, something they’ll try to prevent but probably not put a huge amount of effort into since it’ll end up being easy to catch and in the grand scheme of things not that many people will use it (a hack). I also wouldn’t be surprised if getting caught with out would be grounds for either dropping you or raising your rates (or some sort of fine) OR they made sure it was considered insurance fraud and that they were illegal so they could leave it up to the cops to find them.
Something about this smells a wee bit fishy to me. According to the FAQ if you cancel, your premiums will not go up based on the snapshot data ( I am a wondering how long before that isn’t the case). But what really stuck out to me was this:
So, they are flat out saying that you might not get a discount even if you are a safe driver. Include me out thanks.
I took that to mean that if you’re already at the lowest rates, you probably won’t get any lower. So, for example (and I’m just guessing here), if you’re a 38 year old woman, driving a minivan with 2 kids, no accidents or speeding tickets and you own a home (also insured through them), they probably can’t go any lower to begin with. OTOH, if you’re an 20 year old male, in college with a speeding ticket from when you were 17, you might get a lower rate if you can prove you’re now a good driver.
Also, there are several types of insurance and I always get them confused, but I’m going to guess this only affects the one that has to do with you causing an accident. I’d be surprised if it would lower the rate of, for example, the one that covers you being hit by an uninsured driver or medical expenses following a car accident. It probably also doesn’t affect your rates for theft or vandalism to your car.
And We are very safe drivers, I have not had a ticket for anything in over 20 years, the only accident I have had in the past 20 years is a blizzard knocking a tree down on my car, and my husband got rearended once at a stop sign in 1987, and hit a patch of black ice in 1992 that did some damage to the scout which we actually neither reported nor made a claim for [it only had basic liability so there would have been no pay out for it anyway.]
I’ve been using the Progressive Snapshots on both of my vehicles for several months now. My average discount this far has been about 6% for the daily driver and 14% for our SUV, which we normally only drive on long trips or when we need the cargo capacity.
If anyone wants, I could post screenshots of the monitoring data so you can see exactly what they are looking at.
How is this thing communicating the data back to Progessive? Would I be driving around with a wi-fi or 3/4G device continually broadcasting from my car? Something like that would be easy to start tracking in nefarious ways even if Progessive isn’t the one doing it.
Hard braking log. This works the same as the speed log
So there you have it. Unless Progressive is lying, this is the extent of the data that they collect from the snapshot device. I’m fairly comfortable with it and don’t really see it as an intrusion. However, if they were collecting actual location data, I absolutely would not have chosen to participate. As it stands now, the snapshot device is a fancy accelerometer with a radio and nothing else.
Does it change my driving habits? Maybe for the first few weeks, you consciously drive a bit smoother and try not to drive at odd hours of the night, because you know the device is there and you are trying to get the maximum possible discount. That wears of fairly quickly, and after about a month, you completely forget you even have the things until you accidentally knock it off of your OBDII port (they are not very tightly plugged in) or you get an email from progressive telling your what your latest discount is. If you don’t have the device plugged in, haven’t driven the vehicle in a few weeks or there is something wrong with the device, you will get an email from Progressive asking you to unplug it and plug it in again, and turn the car on for a few minutes so that it can reestablish communications.
More people should be comparing the coverage limits, vehicles and areas. I have no idea what you are paying is a lot or a little? I am in Portland Oregon and I have 2 vehicles full coverage but very low limits. I pay $348 for 6 months and I just signed up with the snapshot program. Here are my limits
it does not sound like you drive very much. So what was their reason for not giving you a full 30% discount on the car that you do not drive that much?
