I had no problem figuring out time of day. If you are frequently driving after 2 AM and don’t work a night shift you are quite possibly driving home from a bar.
Nope. They only want to find excuses to charge more for insurance and/or deny claims. That’s what scares me about these things. Their goal is NOT to save the driver money.
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I think they want to save money, just theirs, not the consumers. If we drive as gently as they want us to, we ar much less likely to be involved in accidents to their way of thinking. If we pay the same premiums or slightly less, they make more money. Maybe we are saying the same thing.
I am going to guess that you are a lot younger than I am.
As an AARP member, I pay $15 for their Safe Driver Course, and then I get a $45 reduction per year–for three years–on my auto insurance rates. I am not a mathematician, but I think that this indicates a very good reduction in my insurance costs vs the cost of that course.
I think we’re describing the two sides of the same coin. 
It’s about money. Theirs. Not ours.
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Re: Sharpness of turns
I’d have thought an insurance company would be more interested what % of the turns are left vs right, rather than how sharp the turn was. Left turns are much more likely to result in an accident affecting the bottom line of the insurance company than right turns. So what’s a good predictor of accidents? Speed, yes. Day vs night driving, yes. Rapid accelerations and decelerations not involving turns, yes. But sharp turns? Not so much.
How much does it cost to insure a car that only turns left?
Have to check all the sponsor stickers,
No left turns at Daytona this weekend!
Can only be purchased w/ a revolving charge account. 
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…and due to the Equifax screw-up, that account is now overdrawn by hackers…
Only for half of all Americans with credit cards.
…after you subtract children, illegal aliens, and people with REALLY bad credit, the total includes the majority of adult US citizens…
I’m with Progressive and they’ve been sending me notices about signing up for Snap Shot. I’ve held off on it simply because I’m not convinced it will help me at all rate-wise.
I’m curious as to how badly a motorist will be punished for things beyond their control. Yesterday on a 5 lane road some fool darted up on my right (outside lane…) and then whipped a left turn in front of me; cutting me off and crossing both the center turn lane and both lane going in the opposite direction.
I had to slam on the brakes and barely had time to hit the horn and give them the one finger salute. So things like this (not the horn and finger…) are logged in an I’m given a lower grade for doing so?
What am I supposed to do: not hit the brakes and smack the fool so as to avoid a panic stop in the database?
Three times in the past year on the barely traveled 2 lane where I live I’ve had to veer for the shoulder due to the female drivers in oncoming vehicles crossing the center line while texting. So I would get hammered for veering instead of maintaining my position and getting involved in a head -on?
In my neck of the woods, almost all of the roads are one lane in each direction, with either no shoulder or a so-called shoulder that is–at most–4 feet wide. When utility trucks have to do repairs to their wires, they are essentially forced to park in such a way that they are obstructing traffic.
My problem–which seems to happen on a very frequent basis–is that a lot of oncoming drivers swerve around those stopped utility trucks w/o first looking to see if there is traffic coming in the other direction. The result is a Kamikaze car coming directly at the opposing traffic.
Because of this ongoing problem, when I see a truck that is stopped on the other side of the road, I slow down in order to be able to avoid a probable near head-on collision with someone swerving around that stopped truck. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to do this, but when confronted with drivers who don’t seem to notice oncoming traffic, it is my best defense against a head-on collision.
And, while I don’t want to stigmatize any one group of people, it seems that ~90% of the time, these people swerving directly into oncoming traffic are elderly women. I live near 4 “Active Adult” communities, and–unfortunately–it seems that their residents are “active” on the roads in the wrong ways.
It’s been my experience that generally when a company is pushing something it is not to the benefit of the purchaser.
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Having points deducted for successfully completing accident avoidance maneuvers sounds like an underhanded scheme for raising premiums.
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I get the idea behind them. If they can monitor our driving, they can give discounts to people who don’t drive like tools, and raise rates on people who do. That’s great, but you just know it was some bean-counting weenie in a back room somewhere that dreamed this up, because as a practical matter it can’t work right.
Absent context, actions can appear to be very different from what they actually are. Did I swerve because I’m drunk, or because I was avoiding the drunk? These dataloggers can’t know, and so what they probably do is build a database of everything you do. If you swerve more than X times in Y miles of driving, you’re flagged as a bad driver. It’s probably also tied into a GPS track so the computer can account for road curves - am I spinning the wheel back and forth because I’ve been drinking or because I’m on Lombard Street:
But that’s problematic for a number of reasons - it can’t know why I’m doing things and so I get penalized even if there’s a perfectly good reason for what I did, and it does know everywhere I go, and when, which means I’ve now got a tracking bug following me all over, and that kind of data is just asking to be sold off to data companies who are building profiles of everyone to use in tailored marketing.
Privacy aside, since we aren’t privy to what metrics they use, and what limits they allow on those metrics, we have no idea what our premiums will look like from cycle to cycle. A 30% discount is stupid if the premiums go up by 100% because of some vague, ill-defined “bad driving habit” their system has decided to accuse us of.
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I don’t know if the main street in Borger, TX is still like Lombard Street in the picture but I would question how that would affect insurance rates. The city put out staggered islands all along the main street.
The idea was to create very slow moving traffic which might cause a certain number of people to stop and go shopping while eyeballing store fronts.
Not only would that show up as constant see-sawing of the steering wheel, there’s also the issue of hitting the brakes frequently as a motorist would round an island only to be confronted with someone backing out of a parking space or crossing the centerline. Or pedestrians stepping out in blind spots.
Plus the insurance company’s idea of hard acceleration and braking is really just normal rush hour here in the Wash. D.C. metro area.
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It’s called “button-hooking,” and in many places, it’s illegal. There is, however, sometimes a legitimate reason to do so if you’re hauling a trailer or you’re turning into a very narrow alley or driveway. If you’re not pulling a trailer, there is no reason to button-hook out of your lane, but you might want to move over to the outer edge of the lane when making a right turn if your vehicle has a long wheel base.
If I’m pulling my utility trailer through a drive-thru, button-hooking helps me keep the trailer tires from riding over the curb or hitting part of the building. If I’m pulling a camper-trailer and turning right onto a narrow two-lane road, button-hooking keeps the trailer from going over the curb.
That being said, there is a right way to button-hook when it’s necessary. You don’t just swing out to the left before making your turn. You turn on your hazard lights and slowly take two lanes as you approach the intersection. As you get up to the intersection, you swing the vehicle over to the left side of the inside lane, using the trailer to block anyone from trying to sneak by on the right. As you make the turn, you steer around the corner as widely as you safely can. If you do it right, the trailer wheels cross the apex of the turn.
Those who can’t make a right turn without running over the curb in a normal vehicle not towing a trailer are simply turning too soon, and button-hooking isn’t the solution.
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