I have had to change insurance companies because I was sick of our agent never being in the office and when I was able to catch him, he seemed like he really didn’t want to be bkthered with my questions.
I found a new agent with better prices, better attitude and less of a tone taken with me however they want me to get an app on my phone to monitor my driving.
Most days I drive very civil and the agent said when I have times I want to rough ride the caprice or my truck I can disable the app since it only needs 50 trips per 6 months to satisfy it.
I really dont want to get the app but I also drive like a Professional Class A CDL driver that i am most of the time.
Im not out driving around at 3am and generally I don’t brake hard unless someone is riding my tail.
I still don’t understand how it knows if your a passenger or the driver or even what car you are in. The agent couldn’t answer my question but never took a tone with me so it didn’t bother me.
Whats everyones thoughts on these big brother apps?
Everyone that I have heard about just plugs into your ALDL and mainly only picks up how hard you accelerate and brake, does not pick up if speeding or carving out the corners… I have never used one, info is from my son and friends…
I would not use one that required my phone, it is always connected to Car Play… lol
While i have no issue with that app or the similar ones from many competitive insurance companies, i have a problem with you using Allstate. They have a reputation, at least in New Jersey, of not paying claims. I got this from my wife, a retired attorney who handled mostly auto accidents, and other relatives who are attorneys in NJ that also concentrate in auto accident cases.
Allstate used to charge me $700 a month for coverage. Never again! But then again, they were the only one to insure me after a relative of mine caused an accident
My parents have been using All State for years with no issues on claims, I just email them (Larry/staff) when I have a question and it is answered ASAP, I’d rather email so I have prof, but if needed he will call me also, my dealings with them have been great also since I took over everything for my parents… Anyway, never been asked to use an app from them…
I use an ins broker company thingy, and have been for many years, I also email them, I even added my truck by emailing them… never been asked to use any apps or whatnots…
‘So what I found last year is that General Motors was collecting data from people’s cars, including when they drove, how far they drove, when they were hitting the brakes, rapidly accelerating, speeding, all kinds of data that they were able to collect from the car. And they’re collecting it every few seconds. And they had started selling this data to risk profiling companies, including LexisNexis and Verisk, who would then provide it to insurers to help them price, you know, insurance for a given driver of a car. And people who drove General Motors cars had no idea this was happening. They would only find out that their information had been collected when their insurance rates would go up or they get dropped from their insurance. And when they asked why, they were told to order their LexisNexis report, and they would get their LexisNexis report, and it would be more than a hundred pages and every trip they had taken in their car.’
What are high risk night hours? Sleepy people? Too dark with lots of deer? I’d not think night hours are more risky than, say, commuting hours.
I’ve resisted getting one of these for several reasons - summary by @keith above. One is my wife (LOL) who’s a bit wonky on the throttle. On an average day I (minus the wife) should come out ahead. I do precious little to no heavy accel (save being on an entrance ramp) or braking. But there are those times when basic survival on roadways full of fools require various kind of, shall we say, “frowned on by the app” activities.
So I have no experience with them. I’m just afraid
I had an offer for that, many times on the interstate 15mph over is average to keep up with the flow of traffic, Did not think the insurance company would like that so I passed.
My thoughts are that I would NEVER agree to download or use this kind of nonsense. There are many reasons why I am willing to spend huge amounts of time and effort to keep a cheap old car on the road, and protecting my privacy/avoiding unreasonable government overreach are a big part of it. I do NOT want anything in my vehicle collecting and transmitting data to a remote server somewhere. My old cars have no telemetry, no data gathering, no remote communication features, and that’s how it should be.
Unless there’s a huge price discrepancy from one insurance company to the other (which there usually isn’t), I mainly look for how well they pay out on claims. From my experience the cheaper the insurance company is, the more of a hassle it is to get a claim. I had All-State ONCE. I was rearended by guy who also had All-state. It was a major hassle getting the money I needed to fix the car as a poor college student. They even wanted me to pay a deductible from my collision coverage even though I was the one hit. It took me 5 months to get everything that was due me. I dropped All-State 2 months later.
It seems to me that GM would have needed to get people’s permission to use On Star this way. Is GM still doing this, or was the practice discontinued after they were sued several thousand times?
+1
That’s why I have used NJM insurance for both home and car for more than 10 years. They are very highly-rated for their claims paying, and are rated #2 nationwide. Only Erie Insurance is higher-rated.
Unfortunately for Rick and many others, NJM only does business in NJ, PA, OH, MD, and CT.
My agent told me about the Drive Safe & Save® Mobile App and I reviewed the rules and I do not have a problem with it but decided against it… It requires you to send in a photo of odometer reading and attach a “Bluetooth Beacon” inside the car (probably to the back of the mirror…) and it connects to the smartphone and you need to keep your Bluetooth and location services on to automatically record trips when your phone connects to the beacon in your car.
So, what type of driving feedback do you and the insurance company get? Quick acceleration; Hard braking; Fast cornering; Speeding; and Distracted driving…
The issue I had was I use a TracFone and I pay for every bit of data my phone uses… I usually pay less than $80 a year for service and I get a new phone every year from QVC or HSN that comes with a year of phone service… If I used this app and it would use all the data from my phone, I would then have to buy extra data and that would defeat the purpose of the savings that I might receive…
But be aware that the distance reported by the dongle through your app will need to loosely correspond to the distance indicated by the yearly odometer photograph… So taking the dongle out of the vehicle to go joy riding would invalidate the use of the app and you would not receive any savings…
Agent? Been a nearly a decade since I have had an agent.
For Thirty years had the same company, no claims, then they decide d I lived too close to the ocean. Stopped writing home insurance.
Then had an agent that got me home owners plus I dumped that company’s car ins. too. When choosing car ins checked with a body shop I have had dealings with. They had had no problems with the company I chose.
Now that agency went to online only, plus the home owners company quit writing policies in FL.
Now a new company that writes policies for both car and home, plus bills my CC monthly with no penalty as opposed to paying every year.
No agent, everything on line, though I can speak to a representative if I had too.