In the commercial auto insurance market, some of the insurers are offering fleet discounts if the vehicles are equipped with a GPS monitor that reports back on mileage, routes, hard acceleration, hard braking, time of day driven and number of trip segments. It is essentially a portable (plugs into the OBD port) black box for the vehicle, and can be accessed far more easily than the vehicle manufacturer black box. Use of these monitors may become mandatory in the future if you want to have commercial auto insurance at all. Some companies are also experimenting with this in the private auto insurance market.
I asked about this when I renewed my fleet coverage this summer, but my insurer said that I have too few vehicles and they don't drive enough miles to warrant the device. Trucking, logistics, rental cars, taxis and large fleets of delivery vehicles are the target markets.
I tried one of those nanny-boxes to get a discount on my auto insurance -- Hartford, but I think other companies have this option.
After on-line review of my record, I could not understand how they derived some of the "ding" points on the computer record. Even normal driving practices resulted in an "aggressive driving" ding. Now, listen, I haven't had a ticket in
well over 25 years, and only one accident where somebody rear-ended me in stop-and-go traffic (he was talking on his cell phone).
That kind of makes me the safe driving poster boy, I guess. About thirty years ago I learned to
drive, as opposed to merely operating a vehicle with consummate skill.
So I analyzed some of the "hard braking" "dings," and it turned out decelerations greater than only 7 mph per second got you a finger-shaking from their computers.
Hey, a safe moderately hard stop with nobody behind you on a yellow light dings you?
There were other totally outrageous "dings" I started to correlate with my actual trips at the stated times. For a while I wondered who had stolen my car and roared around town and then put it back in my parking space.
Specific example? One Saturday trip to the grocery store, where I had to cruise around the parking lot looking for a space, resulted in several "hard turn" and "too many starts and stops" "aggressive driving" offenses.
The real offense there was my stupidity in going shopping on a Saturday.
I got off that discount program within three weeks and sent the nanny box back with a very diplomatic and "Safe For Work" note describing in particulars and details how ridiculous their "safe driving" parameters were.
My conclusion was that driving as required within the nanny box parameters would result in creating hazards
simply because you could not conform to other drivers' expectations while operating within those parameters.
Terry, 230RN