Personally I don't trust them at all.  I drive how I want to and trust myself to not get in accidents.  100% success so far.  Knock on wood.

I think I trust the technology, not sure I trust what the company is doing with the data behind the scenes and if, like you say with the yellow lights, they account for a standard number of allowed hard braking incidents for those situations.

I got a driving monitoring thing last Christmas that plugs into the OBII port and gives you mpgs, trip duration, maps out your path, shows hard accel/hard braking etc (unrelated to insurance). It’s useful info and using it I could tell when I was going to get a ding for braking or accelerating too hard but I think I’m fairly aware of my driving. I could see my wife getting dinged for hard braking due to following someone too closely or stopping later than she should for a red light and not thinking much of it that she wouldn’t expect it to be picked up.

No effing way.  Besides, it won't fit under my tinfoil hat.

The app is also reporting your speed vs. speed limit. It says it is not factoring into the rate decision, however...

I have noticed that the speed limits it shows are not always accurate - for example, it lists the speed on a local highway as 25 mph in some spots, which is totally bogus (it's 45 mph), and in some other areas I know are 35 mph are listed as 55 mph. So I think that because of these discrepancies, they cannot really use it against you. In addition, there are time-controlled speed areas (such as a school zone) where the speed limit varies dependent upon time of day, and even what day it is. As such, it could show you FLYING through a 25 mph school zone at 45 mph at 9PM - even though the school zone is only active during drop off/pick up times. So while it is tracked, I think that it is not as important to the insurance company as the hard brake/hard accel/12-4 AM usages.

racerjim wrote:

Besides, it won't fit under my tinfoil hat.

It's funny you should mention that - the device did not fit under the OBD-II/fuse access panel in our Kia. I had to unclip the actual OBD port itself, pull it back into the dash, and move it 90 degrees from normal to make the dongle fit AND close the panel door.

As far as savings are concerned, the initial discount just for signing up for the RightTrack program was 10% off. Even if you are a complete flunkie at driving, you can still get a nominal 5% savings, which is $63 a year for us. We have the opportunity to save up to 30% off, which is $375 a year. Not chump change, for sure - especially since if you play nice for a few months to get the full deal.

Exclusive of the 'Big Brother' aspect of it, the offer is difficult to turn down - especially if you are a recovering collision claim victim...

Last edited by krazykarguy (2017-01-23 15:51:23)

I don't have one for insurance reasons, but I do have  OB2 monitor, I use it to run Torque while I am driving. Mainly because I have been pulled over before and they were off on my speed. So I log my OB2 speed, GPS speed and the diff between them. I have no idea if any of that info would hold up in court, but I use it anyway. I haven't been pulled over since I started using it 4 years ago. Which coincidentally I just had a reminder that I had my court date for my last ticket(s) just over 4 years ago.

I wish mine would log hard braking though. I used to map it over Google Earth so I could see how fast I took certain corners, but that got scary and stupid, so I stopped.

So I got dinged TWICE yesterday. Once for a hard acceleration event IN THE PARKING LOT OF MY WORK, and a hard barking event, slowing down to the entrance of my neighborhood.

I can understand the braking event - I was coming in a bit hot and braked too late - but the sudden acceleration event has left me scratching my head. I couldn't have been traveling more than 10 mph at any time - I know when it 'recorded' it - but it must have been that I accelerated from 0-7mph (or 3-10mph) in less than a second. What modern vehicle CAN'T do that? And why is this a negative for me? I was trying to NOT get hit in a non-traffic-controlled parking lot!!

It's my understanding they are pretty sensitive, and don't take into account the "why" of an action.  I'm sure there's an algorithm that filters out the handful of legit hard stops/starts against the poor driver's actions, but that's just a guess and it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for an insurance co to *not* use it in order to get higher rates from people.

But you're touching on a rather sensitive topic, maybe unintentionally.

What are us "objectively good" drivers supposed to do about our significant others who are not "objectively good" drivers?

I ask because...as you can imagine...it's not like my partner is necessarily a bad driver, but...     I often think she's too slow to react, freezes up when she has to make a decision, stops short/late, and doesn't assert her position on the road.  None of it is *unsafe* by any stretch, but there's a point where being too timid or cautious on the road is a detriment, and I struggle to think of a single time where she's gotten us somewhere in a reasonable (compared to mine) amount of time.  Like, it literally takes me 10 less minutes to get to the airport across town, and I'm not going more than 5 over.

I've suggested that one way to alleviate the stress of having me as a passenger, would be if she took the same Bondurant performance handling and HPDE classes...but no.

I kind of want one of those monitor things now, so we can compare.  But without hitting our insurance rates....

hammyt wrote:

Anyways, the reason I bring this shit up is I think I'm going to teach her to drive stick this spring.  She wants to learn and my car isn't a "racecar" anymore so I really have no excuse not to teach her.  Gonna have her watch a couple videos before we go out there, but it should prove interesting and I may just have to save the Dashcam footage. 

Ah, the good ol' teach the gf/fiance/wife stick shift.  I attempted to teach my now wife stick back when we first started dating.  We went to an open parking lot and used my sister's 2003 Eclipse GT (she was selling it and the car was a beater, so we didn't care if the clutch took a beating).  She caught on quick, but when it came time to try my Saabaru, she didn't do well.  She was too scared to do anything to my car since it was my "baby." She's never tried stick since that day.

drewsro wrote:

She caught on quick, but when it came time to try my Saabaru, she didn't do well.  She was too scared to do anything to my car since it was my "baby." She's never tried stick since that day.

Yeah with my 9-2x in "racecar" mode (no cats, coilovers and 275whp) I was worried about way too many things going wrong and the fact she knew I loved that car almost as much as her.

Now that I have a stock FoST, that I feel like I won't have for more than another year or two, I think it is a good chance to teach her.  My next car will like 99% chance be stick as well, its just very likely it will have a 435hp v8 

Is it in the terms (that I'm sure no one has read) that they can't eventually deny you insurance based on the OBDII readings alone?

I did check out GEICO, and they were the runner-up to SafeCo as far as rates were concerned. We could only really combine our bike/auto policies - ASI is our homeowner's insurance (that is the only thing they cover), and they are significantly cheaper than anyone else could give us in a 'bundled' policy.

We quoted SafeCo for homeowner's bundled with our bike/car policy - and it came back $220 higher than doing SafeCo/ASI together.

I figured since I mentioned it in my car buying thread that I'd bump this one up, too.

We're almost at 1 month with the tracker in our Kia. Our current discount is up to 17% based on almost 1000 miles of driving.

The traffic in this area (Charlotte, NC) makes it really difficult to avoid hard braking. There are many roads marked for 50-55 mph, and if you leave a safe following distance, other dipshit drivers take this as an open invitation to put their car in front of yours. Plus, traffic can back up fast and you are forced to brake hard or hit the car in front of you.

There are also other instances where the device is really stupid and you are dinged for something really stupid - I got a hard braking event at the end of my neighborhood, where I couldn't have been going any more than 10 mph. Pretty sure that a Huffy can stop at a rate of 7 mph/second at 15 mph... So why is a 'hard brake' at 15 under the 25mph speed limit even something to be concerned about??