For example, is driving more aggressively more dangerous than texting (or simply not being attentive to the road)? Because only the former is tracked.
Perhaps. Devices like this might tell them if people that occasionally drive hard are more likely file a claim.
> Are we tracking things that make dangerous drivers, or tracking things that are easy to track?
I'm guessing they will track everything they can reasonably track and the set of things they can track will increase over time.
Joke's on them, the per-vehicle mileage goes down every time they ask.
If they track the phone, how can they tell if you are driving or just a passenger?
My TomTom 5000 SatNav, which I bought for like $200 has a permanent connection to the internet in all countries of the world with no monthly fee. It has an integrated SIM card and TomTom just paid some fee so that it can connect to the internet and get traffic updates wherever I am in the world. An even cheaper Kindle 3G also had that. So I guess it must be relatively cheap.
This is how they track the hard accels, hard breaks etc., since the car puts these events on it's BUS.
I guess inattentive driving would also result in higher accident rates than attentive driving (which they obviously track).
This is certainly another reason to motivate people to think about what sorts of rules and regulations they want in place regarding data collection and retention.
Those could just as well be samples of very attentive driving. You know, the ones where you didn't hit the tourist stepping backwards off the curb into traffic and the one where you avoided the toddler that suddenly appeared between two parked cars (just two samples from my driving career).
I'd be more wary of people that never have such items while they drive than the ones that do. Circumstances are everything when it comes to making decisions like these.
But they do happen and depending on where you live they happen a lot more frequently (Romania, for example, where driving is a bit like a video game but you only get one life. (And for pedestrians it is like 'frogger', and they also only get one life.)
Your examples are ones of exactly the type of behavior insurance companies are trying to disincentivize. Namely, fail-deadly behavior that puts you in a position where you have to be attentive to avoid a collision when other actors don't do exactly as they should. Your error was putting yourself in that position in the first place.
Even with 100 feet to spare, you still slam on the brakes because when a kid wanders into the road, that's what is safest.
Wow, you were there?
Forgive the sarcasm but you're speaking as though you were when in fact you are utterly clueless about the rest of the circumstances, and you probably are unfamiliar with the local territory.
> Your examples are ones of exactly the type of behavior insurance companies are trying to disincentivize.
Well, let's just say you are dead-wrong about that.
> Namely, fail-deadly behavior that puts you in a position where you have to be attentive to avoid a collision when other actors don't do exactly as they should. Your error was putting yourself in that position in the first place.
Classic strawman, you made up an extension to the situation and then you valiantly knock it down.
Well done. Really, what would it take to get you to re-phrase your comment into something like:
"Forgive me for asking because I don't understand how these situations came to pass in the first place?"
And then I would have answered:
The tourist was a Japanese dude who was standing right next to one of the most busy streets in Amsterdam, I was doing about 50 kph, right along with the rest of the traffic there (and considerably slower than the taxis overtaking the rest of the traffic) when a guy stepped backwards of the curb while looking through the lens of his camera. Obviously he lost is balance and I stopped the car mere centimeters from his fallen body wrecking a set of nearly new tires in the process. We shook hands and that was that, I'm sure he's going to be a bit more careful in the future while walking and looking through his camera at the same time. The alternative - to swerve - was not an option because of the higher speed traffic in the tram lane and it wouldn't have worked anyway. Good I keep my cars in excellent shape and kudos to whoever designed the brake system on the Citroen DS.
The toddler was a much slower affair, this was in a street with slanted parking (quite common in the old south part of the city), this little tike had escaped from his mum and came out from in between two cars well under mirror height. I wasn't going very fast and fortunately there was a large open space on the other side of the road (super market loading area or something to that effect, I forgot) and so I had plenty of room to swerve when I saw something move. At first I thought it was a dog. An emergency stop there would have been too late, he practically rolled out under the car.
> "Forgive me for asking because I don't understand how these situations came to pass in the first place?"
To be honest, I don't think anything would.
Simply stated, I have met too many people (friends, family and coworkers) who tell me well-crafted stories about how they came to be in a car accident, or almost-accident. These stories invariably cast the teller as the victim who could do nothing to prevent the accident (aside from driving more slowly or following at a greater distance). When I later ride with them, I find that they tailgate, speed and roll through stop signs.
Perhaps I was too quick to judge. Maybe you're among the 1% of 'attentive drivers' who actually drive well. I'm just so tired of hearing the excuses of the other 99% that I lumped you in with them.
If you really are that 1%, then I have to say I'm truly am sorry. I hope you are. Because if you aren't, you're probably feeling smug about putting me in my place and will feel justified in driving recklessly in the future.
How do you separate manoeuvres due to driver inattention from the same manoeuvres due to external causes, such as animals or other drivers being inattentive?