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Comment by duffyjp | Hacker News Reader

I was fooled into using one from Progressive once. For the record I'm an extremely cautious driver of a 99 horsepower Prius C, exactly the type an insurance company should love to insure. Any breaking of even moderate intensity causes the box to beep and your "safe driving score" goes down. Yellow light, run it or your insurance goes up. Someone cuts you off and you avoid an accident, your insurance goes up.

The final straw for me after a few months was another driver running a stop sign and feeling my brain waste milliseconds deciding if I should hit the brakes as hard as I should or juuuust hard enough to avoid hitting them in hopes I don't get a beep. I did the latter and it beeped anyway so I ripped it off the ODBII port and threw it on the floor. I changed insurance companies the moment I got home from work.

My final score was really poor and I was pissed since I'm the slowest and safest driver I know.

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While all those incidents you described weren't your fault, surely you have to agree that there's a correlation between driving in situations like that and being more likely to get in an accident? It isn't just about your driving performance, if you're driving in places or intersections where people tend to cut you off or run red lights - or hell, just places with lots of traffic and intersections in general - that's hugely predictive of the chance you'll get in an accident relative to someone that drives a less travelled route.

It's a failure of the industry that they tend to market this monitoring as all about the driver. It's really not, it's just conditional probability.

I don't disagree, but they already know where I live and how far my commute to work is (was, yay WFH) as those are standard questions I've answered with every company I've used.

> It isn't just about your driving performance, if you're driving in places or intersections

To underline this, I had an enlightening moment with my auto insurance company years ago. I worked a handful of miles from where I lived, but the only way to get between the two was a freeway that is infamous for not only being highly congested (my average commute was a 45 minute drive each way), but for the numerous accidents that happened on it.

I moved much closer to my work, and when I updated my insurance policy with my new address, my premium was cut to nearly 1/3rd what it was before.

If it's not about the drivers performance perhaps the box shouldn't consistently beep at them to let them know about how they are driving, to the point of distraction.

That's my understanding, also--they're hypersensitive to the realities of the road. They really need to refine their models a bit rather than simply rewarding what they consider "safe" behavior.

Yes, aggressive driving is a bad thing--but it's not something easily detected by a sensor.

Trying to think of all the shitty driving I could do without triggering this device...

I could easily fly up the shoulder at 40mph in a 60 zone bypassing all the stopped traffic.

Could drive down the sidewalk at a 20mph pace.

I can still weave though traffic as long as I don't go too far over the speed limit (assuming this device tracks location and speed).

I can still tailgate the fuck out of anybody.

I can still use my phone while driving.

I can be completely wasted and probably not set the thing off.

But don't you dare hit your brakes too hard!!!

Practice braking at a stop sign with no one around? Bad driver!

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