Progressive snapshot.. a different approach

[DARK_M3]

So I just saw that stupid commercial.. yet again.. for Progressive snapshot and, again, thought to myself, stuff your big brother tactics and no thank you. Then a thought occurred to me...

We live in a world of aftermarket tuners and tuning devices. Is it possible to simply create a program say, on a laptop or desktop and plug this thing in to it and run a program that basically takes it through an algorithm of hum drum daily driving and made up GPS routes while continuing to drive your own car however you see fit and reap the rewards of "safe driving"?

The obvious disclamer here is that this activity may be construed as insurance fraud? So with that in mind... this is purley hypothetical! (Also I don't even have Progressive)

[kyleb350]

The same thing popped into my head when I got into a discussion with someone about it. Just plug it into an interface that connects to your computer running a simulation program. I'm not sure if it'd be insurance fraud because you aren't making any false claims to collect money. If falsifying data to lower your premium is fraud, then I guess yeah. lol

[NBK]

i believe this constitutes insurance fraud.

you are using deceptive tactics to falsify underwriting requirements for discounts and credits.



needless to say, i think snapshot is a joke.

[Seminole]

A good read: http://www.automobilemag.com/feature...s_with_my_flo/

I'm no Luddite, but I'm not entirely down with the whole voluntary renunciation of electronic privacy. Whenever Facebook or Twitter or my phone asks if it can "use my location," I always click no. And I'm sure that when I do this, my iPhone quietly snickers and tracks me anyway. But my theory is that if I'm going to give you personal information, what's in it for me?

Progressive insurance has an answer to that question: money. Progressive's Snapshot program offers a potential discount to policyholders who agree to let the company take a real-time look at their driving habits. The Snapshot is a small device that plugs into your car's OBD-II port and tracks your driving. After a month, Progressive looks at the data (beamed in via the cell network -- there's no GPS) and calculates whether the driver is eligible for a discount. So far, the company says that participants in the program have saved an average of $150 per year. To find out whether I have the stuff good-driver discounts are made of, I procured a Snapshot and plugged it into my car for a month.

According to the rules, Snapshot can generate a discount but not a surcharge -- unless you live in Rhode Island. The device logs your speed, but that's not a factor in the calculations because Progressive doesn't know where you are -- you might be doing 65 mph in a 70 zone or 45 mph through a car wash (although one wonders if a few trips into the triple digits would disqualify you from a safe-driver discount). The deciding factors are what time of day you drive, how far you drive, and how forcefully you brake.

For instance, driving at 2:30 a.m. isn't great from an insurance-industry standpoint. Bad things happen then. Sure, you're a model citizen. You were working late on your microloan program to fund humanitarian efforts in Africa, sober as a judge, but what about everyone else? Statistically speaking, at 2:30 a.m. every other car on the road is helmed by an intoxicated prostitute who's fleeing police while texting, listening to Ke$ha, and throwing empty cans of Four Loko out the window. If you think that characterization is sexist, I remind you that Ke$ha fans can be women, too.

Another parameter Progressive examines is braking, since gentle braking apparently correlates to low insurance claims. During my month with the Snapshot, I drove the way I always do, with the small pod under the dash chirping happily every so often, probably to commend me on a job well done. I found that if you turn up the radio loud enough, you barely notice it after a while.

It turns out that the Snapshot's happy chirp is an audible reprimand that you're braking too hard. I heard the alarm many times -- thirty-six times on one day, according to Progressive, whose spokesperson asked if I was joking or trying to drive like a maniac just to test the system. Honestly, I wasn't. But with that thirty-six hard-brake day and eleven others with double-digit tallies for abrupt deceleration, I wouldn't be getting any discount.

In my defense, there was one day when I had no hard braking events. Admittedly, I logged zero miles that day. Maybe I started the car and moved it from one side of the driveway to the other. But I did so with the utmost care and caution.

While I don't deny that my driving style errs on the side of hasty progress, Snapshot has a few holes in its logic. If you're approaching a yellow light, Snapshot is an incentive to risk running the red rather than hitting the brakes. If a deer jumps out in front of you, Snapshot would prefer that you swerve into the oncoming lane rather than mash that brake pedal. What if you game the system by aggressively engine braking, lest Snapshot tsk-tsk your indulgent use of the ol' pads 'n' rotors? That would be a stupid way to drive.

As my wife put it -- she being responsible for at least half of those aggressive pedal stomps -- "I'm glad I didn't get a discount. It means I don't drive like a [derogatory word for a person who might get a discount]." Of course, now that this experiment is over, I've pulled the snitch from the Chariot of Chaos and returned to an off-the-grid relationship with my actual insurance company. And thanks to this experience, I'm now driving much slower. As far as they know.

[DARK_M3]

Originally Posted by Emory335

because we're all supposed to have seen that same ambiguous commercial.

Only those of us folks with those new picture box thingies.

Originally Posted by NBK

i believe this constitutes insurance fraud.

you are using deceptive tactics to falsify underwriting requirements for discounts and credits.



needless to say, i think snapshot is a joke.

I suppose it is fraud. The thought had just popped into my head for some reason. I too think its a joke... I mean, save $150. a year? Really? Oh gee whiz.

[roastbeef]

i wonder if they eventually will use it as a tool to raise rates or drop people who they deem drive aggressively.

[kyleb350]

Originally Posted by roastbeef

i wonder if they eventually will use it as a tool to raise rates or drop people who they deem drive aggressively.

You'd be an idiot if you opted to do this and that happened.

[DARK_M3]

Originally Posted by kyleb350

You'd be an idiot if you opted to do this and that happened.

Exactly. No thank you.

[Mr Tonka]

What if all insurance companies, by direction of the state government required every OBDII car on the road to plug one of these in at all times during the car's usage?

I think i'd be first in line for the bypass software or i'd be searching out the best 1995 M3 i could find....

[Its_lobelt]

I dont think this would be possible because what if lets say you got into an accident. Your software would have you logged on a GPS somewhere in town but your accident would be elsewhere. So I doubt this would be possible besides being fraud lol.

[NBK]

there is talk among insurance industry experts of using a modern car's GPS system to function just like progressive's snapshot.

ill try to find the article.

[DARK_M3]

Originally Posted by ROB_S2K

I dont think this would be possible because what if lets say you got into an accident. Your software would have you logged on a GPS somewhere in town but your accident would be elsewhere. So I doubt this would be possible besides being fraud lol.

Good point.

Originally Posted by NBK

there is talk among insurance industry experts of using a modern car's GPS system to function just like progressive's snapshot.

ill try to find the article.

Why am I completely not surprised.

[MidwestGolfBum]

We were talking about this the other day after a meeting. It seemed completely possible that you could (in theory) make a program that would just give the "acceptable" parameters to the snapshot thing but you would have to have it in the car to avoid the you were actually somewhere else part.

[turbosc297]

The snapshot device doesn't use GPS tracking as far as I know.
It only records the time of day you drive, acceleration and deceleration rates, and a couple of other things... but location isn't one.

My friend had it on his wife's car and their premium went from $145/month down to $93/month. So it's not completely bogus.

[ddk632]

To all those "it's not bogus you can really have your rates lowered' responders... that may be true at the moment.

I personally think they are doing this introductory phase in a way where "you can get a discount but not have your rates raised" as marketing bait to get people used to it in a positive way of sorts, then after an initial adoption period (during which it may just become, say, mandatory), wham! we changed our policy, now your rates can be raised!

I mean, why would any self-respecting corporation invest the money to develop this thing if it wasn't going to make them more money?

As far as tricking it... you'd have to literally have to have a "fake" OBD-II port to plug it into in your car (i.e., in the difficult case of an accident, the thing better be in your car). This software you'd need to upload to your car would need to fake all the signals/sensor data which this Snapshot device reads, including the overall timing of the signals.

For example, the current version does not use location/GPS info. I would put some $$ down to bet that it won't be that way for long. Since the current version also won't raise your rates, there's really no point discussing how to trick it in its current form, since there are no actual repercussions other than NOT receiving a discount.

So at some speculative time in the future, once it does use GPS and can also cause your insurance rates to be raised, and is mandatory, you'd have to fake the GPS signal because the GPS route with time and location info can be calculated to ascertain the actual speed of the car at all times. Coupled with the hard braking, etc., and they get a really good idea of your exact driving habits. I mean, if GPS data shows you took Freeway A from Point A to Point B, from Time A to Time B, it's not really a difficult formula to determine your average speed during this time, if not your exact speed at any given time, although given more complex formulas calculated over smaller distances of Point A to Point B (say every mile), your speed at almost any given moment can be calculated pretty well closely.

Tricking it would involve faking the entire thing, including the GPS signal, which would effectively have to record your entire route but "play it back" to the "Snapshot" device in slow-er motion. The case of the accident is the difficult one to see how to reconcile, though. Perhaps not impossible, but I just don't see how snapshot tells Progressive you are at Point B, when you had an accident at Point C, which according to your recently uploaded speed data you should have reached approximately 25 minutes in the future

I don't like any of it.

Edit: When I say fake OBD-II port, I don't mean a literal fake OBD-II port. Obviously this thing has to be connected to the only OBD-II port the car has... The software that tricks this thing would have to recognize the device, intercept any data transfer between the device and your car, and send its own data instead.

[DARK_M3]

I don't like any of it either. The whole thing does smell like "conditioning" for something yet to come. Like mandating that devices like this be mandatory to even get insurance (which we are already forced to have and I won't even get into that). It's just a mild form of wiretapping IMO and it's only going to get worse depending on how you look at it.

[DSB335d]

State Farm has a version of this coming out soon..