Many motorists now own satellite navigation systems like TomTom. The technology has been available for some years and like clockwork the cost of access to this technology has fallen dramatically.
Easy navigation has been good for the motorist. This same technology is about to fuel a revolution in car insurance and, more importantly, road safety.
Insurers rely on obtaining information about you to quote you an insurance premium. On average, young drivers are bad drivers. Some young drivers are good drivers and it would be profitable to give these people a low competitive quote if they could be distinguised from young bad drivers.
Bad drivers are about to be priced off the roads.
Motorists agree to have satellite navigation track all of their movements in a black box. Imagine how an insurance company could analyse the behaviour of drivers that have crashed and analyse the patterns. Perhaps a common cause of car crashes is a high entry speed to tight corners. It is likely that insurers will be able to form a highly accurate model to determine the cost associated with a specific way a motorists drives. If don't want your insurer knowing your movements you can still buy a traditional insurance policy.
If you had a dangerous near miss with a driver, who would be interested in this information? The police? The Police aren't really interested in bad drivers (I reported someone almost killing me once and nothing happened). There's little incentive for them to be. At most they are certainly not anywhere as interested in bad drivers as much as a bad driver's insurer are. The last thing an insurance company wants to do is incorrectly measure the risk of one of their drivers and have them cause a multi-million pound crash scene for which they are liable to pay. A Policeman doesn't get a bonus if he stops a crash but an insurer would. The potential profits for saving lives are huge. This certainly isn't a case of putting profits before lives!
Perhaps the satellite data is not enough to attribute blame in an insurance dispute. Other technologies have this covered. Digital video cameras with mass storage are getting very cheap. Every good motorist would relish the opportunity to prove they did not cause the crash they were involved in.
The burden bad motorists put on motorists in general is going to be pushed purely on to the bad motorist.
Another implication will be the extinction of speed cameras and the debate around them. We will soon find out which driving charateristics are beneficial to society as a whole. The police will naturally have a reduced role in safety on the roads. No more speeding tickets; only a notification of an automatic increase in your premium if whatever you do in your car has been statistically proven to likely cost your insurer a lot of money.
Lives are going to be saved; not only without the government, but better than the government could ever have dreamed of doing.
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