this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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I'm so sick of this shit.
Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it's about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.
You'd also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they're collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.
The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.
Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That's a pattern of risky behavior.
And if they think that this monitoring is going to help anything when people know about it, they need to learn about Goodharts' Law:
As soon as this becomes a thing people will get anxious and petty about it, and they will start trying to game the system, and that system gaming will take some portion of their focus away from driving and guess what, that's going to make them worse drivers.
That's what we did. We were told the negative criteria were frequent driving, night driving, and all the driving BS you'd expect - hard stops, fast corners, etc. The company used a phone app, so we only installed it on my phone, had it disabled most of the time, and enabled it once or twice a week for a painfully slow drive to the grocery store just around the corner.
We had an amazing score which resulted in... No discount! We actually paid more. We got some bullshit low percentage off which was simultaneously offset by a mid-year rate increase. They claimed they had to reevaluate our rates any time they added a discount. Total bullshit.