by Nexyad
I – ONBOARD TELEMATICS AND AUTO INSURANCE : REMINDER
Onboard telematics now can measure behavior of a driver, and therefore, car insurers have early started this adventure of connected car, more or less successfully.
The simplest applications that have been deployed are:
. locate stolen vehicles
. measure the usage of the driver, and in particular the number of kilometers traveled in order to propose adaptive pricing (vehicle that always stays in a garage will never have an accident!)
But the main business of the insurer deals with the concept of risk, and then, we have seen a lot of telematics firms proposing automatic detection of risky behaviors. The most common is the so-called detection of « severe braking », which is based on the assumption that severe braking reveals a lack of anticipation, and thereby a dangerous driving. We now know that this assumption is totally false [1], but it is still in the mind of some insurers that « want to believe » there is a simple way to classify human beings behaviours. However, the lack of results of these deployments has led some German and US insurers to abandon Telematics [2].