According to the newspaper ‘Les Echos », AG Insurance gave up linking driving behavior to accident. For eight months, the insurer has equipped the car of staff members with « smartbox ». Verdict? Nah, nothing interesting linkable to driving style !
In 2014, the bank insurer KBC had reached the same conclusion after a test conducted with 150 employees, whose car was equipped with a device provided by TomTom. »
For Nexyad, there is no mystery. Until now the applications or cases expected to provide data on the behavior of drivers all operate on the same principles :
– severe acceleration and braking
– Vehicle geolocation
– Cornering speed / curves
– Usage (mileage, road types, driving schedules, for example)
This information does not measure the « good behavior » that may inform actuaries of insurance on real risks taken by their clients.
Indeed, the correlation between the brutal acceleration (or severe braking) and road safety is a mistaken belief. The assumption that severe braking would report to a lack of anticipation of the driver, and instead a slight braking would be a sign of good anticipation is definitely wrong. This has been formally shown and demonstrated by experts in road safety. Besides, these same experts believe that an Eco driving is necessarily dangerous: Eco driving mainly keeping as most as possible the vehicle’s inertia, and thus slowing down as little as possible, which would push the Eco drivers to delay their decision of braking including when they approach a vulnerable road user (pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, etc.).
Nexyad worked since 2001 on these issues through four national collaborative research programs and now has a totally disruptive application that measures the Eco driving, but also road safety and those two measurements has no correlation).
This work consisted, for 15 years, in building the causal rules that lead to accidents. This is entirely different of statistical approaches. An insurance actuary may find that the majority of drivers under 25 years old with a red car have more accidents than others, and then this actuary could modulate its pricing on this criterion. This is reasoning on correlations and not cause and effect. Nexyad is the first and only company that can bring cause and effect considerations into accident risk assesment for insurance companies.
Nexyad developed the module SafetyNex which decodes the difficulties of the road infrastructure (dangerous curves, intersections, pedestrian crossings, school zone, etc.) relates those difficulties to the behavior of the vehicle through a grid of cause and effect. The construction of this grid of cause and effect required 15 years of knowledge extraction among a panel of road safety experts (their job is to explain accidents, and find ways to reshape roads and infrastructures in order to reduce statistics of accidents – national and European).
SafetyNex has been validated by INRETS (now became IFFSTAR) that deployed 500 vehiclesand compared risk estimation by SafetyNex with the accidents database « MAIS » of the National French Gendarmerie. We could demonstrate that SafetyNex estimates risk of traffic accident, as an immediately usable score for actuaries of insurance (for example).
NB: Accidents are rare events (one every 70 000km on average). This is why teams of road safety improvement at the national level have set up « observatories of cars trajectories ». They allowed to count the « near misses ». A near miss is accident that were prevented at the very last second (because one of the drivers had the proper reflex, …). When observing a repeat of near misses, then you end up getting an accident (near misses are at least a hundred times more numerous than accidents).
Nexyad is the only team of telematics solutions that brings this knowledge of these near misses and that is able to share it with the risk estimation experts at insurance companies.
How it works ?
Every second, a risk score and an Eco score are computed by SafetyNex, depending on the vehicle speed relative to the difficulty of the road infrastructure. Drivers can be warned in advance, 4 seconds before arriving on the dangerous area. Then SafetyNex may also decrease the number of accident (or the severity of accidents when they can’t be avoided).
SafetyNex establishes daily or weekly reports on the risk and eco and shows what could have been better (advices on driving efficiency improvement).
Insurers may get reports too : the real risk indicators. This is what Nexyad called SafetyNex signature driving behavior (duration at every level of risk, for instance).
View demos 4 films on the same route (1mn30):
Example of a good driver : both safe and Eco.
Example of a bad driver : both waste and risky
Example of a sporting driver : waste but safe most of the time