UK drivers beware

[Creature]

it deffintly wouldnt happen..

someone will make a bypass for them
isnt this against human rights
must have some sort of privacy rights on this

there also brining out the new car barcode system soon.
a barcode sticker that goes in your windscreen and is scanned down all major roads,if ya car isnt taxed insured,then it informs
police that it was on the road..

[Stringent]

Speaking of tax mine runs out next month, and insurance coming up

[Russ]

yea, only chip for most peoples cars would be a superchip to make it faster

[[GSV]Trig]

Superchips suck tbh, u want a unichip...

[wol]

These sort of things are already around, i think ive read somewhere that your ECU remembers a certain amount of driving that youve done, as do chips inside airbags (ie what speed you were doing when it deployed etc).


Wol

[ConnorLowe]

I would say that it would be worth doing if the is a crash, so that people know what may of caused it; to fast, no signalling, heavy braking, lack of breaking etc.

But I do not agree with logging every minor driving offence.

What would be the outcome of the practical driving test where you are allowed 15 minors? Would this then mean you need to pass without any minors?

[Saracen]

Crikey, a thread revival from 2003. That just might be a record.

[ConnorLowe]

Hmm..

This was displayed on New Posts when I refreshed the page and the previous comment before mine was in 2003...

[Kumagoro]

I find it interesting to see old threads like this and whether these things actually came to pass.

[ConnorLowe]

Come to think of it, this has happened.

The only way I could get insured on my car was to have it fitted with a box...

Every 45 days I get a report online explaining everything. It also explains how my insurance has increased, that's something I don't want to read about...

[Saracen]

Hmm..

This was displayed on New Posts when I refreshed the page and the previous comment before mine was in 2003...

Most likely what happened was that a spammer posted, bringing the thread into "new", then you viewed it. While you viewed it, a mod deleted the spam post, after which your reply went in.

No harm, though. as Kumagoro said, it can be interesting ..... as long as it doesn't happen too often.

[Saracen]

Come to think of it, this has happened.

The only way I could get insured on my car was to have it fitted with a box...

Every 45 days I get a report online explaining everything. It also explains how my insurance has increased, that's something I don't want to read about...

Not the same thing, though, is it?

I mean, first, you aren't getting the alleged speeding fine every time you go 1mph over the posted limit, etc.

Second, you do mean the only way you could get insured, or the only way you could get insurance you could afford? Or just that it reduced premiums a lot?

My experience has been that almost anybody can get insured for almost anything .... if you're prepared to pay the premium. When I was young, a contempory of mine ensured a Lamborghini Countache. It cost him almost as much as my gross (pre-tax) annual salary, and by almost as much, I mean a £4000 premium compared to my £4200 pre-tax earnings.

So, I lost about 30% of that in tax, giving me about £2800 after tax, and my annual season ticket into London (to work) was about £600, leaving me about £2200 for food, clothes, spending money and a contribution to housing costs to my 'landlords' (parents). And he paid almost double that insuring an extremely expensive car, partly because it was an extremely expensive car, but largely because he was in his early 20's.

I could barely afford to run a car at all. But I could have had, and insured, the Countache, if only I had the money.

[ConnorLowe]

I suppose it's similar in a couple of ways - the box records pretty much everything; speeding, hard braking, quick acceleration, speed round corners etc. Unsure on whether or not it includes signalling though.

If I regularly go over the speed limit and go too fast around corners, the box records it and then it puts all the data in to a report. The insurance company then looks at it and often decides to increase my payments per month if my driving is unsatisfactory. Although this isn't exactly the same as the initial post, you still are being made to pay for some offences, albeit not the every single one you do, just in bunches.

When I say I could only get insured with a box fitted, I meant to say that it was the only way I could afford to be insured, as quotes for a 19 year old driving a 54 plate 1.2 Corsa can often be quite high!

[TheAnimus]

I don't like these insurance boxes. I don't think they really capture the right data.

Let's have a little diversion and talk about correlation vs causality. Just because two things appear to occur together, doesn't mean that they do, humans are notoriously bad at this, my favourite story comes from South Korea. They found that lots of people died during the night, and in the stuffy summertime they had an electric fan switched on. Instant Fan Death is a rough translation, they honestly think sleeping with an electric desk fan on will kill you. All desk fans come with timers that switch off after 30 mins. It is rather amusingly dumb.

We have the same attitude in the UK with certain driving factors, namely speed. The other week I was driving a differen't car. I ended up having a 4 second gap in good weather conditions whilst bombing along at exactly 70mph (honest! I definitely didn't go faster than that!) a few hours later and its pooring down with rain, the motorway is moving at 60mph but no one appears to have a proper gap between the car in front and themselves. I've managed to get a good one with space to dive on to the hard shoulder should something go wrong. That was very dangerous driving. Yet it was 10mph below the limit.

Monitoring speed isn't the answer. Monitoring the distances kept in front, if you use the indicator before you turn the wheel would be a much better set of things to look at. As for cornering at speed? Well damn if I can take the bend safely at national speed limit, I will, it's fun! A better thing to do would be to look at the ESP system to detect if you were still in control of the car or not. Pulling out of my minor road in London onto the main one, even when turning left I'll floor the damn thing. Too many commercial vans like to park on the double yellows blocking a lot of the visibility. If I'm going for it, I'd sooner get going to the speed of the road as quickly as possible, not pootle up at 10mph.

So ConnorLowe I understand why you have chosen a box for insurance price reduction, but myself I wouldn't want to support something which is effectively a perversion of data.

[ConnorLowe]

I like your example of pulling out of a minor road, on to a main road which vans often cause visibility problems. Where I live the main road has terraced houses on the right hand side so I can hardly see what is coming from further down. If I see a gap for longer than say 3 or 4 seconds, I pull out relatively quick to make sure nobody smashes in to the back of me. But my little box doesn't like that! Oh noooo, it decides to say that what I've done was dangerous and over time, will increase my insurance costs

Its safe to say, if I could afford insurance without having to have a box installed, I would rip the stupid thing out and launch it as far as I could. The nightmare of an apprentice's wage...

[Saracen]

I suppose it's similar in a couple of ways - the box records pretty much everything; speeding, hard braking, quick acceleration, speed round corners etc. Unsure on whether or not it includes signalling though.

If I regularly go over the speed limit and go too fast around corners, the box records it and then it puts all the data in to a report. The insurance company then looks at it and often decides to increase my payments per month if my driving is unsatisfactory. Although this isn't exactly the same as the initial post, you still are being made to pay for some offences, albeit not the every single one you do, just in bunches.

When I say I could only get insured with a box fitted, I meant to say that it was the only way I could afford to be insured, as quotes for a 19 year old driving a 54 plate 1.2 Corsa can often be quite high!

Sounds, in large parts at least, as if you're paying for a lack of careful, sedate driving, rather than driving offences as such. But I know what you mean. And I'm sure you know why you are, and why premiums are so high .... it's the comparison between the proportion of drivers that are of a very young age compared to the proportion of accidents, serious accidents and fatal accidents, in that age group.

I know it sounds like a cliche, but as you get older, or to be more accurate, more experienced, you develop a more tuned road sense, and you see situations coming earlier than less experienced drivers. Ask any police driver. Or try to arrange a ride-along, and see just how observant, how aware, police drivers are.

And because of that earlier awareness, you tend to have less accidents because not only is your driving less aggressive, but your road sense is more tuned. So, if you can moderate your driving style, accelerate more smoothly, and perhaps, more importantly, anticipate things like junctions and be slowing down ready, rather than hurtling up and dropping the anchors at the last moment, you should see those insurance reports improve.

But the number of times I've been carved up, and it's usually by a "kid". For example, yesterday. Two roundabouts separated by a few hundred yards of town-centre, 40mph dual carriageway, and when I get to the next roundabout, I'm going left, so I stay in the left hand lane. And I'm doing exactly 40.

And the guy behind me when I came off the first roundabout waits for about 3/4 of those few hundred yards, then decides to overtake. So he pulls out, whips past, doing maybe 60, 65, then pulls RIGHT in front of me, and has to brake firmly, causing me to brake quite hard, because if he hadn't, he'd have smashed into the car in front of me. And he goes left.

And for what? 1 car length of gain?

I'm not saying you drive like that (obviously, I cannot know, one way or the other), but that is an example of why your premiums are so high. He got away with that moronic manoeuvre, but a decent percentage of the time, that kind of stupid, not to mention dangerous, aggressive stunt, causes an accident.

And, of course, if your car data shows a lack of hard acceleration, hard cornering, hard braking, etc, then it shows you aren't driving aggressively.