not worth it. and i need that port for data logging

 

I'd offer the insurance company no excuse to jack my rates up. I don't drive like a mad man, but I sure like driving my MINI. I'd be afraid my good neighbor wouldn't be such a good neighbor after downloading my results.

 

The OBD-II plug-in insurance tracker can assist in theft recovery only to the extent that the car will be stolen by an imbecile who does not know how to unplug the tracker and throw it out the window.

Correct - they have their own antenna and cell phone account with a carrier of their choosing. Your cell phone's presence is not required.

a

 

well, We've had this thing for a 2 months and 2 weeks now and it has been interesting.

to summarize- no GPS
Monitoring of braking and top speed and time of day that you are on the road. (I have a coworker who has one through her insurance co and it does also monitor acceleration).

The sales pitch- could save you up to 15% on your premium- First, your premium is made up of many things. This 15% does NOT apply to all of them. So already we have a value that is deminishing eh?

It will tell you what your current and projected discounts are when you log in to look at your ongoing results. Ours started dropping slowly from 15% fairly soon.

Our problem- excessive hard braking. I have 20 events- in my Outback Wagon . Here's the rub. I "drive" my cars as I am sure all on here do. I want to feel the car responding yada, yada. The cars perform very well and brake very well, as does my Subaru Outback (brakes well- nothing else) believe it or not. What that leads to is later braking becasue we can, and firmer braking. I assure you my braking is not hard but this device would beg to differ. So I have something like 20 hard braking incidents and 1 extreme braking incident in the last couple of months. The extreme braking incident was indeed a very hard stop to avoid something.

Most of our driving is in the Moderate risk time zone (there is only one worse time zone to be in) and that time is noon - 11pm. Hello???? Yeah that's when peoople drive. We went to a very special event for us- something we never do. The event was out of town and put us driving home after midnight and that made our discount drop off significantly.

The speed they are looking for is simply that you not go over 80mph. I can live with that for 6 moths. My wife has the only incident here when she was moving with traffic on I95 and needed to make a move to merge or change lanes or something and briefly hit 80. She knew it immediately but nothing to do about it. They don't care about any speed up to 80.

They also give you a letter grade vs all other drivers. We are B- on mileage driven- we both have about a 10 mile commute- pitty those who really commute. B+ for braking even with 20 hard braking incidents. B+ for time of day. A+ on speed having only tripped the device once for over 8omph.

So we are down to a projected discount of 7% on one car and 5% on the MINI.

We have had a little stress worrying about and trying to improve our driving with regards to "hard" braking. Which is quite rediculous. After all my driving record is what it is - safe- with the driving habits I have. The safe driver discount we already get supports that.

So it seems if you drive like the proverbial little old lady or little old man this whole thing may work to your advantage. I would not do this again. Can't wait to drop the thing and get back to stress free driving.

BTW, as another poster pointed out, what happens when you know your braking is being monitored and may adversly afffect your rates? You start drifting through stops and carrying your speed at places you never would have before. So this is safer?

JD

 

That's just what I thought..

I'm sure they would raise my rates... Lol.

 

So bottom line my rates would go up because I brake hard to avoid hitting someone texting while driving and in the end pay for their mistakes.

I see texting all the time. In the rear view mirror their eyes on the phone before the car stops behind me. I have duel dash cams that record everything. I try to avoid driving over 80 more like 65 maybe 70 to keep with the flow of traffic.

Interesting comments. In the end while much can be gathered via the internet I like my privacy.

 

So you gave up privacy and picked up additional stress all for ... what ?!?

a

 

Final update. We received an email about our time being up on this insurance device. We thought that was kind of fast. We expected to have it in for Six Months. That is what we understood when it was pitched to us. Well......... We apparently arrived at a time when it is to be "renewed". What? Renewed? Oh yes, it will be in your car forever or as long as you want the potential discount. That is not what we understood when we got it. We understood a six month snapshot if you will. Yeah, they are getting it back now. We unplugged immediately. They are in the box going to the mail.

We explained to the lady that almost none of this was represented correctly in the beginning and how not worth it it has been. Knowing you have a device like this actually encourages you to short stop signs and lights. We also found ourselves in a situation on the highway sandwiched in traffic where the smart move was to speed up and pass a truck to get to the slow lane and get out of crazy traffic. But the speed up would have taken us over the 80 milit oin our device and caused an incident. So we hung out further clogging up the works and made a bad situation worse. She actually agreed. Our call, I know but I'm just sharing.

For us, the takeway is that it is not worth it unless you truly drive like a little old lady. But worse was how miserably represented the whole thing was in the beginning. Had we known the facts, we would have said "that's not for us. We don't fit the parameters". But it seems the insurance companies are a bit desperate to get these things out there to anyone who will listen.