Insurer offers discounts to drivers with monitors

TRENTON, N.J. – A high-tech monitoring device makes it possible to reduce insurance premiums for drivers who avoid jackrabbit starts and slam-on-the-brakes stops, an insurance company says.

The catch? Bad drivers who take a chance on the program may wind up paying a surcharge instead.

Auto insurer Progressive Corp. has begun offering its drivers the chance to cut their costs based on how they actually drive, not only on their age, credit score and number of tickets or accidents on their record.

The monitoring device – sort of like a black box for cars – tells Progressive what time people drive, how many miles they've driven, how fast they accelerate and how often they hit the brakes. It does not track where people go.

Under Progressive's program, customers can earn a first-term discount of up to 10 percent just for signing up. When they renew their policy, their rate could decrease by up to 60 percent based on their driving habits. But it could also increase by up to 9 percent.

After South Dakota Rep. and former Gov. Bill Janklow, R-S.D., collided with a motorcycle last weekend, a state prosecutor said investigators believed Janklow may have run a stop sign, causing the crash in which the motorcyclist died.*

The Associated Press reported that according to a South Dakota highway patrol officer, "Janklow's 1995 Cadillac has a black box, which records information such as how fast the car was going and whether the brakes were applied." How many cars have such black boxes, and what information do they record?

Black boxes—event data recorders like the ones found in airliners—are increasingly common in automobiles and vary from one type of car to another. But cars with airbags have long had onboard computers with the sensors and software necessary to determine within 1/100 of a second that you're in a crash; that's how cars know when to deploy the bags. These computers, called sensing and diagnostic modules, are located inside the transmission hump, behind the dashboard, or under the seat, and constantly collect and process data on the car's acceleration or deceleration. Airbag-equipped cars made by General Motors (which owns Cadillac) have had SDMs since 1974.

Beginning in the 1999 model year, though, GM upgraded SDMs to include an event data recorder. The newer SDMs track the car's speed (from the speedometer), engine RPM, the exact position of the gas pedal, and whether or not the brake pedal was pressed, among other statistics. The SDM keeps the previous five seconds' worth of this data in its onboard memory and, if the airbags are deployed, saves the most recent five seconds as a snapshot of events leading up to a possible collision. Ford and Isuzu added similar features to some models in this decade. Santa Barbara-based Vetronix sells a $2,500 "crash data recovery" gadget that will download the logs from these computers (the company lists what years and models it works with, and what data is recoverable).

Auto engineers designed and installed event-logging SDMs to study accidents and improve their cars' safety, but the data from the boxes has also proven admissible in court.