Aaron Landry

UPDATE: Progressive TripSense is now Progressive MyRate

I talked about getting the Progressive TripSense sensor last month and now I plugged it in to see what it says about my driving.

Their version of math is weird. I will try to explain the best I can. You start with a potential of 25% off your insurance. You get 5% off no matter what. You get 5% off if you drive under 75mph 99.25% of the time.

I’ve spent 0.83% of my driving over 75mph so I lost that. The last 15% is relative to the times of the day you drive. They catagorize Low, Medium and High Risk miles and I was very close to even on all three categories, but their strange calulations say that I lose 25% of the potential 15% savings which is under 15% apparently. Overall, I only save the 5% because I have the device and give them all of my driving habits and data.

Their interface also decides to not tell you how many miles you’ve spent driving in the various risk levels, just how many miles it predicts it would be if you travelled the same amount for 365 days. For example, it says “Your usage discount is reduced at a rate of 1.25% for every 1,000 medium-risk miles driven per year. For example, someone who drives 300.0 medium-risk miles would see their Usage Discount reduced by 0.38%. (300 * (1.25/1,000) = 0.38%)” It tells me that I’d drive 8,664 miles a year, so it says I lose “10.83%,” which means I’d lose that many percentage points of the 25% total, not the percentage at which my potential discount is reduced.

After “-5.19%” and “-9.97%” for my Low and High risk miles added as well, I don’t have anything left from my pool of “15%.” It also tells me that I have 8.7 “Aggressive accelerations (per 100 miles)” and 8.9 “Aggressive brakes (per 100 miles).”

Using the CarChip Software from Davis Instruments I am able extract much, much more data than what Progressive provides. It says that 0.31G is the “Hard Braking Threshold” while the “Extreme Braking Threshold” is 0.45G. Good to know what they are basing their information on, I guess.

It also indicated that I’ve driven 1052.7 miles with it and only 17 minutes and 28 seconds were spent above 75mph. That’s essentially 17 minutes that shaved my potential discount down 5 percentage points.

It also showed me a graph of my driving from when I got my ticket on 27 Aug 05. Sure enough, I was indeed going exactly 45mph as the cop said. Interesting enough.

Anyway, here’s the worst part about this Progressive TripSense thing so far: When I plugged in the sensor and launched the Progressive software, it gave me the error message saying it couldn’t find my device in Progressive’s database. Now why is the software calling home and telling them my sensor information and perhaps more on launch? Especially disturbing when they say that no data is sent to them until you specify. That’s BS as far as I can tell.

This shit is not worth it at all, unless you really want the free sensor to monitor your driving habits at the expense of giving your detailed driving habits to your insurance company.