Black box insurance and advisory speed limits
Discussion
TwigtheWonderkid said:
BBs were introduced in 1995, on private car insurance as a niche product for young drivers. All the tinfoil hat loons told us it was the thin end of the wedge, and soon we'd all have them. A quarter of a century later, and here we are, those 18 y/olds are now 43, and it's a niche product for young drivers.
And in 2022, when EU laws mandate that every new car sold in the EU (and, by extension, the UK) must be fitted with an 'intelligent' speed limiting device and a GPS system?RSTurboPaul said:
TwigtheWonderkid said:
BBs were introduced in 1995, on private car insurance as a niche product for young drivers. All the tinfoil hat loons told us it was the thin end of the wedge, and soon we'd all have them. A quarter of a century later, and here we are, those 18 y/olds are now 43, and it's a niche product for young drivers.
And in 2022, when EU laws mandate that every new car sold in the EU (and, by extension, the UK) must be fitted with an 'intelligent' speed limiting device and a GPS system?We've seen MPs recently calling for Black Boxes to be legally required for younger drivers when one has an accident and lives are lost. Yes insurance companies only care about cost and profits but governments are they to try to see past the cost and save lives.
We all see people using dash cams now. Personally I think the risks are 2 way in that. If my driving were questionable then does me having a dash cam help me or the police. Right now I don't have one so you decide. These dash cams cost money and yet people are paying for them - why?
You can get useful data from a Black Box in the event of a crash. Even without dash cams. Imagine if all vehicles had a BB involved in or close to an accident - or i believe we call them collisions now. You could accurately read the data of all the vehicle's speeds and any g forces from collisions or impacts and rotation if vehicles spun.
The AA are now offering a BB as a part of their break down service. Its still in its infancy so not sure how popular it will become. Monitoring the vehicle's well being seems to have value to the AA. Only us as individuals can decide how we value someone like the AA constantly monitoring our vehicle for potential problems is worth to us - perhaps elderly people might see more value in that or less car savvy owners who just see a car as a requirement to provide transport in rural areas. Then perhaps the AA start to add insurance on top and the costs of the BB are already absorbed or partly absorbed due to the break down offering.
Maybe the insurance companies right now are paying too much for their BB and as the prices drop then they will become more viable. Perhaps as more people start to use BB to get better premiums then the prices of insurance without a BB will increase and more and more people will switch. This will take time.
Just because the BB is not more widely used now does not mean that it won't change over time. More insurance companies are buying more BB now so the numbers of these is increasing. They are going somewhere. They are being used for something.
anonymous said:
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Don’t you think something that mitigates his “over enthusiasm” until he has some ore experience under his belt would be a good thing?I agree we all did stupid things. Sometimes they had consequences and sometimes those consequences were serious ones. If BBs stop those then I think that’s a good thing.
Countdown said:
anonymous said:
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Don’t you think something that mitigates his “over enthusiasm” until he has some ore experience under his belt would be a good thing?I agree we all did stupid things. Sometimes they had consequences and sometimes those consequences were serious ones. If BBs stop those then I think that’s a good thing.
Countdown said:
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Don’t you think something that mitigates his “over enthusiasm” until he has some ore experience under his belt would be a good thing?I agree we all did stupid things. Sometimes they had consequences and sometimes those consequences were serious ones. If BBs stop those then I think that’s a good thing.
ATM said:
Modern cars are safer than older cars but they are also much much quicker. I've had cars when I was younger that would struggle to get over 70 mph. Its almost impossible to say that about any new car sold today. Should we allow kids to just get in and drive these cars at any speed they so choose when we know they're at risk or the highest risk category of any driver.
Perhaps we could train them first and assess their driving skills?BertBert said:
ATM said:
Modern cars are safer than older cars but they are also much much quicker. I've had cars when I was younger that would struggle to get over 70 mph. Its almost impossible to say that about any new car sold today. Should we allow kids to just get in and drive these cars at any speed they so choose when we know they're at risk or the highest risk category of any driver.
Perhaps we could train them first and assess their driving skills?There was a Welsh [I think] MP calling to make Black Boxes mandatory for new drivers last year when one died in a crash not long after passing test - again memory sketchy here. So yes we all know this is the highest risk category of driver.
I do agree with some of the comments here - that I would feel better if I had children getting them some form of monitoring device. I do not want to try to tell people how to parent their children because that is a can of worms. Perhaps this is where the government comes in with its law making.
I agree that giving kids better training of handling speed in a car and skidding is a good idea but I dont see how that can replace monitoring. I think it would be difficult to argue that monitoring is a bad idea but understand some parents think their kids are wonderful and will never have a problem. Again possible chance of straying into telling others how to parent their kids which I do not want to do.
None of us want to see kids getting hurt or worse as new drivers.
None us want big brother rules and regs telling us what we can and cant do all the time.
Navigating the middle ground here feels tricky.
anonymous said:
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Whilst Black Box is a term used in data modelling, big data can also be used to define the aggregate of data coming from the physical black boxes in large numbers of cars. Read the definition of Big Data from that post, and it's exactly the sort of complex, large data sets that you'd get from a large number of drivers with a black box fitted to their cars.So, you have all the data being provided by hundreds - maybe thousands - of cars fitted with black boxes. Some of those drivers will have collisions and make insurance claims, which will fit into different categories - hitting a pedestrian, hitting a stationary object, colliding with another vehicle. Those categories can basically be assigned by a human, but working out what each of those accidents has in common based on the black box data is likely to be too difficult for humans to do reliably, and it could be that there is some abstract, subtle piece of data in the way that those drivers behaved that a human would miss.
Machine learning based on that big data can be used to look for those nuances, and then look for other drivers that display similar patterns in their driving. Or, to take an example mentioned on here, someone mentioned differences in smoothness between a manual or an automatic gearbox. Using big data will allow that to be compensated out, so that a manual driver isn't unfairly penalised because they're not as smooth as a DSG - the data will show that a manual driver is less smooth than a similarly safe auto driver.
So yes, big data can use Black Box modelling, but it can also be used to model and understand data from a black box.
BertBert said:
Perhaps we could train them first and assess their driving skills?
I'm not sure that's the answer. A 50 y/o passing their test is just as inexperienced and lacking in training and skills, but is far less likely to crash. In fact, the insurance rates for a new 50 y/o driver aren't a massive amount more than an experienced 50 y/o driver (once you've excluded ncb). My wife's friend passed her test at 49 and took over her husbands Audi A4 3.0 Cabriolet. He was paying about £220 with 65% ncb, and her cost was around £500 without ncb as a new driver!! I wonder how much an 18 y/o would pay to insure that car!!!You can't train teenagers to act like 50 years olds. It's not an experience issue, it's an attitude / maturity issue. And no peer pressure. My wife's mate of 49 didn't have 4 other 49 year old passengers in the car egging her on to go faster.
anonymous said:
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It surely has everything to do with insurance companies, in that they will seek to gain access to the data in order to check who is exceeding the limits, how, where and when?I recall someone posting (on here, I think) about a BMW M2 driver who'd managed to roll it on the NC500, and the Police (and therefore, I assume) the insurance companies were actively trying to access the 'black box' data stored in the ECU re: throttle openings etc.
The EU naturally says 'It's for your own good', but reveal their hand by saying elsewhere about how it will enable real-time enforcement of all offences.
I think my point is that an offence does not mean one is a 'bad driver' - we all know speed limits that have been lowered to ridiculously slow levels at the whim of a local politician and whiney locals, so if driving in a way that is entirely sensible, that reflects how the majority of (non-BB) drivers choose to drive on the road, is able to be punished financially and in terms of licence penalties, does that really help road safety or make one a 'bad driver'?
Road safety is not about following a set of numbers or driving in a set (slow, steady, BB-monitored) manner - it is about adapting to the constantly changing circumstances and, yes, on some occasions breaking the law as written.
Enforcing what is right and enforcing what is easy are two different things.
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Straight from the link, under the definition of Big Data:"Data can be both structured and unstructured, and data types can be both numerical and categorical"
What makes it big data is that it's incredibly complex with a huge number of potential variables, and as the definition states "having high dimensionality and both numerical and categorical data type". It certainly meets 3 of the 4 Vs - volume, variety, and velocity.
I'd argue that the large variety of potential scenarios involved alone is enough to qualify the data as unstructured. This isn't the simple telemetry of a car on a circuit, this is the telemetry of a car travelling along potentially any road in the whole of the UK, where that road contains a set of hazards that are likely completely unknown. In the same way that an image is considered unstructured data - even though there are a finite number of options for each pixel - then it's fair to say that the potential data from that telemetry is also unstructured.
RSTurboPaul said:
Road safety is not about following a set of numbers or driving in a set (slow, steady, BB-monitored) manner -
Road safety is all about reducing the number of accidents, or making the accidents that do happen less serious. Driving in a slow, steady, BB-monitored manner does just that. 
RSTurboPaul said:
Road safety is not about following a set of numbers or driving in a set (slow, steady, BB-monitored) manner - it is about adapting to the constantly changing circumstances and, yes, on some occasions breaking the law as written..
When would road safety require you to break the law?Countdown said:
RSTurboPaul said:
Road safety is not about following a set of numbers or driving in a set (slow, steady, BB-monitored) manner - it is about adapting to the constantly changing circumstances and, yes, on some occasions breaking the law as written..
When would road safety require you to break the law?RSTurboPaul said:
Countdown said:
RSTurboPaul said:
Road safety is not about following a set of numbers or driving in a set (slow, steady, BB-monitored) manner - it is about adapting to the constantly changing circumstances and, yes, on some occasions breaking the law as written..
When would road safety require you to break the law?You'e said that Road safety is occasionally about breaking the law. I was just interested to know in what situations that would be true (because it's suggesting that the "Law" that you would be breaking is unsafe)
RSTurboPaul said:
Countdown said:
RSTurboPaul said:
Road safety is not about following a set of numbers or driving in a set (slow, steady, BB-monitored) manner - it is about adapting to the constantly changing circumstances and, yes, on some occasions breaking the law as written..
When would road safety require you to break the law?TwigtheWonderkid said:
That's not quite what he said, but seeing as you ask, if we all drove within the speed limits at all times, no one ever jumped a red light, crossed the solid white lines, and never drove carelessly by being too close to the car in front, then whilst not being eliminated, the numbers of accidents would be reduce hugely, and the accidents that happened would rarely be serious.
If everyone obeyed the highway code, at all times, then any collisions would be as a result of unforeseeable mechanical catastrophe (rather than merely s
t maintenance), or sudden onset medical emergency.But I have been in the position where I should have jumped a red light on my bike, because I could perfectly safely have made a left turn on red. Meanwhile, the light didn't trigger by my presence, and the van driver that triggered it turned out to be a c
t who nearly ran me off the road!So breaking the law can sometimes be the safer course of action to mitigate the homicidally s
t driving of others, especially if the law and infrastructure is motor-centric, and you're not a motor vehicle. But if everybody always obeyed the rules, then there wouldn't be crap like that to mitigate.Solocle said:
If everyone obeyed the highway code, at all times, then any collisions would be as a result of unforeseeable mechanical catastrophe (rather than merely st maintenance), or sudden onset medical emergency.
How do you know? Has the Highway Code been proven to be a fail proof system in some way?t maintenance), or sudden onset medical emergency.Based on how I behaved during my first 3 or 4 years of driving, I would feel much better if my future child had a BB.
In fact, when I think about the driving of my friends back then, 2 of which were killed simply by driving like idiots, then I can’t see any reason to not have a black box.
Driving lessons and a driving test teach you almost nothing, and you only start learning to drive once you have a licence, and I would rather that learning took place within the speed limits and with driving that was ‘smooth and careful’ (as per parameters measured by the BB).
A friend of mine’s son turned 17 a couple of years ago, and stated quite simply “if he drives like I did after he passes his test, he won’t make it to his 18th birthday, so he’s getting a black box on his car and that’s that”
Myself and all my friends were polite, well behaved, middle class kids who would do (mostly) what our parents asked of us, yet once we got behind the wheel. It was like ‘Wacky Racers’, purely because we liked cars, and it absolutely resulted in deaths.
I have no doubt my parents didn’t even realise the half of what I was up to.
But 124mph absolutely flat out in a Golf GTi 16v, in a 30mph limit, aged 18, was what I was up to.
I can’t see the downsides to BB/trackers for new drivers. It simply forces them to behave relatively sensibly, while allowing them to build up a couple of years of driving experience.
We will look back in another 5 years and consider it absolute lunacy that new drivers were allowed on the roads without a tracker or BB.
In fact, when I think about the driving of my friends back then, 2 of which were killed simply by driving like idiots, then I can’t see any reason to not have a black box.
Driving lessons and a driving test teach you almost nothing, and you only start learning to drive once you have a licence, and I would rather that learning took place within the speed limits and with driving that was ‘smooth and careful’ (as per parameters measured by the BB).
A friend of mine’s son turned 17 a couple of years ago, and stated quite simply “if he drives like I did after he passes his test, he won’t make it to his 18th birthday, so he’s getting a black box on his car and that’s that”
Myself and all my friends were polite, well behaved, middle class kids who would do (mostly) what our parents asked of us, yet once we got behind the wheel. It was like ‘Wacky Racers’, purely because we liked cars, and it absolutely resulted in deaths.
I have no doubt my parents didn’t even realise the half of what I was up to.
But 124mph absolutely flat out in a Golf GTi 16v, in a 30mph limit, aged 18, was what I was up to.
I can’t see the downsides to BB/trackers for new drivers. It simply forces them to behave relatively sensibly, while allowing them to build up a couple of years of driving experience.
We will look back in another 5 years and consider it absolute lunacy that new drivers were allowed on the roads without a tracker or BB.
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