Discovery Insurance

Dolby

Dolby

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Anyone know this ?

I've heard it's not great because they put a tracker and track speeds etc and penalise ?
 
I think its fair system, i drive about 700KM.. spend about R1K on fuel.. based on my good driver behavior I get about R400PM on the Vitality Drive Program
 
sly said:
I think its fair system, i drive about 700KM.. spend about R1K on fuel.. based on my good driver behavior I get about R400PM on the Vitality Drive Program
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What criteria makes you a 'bad' driver?

I've heard night driving? harsh braking? speed?

My concern is denying a claim because they could see I was doing 100km/h instead of 80km/h
 
harsh cornering, driving at night(2AM-4AM).. don't know how bad it affects the scoring.. ,harsh braking, harsh acceleration
 
Too bloody expensive anyway, what they wanted to charge me on monthly premiums compared to what I am paying now was basically double. SO yea you pay for all those points they give you.
 
I long for the days I wont need to own a car.. soo wasteful... Google Better hurry up with the self-driving cars
 
No. Not 1984. You see 1984 (and big brother) is about trying to control you and punish you for bad behavior. Discovery is about rewarding good driving, not about punishing bad driving. There is a difference.

I doubt they would deny a claim if you were speeding, they might load it tough. I dunno. But try to see the good in what they are doing.
 
I've signed up with Discovery insure in July and I'm paying R250 less on Car and household insurance now and my cashback for the last 3 months were R225, R440 and R400 respectively.
 
I'm going to meet the guy next week and see what it's all about.

But if need to get far, far cheaper per month to adhere to this Big Brother stuff. I don't see driving at 2am a negative ...
 
whizzkid said:
I've signed up with Discovery insure in July and I'm paying R250 less on Car and household insurance now and my cashback for the last 3 months were R225, R440 and R400 respectively.
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sounds great to me!! :D

I haven't driven at 2 am in years!! ;)
 
Friends of mine have signed up and are saving R200- R300 on premiums.
They're still in their frist month - so we'll see what their driving style is like :p
 
I can understand classifying a bad driver by the way they brake and accelerate etc.. but by the time that they drive? thats just a bit pathetic in my opinion.

There are times when I need to rush out at 2am.... and just for that I'd be penalised? No Thanks
 
B.O.F.H. said:
I can understand classifying a bad driver by the way they brake and accelerate etc.. but by the time that they drive? thats just a bit pathetic in my opinion.

There are times when I need to rush out at 2am.... and just for that I'd be penalised? No Thanks
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Exactly, a pointless exercise IMHO. Their criteria is obviously worked on according to statistics, especially with reference to the time frame. What these insurance companies seem to be unable to grasp is that people crash their cars as a result of a decision they made/failed to make. Harsh braking. acceleration, cornering, etc might be indicative of an aggressive driving pattern, but can hardly be classified as dangerous driving by default.

Example: I can quite easily have an aggressive driving style, but be very safe on the road at the same time by keeping good following distances, and by never endangering other road users with my actions. IMHO this is like sending taxi drivers on a Defensive Driving course and expect them to start behaving on the road...not gonna happen.

Address the root causes, not the symptoms.
 
Here's the full story. I think it's a brilliant idea. I would go that route if I needed car insurance again. :D

Insurance - especially motor insurance - is at best a grudge purchase. No matter what the insurance companies say, we all know that in the long run we are going to spend more on premiums than we will ever get out.

If that weren't true, no insurance company would stay in business very long.

Of course, it would help if the appalling accident rate could be reduced; more attentive drivers, concentrating on what they're doing rather than fiddling with the car's radio or sending text messages, would have fewer crashes, which would also help keep premiums down.

But how to change the notoriously inattentive attitude of the average driver?

Several insurance companies offer cash-back schemes if you don't claim for a given number of years, others lower premiums, but the operative word is just that: years. Not many people can concentrate for that long.

Enter Discovery Insure, the short-term insurance division of the company that turned healthcare on its ear by treating it like a credit-card business.

Wouldn't it be a real incentive, said Discovery Insure CEO Anton Ossip, if insurance policy holders could earn reward points on a monthly basis (there's that credit-card model again!) for driving safely, that could be applied to something tangible such as, say, their fuel bill?

But how do you gauge good driving behaviour? How do you measure someone's Driving Quotient, in real time, every time they drive?

The answer came from an unexpected source: Formula One racing.

At a road show this week at Killarney racing circuit near Cape Town, legendary racing car designer Rory Byrne, widely recognised as the most successful Formula One designer of all time with 99 Grand Prix wins, seven Drivers' and seven Constructors' championships on his CV, and now a specialised engineering advisor to Discovery Insure, explained that the telemetry used to measure all the forces acting on a racing car, which makes it possible for team engineers to set up a F1chassis for top performance, can be applied to the street as well, where it's called telematics.

By measuring the strength and duration of the forces acting on a moving car it's easy to gauge the skill and concentration of the driver. Really skilled drivers move fluently from gentle braking to smooth acceleration to clean, steady steering inputs - and they record phenomenal fuel-consumption figures too.

Cue Deon du Rand, head of C-Track, part of the international Digicore group; C-Track has been using satellite and cellphone transmissions to track commercial vehicles for years. It's taken five years, but C-Track has now developed a three-wire “black box”, about the size of a packet of 20 cigarettes, that can be installed in a concealed place on a customer's car and will measure the forces acting on that car in all six axes (up and down, left and right, braking and accelerating) and send that information to a server in real time.

A relatively simple computer programme (the wired generation would call it an app) converts a month's worth of data (ignoring the occasional panic stop when the neighbour's dog ran out in front of your car and the foot-flat acceleration you used to get by a slow-moving truck, unless they happen all the time!) into a simple report and a score, which earns you a certain number of DQ (Driver Quotient) points.

Those points can then be used to save you up to 40 percent on your monthly fuel spend at BP stations using your Vitality card - that's a real-time incentive for driving like a pro.

Of course, the system knows exactly where you are, plus how well - and how fast! - you are driving, all the time, which opens a huge can of privacy issues, but Du Rand said bluntly that if you didn't want people to know where you were, you'd have to leave your cellphone at home!

Ossip assured us that the information would never be used to repudiate a claim or prejudice a Discovery client unless that client lied about the time or place of an incident, which sounds good, but I can't help wondering how long that attitude would hold in the face of a Supreme Court subpoena.

But, putting aside Big Brother issues, how easy is it to beat the system? The answer is, not very.

Discovery had half a dozen Mercedes-Benz C180's on hand, each fitted with a C-Track Insure, and we were invited to drive around the circuit as smoothly as we could, and then immediately see our lap analysed in terms of harsh driver inputs.

I went round like a real featherfoot, using the motorcycle lines because they're smoother than the ideal lines for a car where you turn in much later and much harder, accelerating smoothly from the apex of each corner to about halfway to the next turn-in point, reaching a maximum of 143km/h and, I thought, floating like a butterfly.

Nevertheless, I lost points for two harsh accelerations and one harsh braking manoeuvre, which proved that yes, you can beat the system, but you have to be a really skilled driver and you have to concentrate on your driving all the time - and there's nothing wrong with that.

Motoring newsletter - click here to keep up to speed with the best in motoring
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http://www.iol.co.za/motoring/industry-news/insurance-you-can-beat-the-system-1.1181213
 
MFour said:
Exactly, a pointless exercise IMHO. Their criteria is obviously worked on according to statistics, especially with reference to the time frame. What these insurance companies seem to be unable to grasp is that people crash their cars as a result of a decision they made/failed to make. Harsh braking. acceleration, cornering, etc might be indicative of an aggressive driving pattern, but can hardly be classified as dangerous driving by default.

Example: I can quite easily have an aggressive driving style, but be very safe on the road at the same time by keeping good following distances, and by never endangering other road users with my actions. IMHO this is like sending taxi drivers on a Defensive Driving course and expect them to start behaving on the road...not gonna happen.

Address the root causes, not the symptoms.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I cannot agree with you. There is absolutely nothing safe about an aggressive driving style. By adopting an aggressive attitude, you are putting both yourself and your fellow road users at risk.

As for the 2 am story, it will obviously not matter if you occasionally run at that time, but the guy who regularly does a 2 or 3 am stint every weekend, and drives like a twat whilst he's doing it, will get nailed. I don't have a problem with that.
 
Fazda said:
but the guy who regularly does a 2 or 3 am stint every weekend, and drives like a twat whilst he's doing it, will get nailed. I don't have a problem with that.
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But what if he doesn't? :/

I know people who go out and party to all hours ... and drink Appletiser. They'd be penalized unfairly.

It's also a little grey on the paragraph :

A relatively simple computer programme (the wired generation would call it an app) converts a month's worth of data (ignoring the occasional panic stop when the neighbour's dog ran out in front of your car and the foot-flat acceleration you used to get by a slow-moving truck, unless they happen all the time!) into a simple report and a score, which earns you a certain number of DQ (Driver Quotient) points.

How often is too often before it lists you as a bad driver?
I mean driving to Kruger Park - which my stepfather does every 2 weeks - you'd be passing a ton of cars?

As I say, he's coming through next week ... but I am skeptical
 
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