coffeebaron: So if someone pulls out from a side road and you successfully brake hard and avoid an accident, you are a bad driver?
No... if you avoid braking hard *and* (presumably) avoid an accident, then you are a "smart" driver. "Smart" is one of those words beloved of marketers that mean whatever you want it to mean.
Using this crude metric to decide anything at all about your driving ability would be crazy.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if Tower uses data from smart driver to deny someone's claim.... "You, via our smart driver app, have told us you were doing 111kph just prior to the accident. On your claim form, you've said you were only doing 100kph. Based on this, your claim is denied".
you could get a 10/10 and still be a bad driver for a few reasons
1. you do not indicate 2. you do not check your mirrors before merging/changing lanes 3. you cut people off while not altering how you are driving 4. you tail gate or you drive slow in the center lanes of a multi lane'd road
there are probably a few more
acceleration and breaking are only a few things that equate to how good or bad a driver is and its pretty poor to offer people discounts/mislead people into thinking they are a good driver cause they can brake/accelerate smoothly.
Jase2985: I was thinking about this on my way home today
you could get a 10/10 and still be a bad driver for a few reasons
1. you do not indicate 2. you do not check your mirrors before merging/changing lanes 3. you cut people off while not altering how you are driving 4. you tail gate or you drive slow in the center lanes of a multi lane'd road
there are probably a few more
acceleration and breaking are only a few things that equate to how good or bad a driver is and its pretty poor to offer people discounts/mislead people into thinking they are a good driver cause they can brake/accelerate smoothly.
IMO its a crock
I tried to test it and found that if I ran stop signs I got no consequence. Encouraged to do worse I found I could drift way over the center line, run orange lights, do 50km in the right hand lane in a 100km zone, talk on my mobile and still end up with thumbs up. I also nearly ran a cyclist over who had no lights and was wearing black and who came storming out of an intersection at night. Slammed my brakes on and got the negative score - obviously I should have kept my speed hit him and not stopped to keep up my good score.
Then I tried my son on it whose a Learner with about 50kms under his belt. He got top marks in the industrial park he practices in. This is despite driving too far to the right, hitting the edge of a round about as he went around and knocking road cones in an attempt to parallel park, parking so far from the kerb I called a taxi to get me to the footpath and, mistaking the through road center line as he approached a giveway as his place to come to a rest. With the car being an auto hes got the acceleration and braking reasonably sorted - even then though still not the smoothest, but not enough to register the GPS as too hard or fast.
I wonder if we could seven sharp or a similar programme todo some independent testing with a representative group of users and across different circumstances to see if anybody actually gets a decent score. An interview with tower representatives would be good as part of tr slot. Anyone know how we get them to consider the story? Any contacts at TVNZ?
vexxxboy: few tips, you cant break sharply, everything has to be smooth . From acceleration to stopping. Its almost impossible in heavy traffic to have a good score. Someone pulls out in front off you and you have to break, or you have to accelerate to merge really affects your score.
Well that's dumb. So if someone pulls out from a side road and you successfully brake hard and avoid an accident, you are a bad driver?
agree, would not be hard to exclude intersections, would also not be difficult to associate the speeds with forces. The biggest issue I have with this app, other than the fact it's a copy of about 10 other apps, is it runs the accelerometer all the time, even when cruising along the motorway, hence battery life is gone.
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