Driving behavior has more than twice the predictive power of any other insurance rating factor, according to a 15-year study of five billion real-time driving miles released by
Further, drivers with the highest-risk driving behaviors are two-and-a-half times more costly than those with the lowest-risk behaviors, and therefore auto insurance rates can be much more personalized.
“The consumer was right all along,” said Glenn Renwick, Progressive’s president and CEO. “For most, the rates they’re paying are higher than the risk they actually present—and in many cases, much higher. Until now, insurers had no effective way to capture actual driving behavior and factor that into the rates they could offer. But we have made a meaningful start toward personalized insurance pricing that’s based on measuring real-time driving behavior—the statistics of one."
By adding key driving attributes such as the number of miles actually driven, braking, and time of day of driving, Progressive says it can predict the likelihood of claims far better than with traditional insurance rating variables alone.
For the past 15 years, Progressive has been collecting and analyzing real-time driving data, and the number of miles analyzed has more than doubled in the past 18 months since the launch of Snapshot UBI. Snapshot now is available in 42 states and the District of Columbia.
“It’s a case where the data confirms everyone’s intuition,” added Renwick. “We believed that driving behavior was the most predictive rating factor—but didn’t expect the difference to be this dramatic. Actual driving behavior predicts a driver’s risk more than twice as strongly as any other factor. It shows that we’re not members of an arbitrary actuarial class—we’re individuals with our own set of driving habits, which should be reflected in the price we pay for our insurance.”
According to Progressive, almost a million customers have tried its usage-based insurance; 70 percent of whom end up paying less for auto insurance. In the past 12 months, the company says it has written more than $1 billion in premiums that include a Snapshot-powered discount.
“The name of the game is the quantity of data and the quality of analysis and insight,” said Richard Hutchinson, general manager of usage-based insurance at Progressive.
Progressive now is expanding access to Snapshot to all drivers, not just Progressive customers, who can test drive Snapshot free for 30 days to determine whether their driving behaviors can lower their auto insurance costs.
