Progressive Insurance announced that it has collected more than 10 billion miles of driving data with Snapshot, its usage-based insurance program.
Snapshot accounted for $2 billion in written premium in 2013, Progressive said, and more than two million vehicles have participated in the program since the company launched its first wireless telematics device in January 2008.
Snapshot currently uses three predictive factors to determine drivers’ discount: mileage, time of day and hard braking. The company will pilot GPS for predictive modeling in the coming year, Progressive said.
Future plans for usage-based insurance at Progressive include sampling a group of drivers to examine how factors such as highway vs. city driving contribute to predicting future losses and potentially bigger discounts for customers, Progressive said. Other opportunities to advance UBI include using smartphones to measure customers' driving behaviors and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) telematics.
“This is a very entrepreneurial space right now and we’re seeing promising results,” Pratt said of smartphones. “OEM’s in-car technologies have the capability to transmit driving data, so we’re exploring options like this that would ultimately replace the customer’s need to plug in a separate device,” said Dave Pratt, Progressive’s general manager of usage-based insurance. “We’re also exploring using technology people already carry with them, like smartphones, to do the same measurement.”
The data Progressive has collected equates to:
- 1.5 billion car trips
- 6.6 average miles per trip
- 1.5 million average “calls” per day from Snapshot devices transmitting data to Progressive
- 110 terabytes of data, which the company says is more than seven times the amount of data stored in the Library of Congress
- Research and development
