Discovery Insure has once again launched the Discovery Insure Driving Challenge which aims to help South African drivers improve their driving behaviour.
The challenge runs from 10 August to 31 October 2015. You do not need to be a Discovery Insure client to take part. All you have to do is download the Discovery Insure app onto your smartphone.
Once you have downloaded that app, it will monitor your driving behaviour, such as speeding, harsh braking, harsh cornering and using your cell phone while driving.
Anton Ossip, CEO of Discovery Insure, said: “These behaviours can be modified to lower the number of accidents on our roads. All we need to do, as a nation, is work together to become more aware of the driving behaviours that increase risk for accidents.”
The challenge
“The Discovery Insure Driving Challenge is a good place to start if you want to know how you rate as a driver. The app measures some of the behaviours that increase risk on the roads, and gives drivers a score with details of how to improve their driving behaviour for greater road safety for everyone,” explained Ossip.
There were 60 000 participants in last year’s challenge, and Discovery Insure saw 20% of participating drivers changing their behaviour within the first two days.
“It’s a fact that when dealing with driver behaviour, drivers consistently overestimate their abilities, and underestimate the risk for an accident when talking or texting while driving. This is where the app of the Discovery Insure Driving Challenge makes a difference, and we’ve seen the improvements in driving behaviour following the first challenge,” revealed Ossip.
The results
Over 70 million kilometres of driving behaviour was gathered during the challenge last year. The app rates your driving out of five, measuring factors such as speed, acceleration, harsh breaking, cornering and cell phone use while driving. Over the three months that the challenge was carried out, the average trip rating was 3.5 out of five.
“The outcome of the initial Discovery Insure Driving Challenge showed women were better drivers than men. Interestingly though, men were more prone to speeding and harsh cornering, and women harsh braking and cell phone use,” revealed Discovery Insure.
While making use of the app will not affect the premiums of Discovery Insure clients, there are benefits to using it. Philippa Wild, head of marketing insights at Discovery Insure noted that indirectly the use of the app by clients will affect the cost of their insurance.
“Many existing clients are already using the app as their main telematics device, others use our deep install telematics device. The data collected by the app is already being collected for all our clients. We have over three billion kilometres of driver behaviour so far. We use the information to reward clients for good driving. The better they drive the more rewards they get – up to R800 in fuel cash backs every month, as well as a range of other rewards,” said Wild.
How it works
In order to take part, you simply have to download the Discovery Insure app from your phone’s app store and enter your details. The app will then measure your driving behaviour on daily trips and give you a score out of five.
“Every drive, based on its rating, earns participants tickets into the daily prize draws. Participants earn more tickets into the daily prize draw by challenging friends and family to compete with them,” explained Discovery Insure.
Drivers who participate in the challenge and earn the most tickets and motivate others to join in the challenge, can win a share of R1 million in BP fuel vouchers, rewarding you for driving well.
The data
Wild pointed out that “the main purpose of measuring driver behaviour is to convert it into a user-friendly score (out of 100) to create the awareness among users of how good a driver they actually are.”
The data generated by the app is converted into a score that reflects the relative risk of the driver’s behaviour. The higher the score is, the less likely the person is going to be involved in an accident.
Wild revealed that Discovery Insure also uses the data to:
· To show users visually where they had poor driving events. For example, harsh braking or speeding. This helps them see where they went wrong and quickly improve their driving.
· We de-personalise data to create interesting insights into the way South Africans drive. For example, do women drive better than men, which gender uses their cell phone more and does driving behaviour vary by province. These insights are shared with various stakeholders, including the media to help create awareness around good driving and how easy it is to improve your driving and make a real difference to the dangerous roads in South Africa.
Justmoney tested it:
Jessica Wood, who tested the app on behalf of Justmoney says: “It helped me identify where I break or turn too quickly but it’s poor at detecting when I am on the road in peak traffic. On my way to the highway in peak traffic I was driving so slowly that it didn’t pick up my driving at all. It was only when I hit the highway that the data started to be collected. Once, on my drive into work it divided my drive up into two sessions as I was sitting in traffic for so long.
“It did motivate me to be more aware of my driving. I am more conscious about how harshly I break and to make sure that my cell phone isn’t within reach when I drive.”
For more information on the challenge, click here.