- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
A new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study compared smartphone telematics with police reports for almost 17,000 crashes in Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. After excluding passive screen activity such as an untouched navigation display, the data still show a huge gap: phones detected active use before crashes far more often than police documented it.



It stopped looking good to me about a month into use when I realized I changed my driving habits to make the app happy, not maximize safety/preservation of life. As far as I knew, it only tracked hard braking and speeding. There was an instance where I saw something step out between parked cars and I did a controlled gentle brake instead of a full panic brake. I’m aware a panic brake increases the chance of me getting rear ended, but there should be no second thought about it when you think you might be about to kill a child. Deleted the app as soon as I got home. This was nearly a decade ago.
The irony to me is now seeing overreactive camera-based auto braking that brakes harder and more often than I ever did.