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Save Money With Pay-As-You-Drive Car Insurance
Aug 27 2008 by Sherrice Gilsbach
8/27/08
Progressive’s MyRate Uses In-Car Device to Record Information
Moms with excellent driving records, listen up! Imagine paying less for car insurance based upon your actual driving habits. If your daily commute involves dropping the kids off at school, hitting the grocery store and maybe the gym before heading home, odds are you could get a lower rate with a new car insurance program. Finally, a bonus for moms — hooray! Oh, and a lower car insurance rate means potentially more cash to pop into the mommy-needs-a-new-pair-of-shoes fund.
Progressive Insurance is now offering MyRate, a pay-as-you-drive program to help reduce consumers’ car insurance costs. This plan is only available in Alabama, Minnesota, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon and Michigan (sorry, everyone else will have to wait for now).
Here’s how it works: Each MyRate customer receives a small device that records speed and time, but not location, and plugs into the car's steering column. Using the speed and time data, Progressive can determine what time of day you tend to drive, how many miles you average and how aggressively you drive.
The pay-as-you-drive plan does have critics who are concerned about privacy issues.
“We see this as kind of a creeping abduction of people’s data,” Charles Samuelson, ACLU of Minnesota’s executive director told the New Jersey Star-Ledger newspaper. “Basically, once they collect that data, it belongs to the insurance company. That’s a big problem.”
Progressive says on its website that it doesn’t use the driving information to monitor where its customers drive.
MyRate also helps customers become better drivers by providing driving data online. By logging into your policy online, you can compare your driving to other MyRate participants, track your recent trips and driving habits, and most importantly, see how much your MyRate discount will be. If your rate isn’t as low as you’d like, you can modify your driving style and frequency. The MyRate plan updates your rate every six months based on your recent driving data, so you’re never stuck with your rates and you always get a chance to improve — how sweet!
However, and this is a big however, if you’re a lead-foot who enjoys swerving in and out of lanes to get somewhere as fast as possible, please don’t sign up for this program. If you don’t heed our warning, you’ll just skew the curve for the rest of the class and deprive moms everywhere of the new shoes you know we deserve.
User Comments
trying to find some cheap insurance for my 2004 honda civic car payment are $199.42 every two weeks
Amazing program! Please start offering it to Florida policy holders. Everybody in my family are safe drivers that would welcome the savings this new auto insurance policy would offer. Attach the device to my forehead if you’d like!