Does anyone know what the thresholds are? Like if I drive 70 in a 65 will I be penalized? What about 75? 80? 85? Do they even have a way to know speed limit? I'm not trying to be skeptical, I just have no idea.
From what I have gathered, no. They have no way of knowing if you're speeding. What they measure is the amount of stops you do, how quickly you stop/accelerate, the number of miles you drive and the actual times you drive. If you drive during rush hour traffic (about 5pm for example) you're driving at a high risk time and you can actually see the graphs where it shows the high risk driving times and the amount of braking you did.
Just for clarity's sake, speed = distance over time. If they're measuring how far you drive and times you drive, they can tell if you're speeding. I'm not saying that Progressive is 'policing' people - just pointing out that when EZ Pass first came around, I believe people got tickets for speeding if they made it from Point A to Point B in less time than they should. My understanding is that EZ Pass doesn't do that anymore. Again, not saying Progressive is monitoring for speeding per se, but if they are measuring time and distance, it's not difficult for that conversion. I have no idea if it would affect rates, etc.
That is a big topic for debate here in south Florida. A state trooper pulled over an off duty Miami cop for doing a reported 120mph on his way to his 2nd job. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/florida/mh-trooper-vs-cop-20111106,0,3725284.story" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/ ... 5284.story</a> The cop would not pull over and when he finally did, the Trooper had to draw her gun to get him out of the car. She said that cops had been driving recklessly through the area for months and she was sick of it. Now there is a debate as to whether or not she was out of line for drawing her weapon AND for even pulling him over in the first place. He was off duty, out of uniform and on his way to a 2nd job. Fuck "professional courtesy". If he hit somebody, they would be just as dead.
I'm somewhat puzzled by the underlying assumption in many of these posts that one is entitled to a low insurance rate, and that by introducing this sort of system, an insurance company is doing something underhanded or unjust. You in essence are simply paying for how you desire to drive here. if you want to drive faster, you pay more insurance. If you don't, you pay less. This is a tradeoff that I personally might be willing to make. Even if rates were to only go up, it's unclear to me why this would be unjust rather than simply inconvenient absent false advertising. And the Lord said, "Let there be Snopes!" He looks upon his creation, and behold it was good.
The Progressive model may not track speed, presumably for PR reasons. The version we built did. Future versions almost certainly will, because it's a sensible metric to measure. I suspect this probably will benefit safe drivers in the majority of cases. That said, I remain ideologically opposed to the widespread introduction of this device. In my city, the cops have a tendency to wrongfully convict people in the face of all available evidence. They can already determine everywhere your cell phone has been. Do they really need access to a device which logs everywhere you go in your car? I just don't trust the police with that much information. I think this fundamentally comes down to the question "do you trust <government/business> to act in your best interests?" If you answer yes, then you probably have no objection to this device. If you answer no, this is just another tool that can be turned into a weapon against you.
I think it's more complex than that. For me it's more 'Do you trust the anonymous mass to drive safely without this device? If you do, please quit smoking crack. If you don't, do you believe that it is more likely that the government will fuck you with this device, than that some moron who would have killed you and your family will instead drive safely because of it?' I certainly believe that the government will fuck people with this sort of device. I'm absolutely positive that there will be people who get fucked over by a mass implementation of this device if it's mandated or the data is made available to law enforcement. But compared to how many people get fucked over by dangerous drivers, and how well people respond to financial penalties with a high likelihood of occurence, I'm thinking there's a reasonable chance of this thing being the lesser evil. Fuck people are stupid. Your car already has a metal strip on it, it's called a license plate. If point to point speed calculations were going to be used to issue speed citations, those metal strips would convey information using a clever technical device called 'cameras' - just like they already do for automated toll stations all around the world, at Casino's in Vegas and throughout England where they do facial recognition on the people in the car for security tracking.
You make a fair point. The likelihood that some tosspot will kill or injure me by driving like a dipshit is far greater than that of the cops framing me as a convenient suspect, probably about 500 to 1. That said, the ever increasing degrees of surveillance worry me. If I want to go to a nightclub now, I can choose between letting them scan my driver's license, giving them my fingerprints, or submitting to facial recognition. At the risk (near certainty) of killing the thread, I can't help but think of the panopticon, as discussed by Foucault. In other words, the easiest way to control people, now that there are so many of them, is to make them believe they are always being watched.
I hate revive a dead thread and all, but I thought this was relevant and should be added here. Especially since when it was suggested that the government would eventually mandate these devices, I was called a nutjob. New legislation to add "black boxes" to all cars I guess I should've said 15 months instead.