That's what driving lessons are for, live.  Experience should make you a better driver of course, but I had a year of lessons before I sat my test, by which time I was reasonably good at driving fairly smoothly and at sensible speed.

No, I'm sure I'm no better a driver than anyone else here and made plenty of mistakes when I first started but I can see the smartbox thing as a useful tool to aid further learning for inexperienced drivers.

You get the basic skills down when you're learning then the smartbox highlights any niggles that remain that could be ironed out to make you safer and more efficient.

@igor
Well it's either going to highlight stuff thats wrong, or it's going to save you money, can't do both surely.

@Unlikely
Spot on

Hi Unlikely, where the fick have you been?  

I'm a bit off about all of the financial type institutions atm.  i can only see what they do as a way of amking them more money, nothing to do with safety. 
More accidents mean they put premiums up anyway - they had a field day with the snow a couple of years ago.

Liveinadive wrote:

@igor Well it's either going to highlight stuff thats wrong, or it's going to save you money, can't do both surely. @Unlikely Spot on

I quite agree - the bottom line for the insurance companies is money.  The point though is that to end 2009, for every £100 that was paid in premiums, £123 was paid out in claims.  Some insurers have decided that a smartbox will help tip the balance in their favour, whether that's more through increased premiums for bad drivers or reduced claims for those (esp. 17 yr male) who drive more sensibly and have fewer collisions.

@live - it can do both - it points out stuff that you're doing wrong - you fix it - it saves you money.

But to be sure it's working you should spend the first 90 days driving "perfectly" and the next breaking every law you can think of, preferably in front of the police.

£650,000 speeding fine lol.

Sorry, my car doesn't go from 30-0 in less than 1.5s.

Also, I'm a little alarmed that anyone can be considered roadworthy after only a week behind the wheel.

To be fair Moto, we have established that you are an unstable psychotic time bomb when on the road.

Skerret wrote:

To be fair Moto, we have established that you are an unstable psychotic time bomb when on he road.

Well, yeah, you should actually be in prison for that story about taking offence to someone's driving, following him 100 miles out of your way, goading him into stopping, and then assaulting him to a degree that sounded like GBH.  

Regarding the secret watch-your-driving box thing, loads of people out here have them.  They don't contain GPS (and the OBD port in most cars would be shielded from GPS signals anyway), they can only read info provided by the OBD port itself.  

They're well written about here, and the insurers over here have to be pretty open about what they do with them.  There's only 2 parameters that they regularly use here; braking effort and time.  If you're always braking sharply, they assume that you are more likely to be in an accident.  If you're always driving at 4am, they assume you're often tired and correlate that with stats of when accidents tend to happen, and adjust your premium appropriately.

The biggest insurer that uses them (Progressive) says they don't use RPM data as it's not comparable; there's no reference to redline, there's no way to tell it's a diesel that revs to 4500 or Unlikely's car with a 9000rpm redline.  They also say that it'd be unfair to penalise you if you live up a mountain and have to drive up it at high revs every day after work.

One of my closest friends here has one, albeit for the "family" car and not his commuting one (the night shifts would tick the "unsociable hours" box too often).  He and his wife have saved something like 25% on their first renewal.

Anyway, if they work the same as the ones here, they're not going to know what the speed limit was or anything.

Would you follow someone home from the pub?

Moto70 wrote:

2 Cavalier King Charles

psy-cho

Moto70 wrote:

a bloke who was continuely cutting people up, forcing people to brake sharply and genuinely just causing mayhem. He tried to undertake me in queues of traffic but ended up getting boxed in, I was laughing at him and he went mental giving it loads from within his car. I turned off at the same time as him and got out of my car, he also got out and was still giving it large so I physically showed him I wasn't happy. I look at it that it could've been my Dad, my sister, your missus, etc he was having a go at so I think he got what he fucking deserved.

Hmm.  If he was gesticulating wildly at my wife, I think she'd just quietly ignore him and let him carry on past without it affecting her day.

I'm more worried that one day I'll be trying to get somewhere with my daughter gravely sick in the back of the car, and you'll do your "road vigilante" act on me with an entirely inappropriate and misplaced sense of responsibility.  Or I'll be worried that you'll take offence to my driving to the point of assault.

If you think someone's driving badly, ignore it.  If you think someone's driving dangerously, call the police.  There's absolutely no civilised or acceptable reason to follow them somewhere and then attack them.

Nope sorry, still not justified. He was driving like a bellend, ignore or call the police. If you want to flip him off do so and then forget about it. There's no reason either of you should have got out of your cars, he's just as in the wrong as you were. 

Also if everyone abided by the laws and we had no need for the military and lived in utopian harmony, Elm would be a commercial pilot instead of a fighter pilot so your last point was as clumsy as it was stupid.