Next week, Progressive Corp., of Mayfield Village, Ohio, will begin a pilot program in Minnesota to track how often, how far and at what speed people drive. The insurer will provide up to 5,000 volunteers with a matchbox-sized electronic device to be installed in their cars to gather this information.
The incentive to sign up? Drivers get a guaranteed auto-insurance discount of 5 percent, and savings of up to 25 percent if they drive little and conservatively enough.
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Participants get a 5 percent discount on their first premium just for signing up. After that they can download the data to a home computer and send it to Progressive to save even more money.
"Then at the end of the term we'll send you a "Gee, it's time to upload you data." And at that point you hook it up to your home computer and you can look at the data first. It will tell you what kind of discount you have available and then if you choose to upload that you'll get a 5% discount automatically for sharing the data, then up to 20% depending on how far or how fast you drove, and when you drove" said Haas.
