Hooray for Insurance Discounts!
Dec. 1st, 2005 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ambericaI get my auto insurance through Progressive, and they offer a really neat discount program called TripSense (Jon and I both participate in it.)
Here's how it works: Progressive sent me a little box that is a little larger than a Lego block, and then I just plugged that box directly into my car's computer (it's not hard - you just plug it right in kind of below the dashboard.) This little box then keeps track of what times of day you drive, how many aggressive starts/stops you make, and how often you drive above 75 mph. Then, every 6 months, I get a reminder email from Progressive about uploading this information to get a discount! All I do is remove the box from my car, connect it to my computer with the USB cord that came with it, and it shows me little charts that tell how much I drove for the last 6 months, how often I drove during "high, medium, and low risk" hours, and all that other good stuff. The less high risk hours I drove, the less I sped over 75 mph, and the less aggressively I accelerated and braked, the higher my discount is! (If I didn't drive at all for 6 months, the discount would be 20% by default.)
Then, if I like what the little charts show me, I can decide to upload that data to Progressive. They then give me an additional 5% discount just for uploading! So that's a potential 25% discount if you are a totally "perfect" driver. Last term I got a discount of 22.7% or something awesome like that. This term I didn't do quite so well, but I still got 17.25% off! So my bill should be coming in the mail shortly, and that discount will be reflected. Nice!
Now don't worry - the first thing I thought when I heard about this was, "What if they penalize me for bad driving?!" - but they don't. You can't get higher insurance rates because of this program, and really, even if you drive so much and so badly that your discount is 0%, you STILL get that 5% uploading bonus discount! So really you only benefit from this program. Plus, even if you are someone who tends to go over the posted speed limit, they can't tell from this software what the posted speed limit is, so you don't get penalized for that. It's really cool.
When I first switched to Progressive, I was told about this program and decided to check it out since it was totally risk-free (I never HAVE to upload anything). I was so impressed with the details when I looked into it, I told Jon all about it and he signed up about a week or two later! He was already a Progressive customer but had not heard about TripSense before. My dad is also kind of interested and might switch over. I'd recommend it to anyone - even bad drivers! And for you GOOD drivers, it's an even better deal!
Here's how it works: Progressive sent me a little box that is a little larger than a Lego block, and then I just plugged that box directly into my car's computer (it's not hard - you just plug it right in kind of below the dashboard.) This little box then keeps track of what times of day you drive, how many aggressive starts/stops you make, and how often you drive above 75 mph. Then, every 6 months, I get a reminder email from Progressive about uploading this information to get a discount! All I do is remove the box from my car, connect it to my computer with the USB cord that came with it, and it shows me little charts that tell how much I drove for the last 6 months, how often I drove during "high, medium, and low risk" hours, and all that other good stuff. The less high risk hours I drove, the less I sped over 75 mph, and the less aggressively I accelerated and braked, the higher my discount is! (If I didn't drive at all for 6 months, the discount would be 20% by default.)
Then, if I like what the little charts show me, I can decide to upload that data to Progressive. They then give me an additional 5% discount just for uploading! So that's a potential 25% discount if you are a totally "perfect" driver. Last term I got a discount of 22.7% or something awesome like that. This term I didn't do quite so well, but I still got 17.25% off! So my bill should be coming in the mail shortly, and that discount will be reflected. Nice!
Now don't worry - the first thing I thought when I heard about this was, "What if they penalize me for bad driving?!" - but they don't. You can't get higher insurance rates because of this program, and really, even if you drive so much and so badly that your discount is 0%, you STILL get that 5% uploading bonus discount! So really you only benefit from this program. Plus, even if you are someone who tends to go over the posted speed limit, they can't tell from this software what the posted speed limit is, so you don't get penalized for that. It's really cool.
When I first switched to Progressive, I was told about this program and decided to check it out since it was totally risk-free (I never HAVE to upload anything). I was so impressed with the details when I looked into it, I told Jon all about it and he signed up about a week or two later! He was already a Progressive customer but had not heard about TripSense before. My dad is also kind of interested and might switch over. I'd recommend it to anyone - even bad drivers! And for you GOOD drivers, it's an even better deal!
