Cameras in Teenagers’ Cars
From WSJ.com:
American Family Mutual Insurance will offer some of its customers a camera system known as DriveCam as a way of improving teenagers’ driving behavior. The DriveCam captures sights and sounds inside and outside the vehicle.
DriveCam’s palm-sized, exception based video event recorder is mounted on the windshield behind the rearview mirror and captures sights and sounds inside and outside the vehicle. Forces (e.g. hard braking, swerving, collision, etc.) cause the recorder to save 20 seconds of audio and video footage – the 10 seconds immediately before and after the triggered event.
When the video event recorder is triggered a light blinks to alert the driver. This is intentional so the driver knows what he/she did to activate the video event recorder and can aim to avoid repeating that behavior.
DriveCam’s Certified Driving Behavior Analysts take a cursory look at downloaded events to identify anything that would be critical for a customer to know immediately (e.g. a collision). Next, the experts closely review and assign a risk score to each event.
The story provides some anecdotes of teenagers who claim that the blinking light has led them to drive in a safer fashion. I think the feedback loop here is an important component for not only tracking behavior, but also trying to improve it. Read the article to get the full details on privacy, the role of parents, and how this will affect our insurance rates. Here is the WSJ video (the article is much better):
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