PAY AS YOU DRIVE ???

[jessicaandrebeccasmummy]

here

Will this ever take off? As i dont drive a lot, I wonder if it would be worth it to save the £47 a month I pay for insurance........ your thoughts?!

no-one even remotely interested?

It already exists for some hire cars. In the USA you can get fined if your drive over the speed limit.
All lorries above a certain size already have a primitive speed logger.

I don't think you're the target, yet, suspect it's high risk drivers in expensive cars, ie young blokes.

GPS gear is cheap, and getting cheaper. In a couple of years you can have a black box for about 50 quid.
Also, it can be integrated as a security system. If the car goes where it shouldn't, it flatly refuses to move.

I see it as inevitable.

Isn't it only for drivers under 23 ?

i couldnt really work it out - ive just turned 24 so out of luck, but do you think it will ever take off?

How on earth will you be able to estimate your monthly insurance costs? Surely there would need to be A LOT of techno stuff installed to make it work?

Weird........ cant get my head round it.

I dunno, my insurance is pretty good atm, can't grumble.

On R4 this morning they said that there was a start-up cost of about £50 to install the equipment in the car. I do well under 10,000 miles a year, often don't get in the car for days one end, am female and over 40 so it might be worth looking at. My insurance is OK for now but I wouldn't mind reducing it if possible.

im the same, use the car mostly to visit dad on a saturday which is a 50 mile round trip, but other than that i do probably 2 shopping trips during the week.... so average no more than 70 miles a week.

70 miles @ 5p a mile = £3.50 multiplied by 4 (avg month) = £14 a month = a hell of a lot less than i pay now!

joelallie is quite probably subsidising people who are more of a risk. More info will allow more accurate pricing, which of course means some will go up as well.
Will take a while to get the tables set up since data on driving habits needs to be set against payouts. Will be very rough approximations at first.

Of course, speeding will get very expensive very quickly.

isn't pay as you go in all commercial areas always more expensive than other methods because it is a business model directed at the poorest?

I think it is quite scary and stinks of the Big Brother society that we live in, whether we like it or not.

Let me explain: they have come up with a reasonably cheap way of putting a black box in a car. The box transmits data which says when, where and how far you drive.

Well, sorry for being pessimistic, but to me this means that it won't be many years until the Government (any Government, not just Labour) start using these boxes for their Road Tax Scheme. The next step will be that it will be compulsory for manufacturers to fit these boxes to new cars. If that happens it won't be long before nearly everyone has a box in their car. We will all be being watched wherever we go. We will have lost our freedom and will have had no choice about it.

What do you think?

I see your point, but I recall a skit long ago about what would have happened if Big Brother had really happened in Britain. It went along the lines of a call to the Big Brother support desk. You can imagine how it went.
If you rang up to demand that you were watched night and day, you'd get a "press 1 for the thought police, 2 to denounce your parents..."
And left on hold for hours.

These things don't look tooo hard to hack, certainly one can easily cause them to stop working for a while without opening the lid.