Car insurance is about as banal as topics of conversation can get, but one South Korean company has figured out a way to make insurance premiums and safe driving habits social.
Tmap Mobility, the company responsible for turning driver safety scores into social media, operates a lot like insurance companies here in the U.S. The Seoul-based mobility firm uses your phone to track acceleration, braking, cornering and speeding and creates a driver safety score, mirroring the kind of telemetry data that stateside insurers like Allstate offer as an opt-in feature incentivized by insurance premium discounts, but there is a twist with Tmap. Instead of being privatized and highly guarded like they are in the U.S., a report from the Korea Herald details how driver safety scores have become public and prideful in South Korea.
A glance at Tmap's own website illuminates articles like "Tips from the Driving Score Team to quickly raise your score" and "What kind of cars do people with a perfect driving score drive?" Keeping an appropriate distance between cars and being especially gentle with the controls are just some of the metrics that Tmap says helps raise your driver safety score. Drivers who use the app can see where their driving habits rank them against other drivers. Participation in these usage-based insurance models is voluntary in Korea, but many of the countries residents wear their perfect driving scores as a badge of honor.
"When I got a perfect 100 last month, I posted it online like a medal," Lee Ji-yeon, a 39-year-old office worker in Incheon, told the Korea Herald. "It made me think more about how I drive, even when no one is watching."
This kind of new social media was not created simply for fun. Tmap says its mission is to make driving safer for all South Koreans, and it has data to back up its claim. First introduced in 2016, Tmap's Driving Score program has over 19 million drivers enrolled, with around 10.1 million of them being eligible for insurance discounts. Now, nearly 10 years in, Tmap claims it's Driver Score program prevented 31,366 car crashes between 2018 and 2020.
The methodology behind this corporate claim comes from an internal model which compares the accident rates of drivers with high driving scores to those with lower ones and then adjusts for distance driven. Korea's annual crash rate has plummeted over the last decade, going from 223,552 in 2014 to 198,296 in 2023. This figure coincides not only with the introduction of usage-based insurance, but also with the rollout of expansive unmanned speed cameras and stricter school zone speed limits. Even so, officials in South Korea were willing to give some credit to private sector innovators like Tmap.
"Enforcement and better technology are still the main drivers of change in road safety,” Seo Beom-kyu, head of the traffic safety division at the Korea Road Traffic Authority, said to The Korea Herald. “But the private-sector model adds something new. It rewards good behavior, which government programs struggle to do at scale."
Aiding the growing focus on road safety is the widespread adoption on usage-based insurance models. When one insurer offers discounts through a usage-based model, others are likely to implement similar programs to keep up, researcher at Samsung Traffic Safety Research Institute explained to The Korea Herald. This rings true here in the U.S. as well, as most insurance companies offer some form of telemetry-based discount for safe driving behavior.
No solution is perfect and there will always be system abusers. One Seoul resident admitted to turning off their navigation when encountering heavy traffic as not to damage their Tmap score. Tmap's own materials urge drivers not to stop driving or turn off the system if they make a mistake, indicating that drivers are particularly protective of their scores. Plus, GPS-based navigation can be faulty at times, particularly in dense urban areas. Even so, the social benefits of these kind of programs are a welcome shift in general driving behavior, researchers and road-safety officials in Korea said.
You Might Also Like
Comments