Ever since the UK car insurance industry starting to advertise insurance policy discounts for policy holders who have Dash Cams, the market in the UK has gone through the roof!
We can’t get enough of them and its created a whole industry from something that we all think will save us money!
Well guess what, I have 10 years no claims discount and because I work at Road Angel I have as many Dash Cams as you can shake a stick at but...my insurance policy cost goes up every year!
I suspect yours might too.
Where is my discount for having a dash cam?
The facts are simple, whilst a Dash Cam can prove who was at fault and can help speed up the process, the accident STILL OCCURRED and year on year, whilst Dash Cam sales have increased, so too have accidents.
That means insurance companies are still paying out and so, your insurance premium only ever likely to increase year on year. It is simple economics.
Prevention v Cure - the simple solution
The answer to getting back on top of the situation It is actually quite simple and comes down to one concept, Prevention is better than Cure. Knowledge and altering driver behaviour is the key.
If you know your speed, if you know the conditions, you massively reduce the chances of having an accident. There’s a key reason why the speed limits are what they are - safety.
We all know that speed kills but think about what actually happens, speeding means we run out of space faster or have less time to think because we are travelling too fast for the environment.
The insurance industry is promoting Dash Cam use and I can see why but really, if they want to help make a real change with regard to road safety, they should consider rewarding drivers by offering them policy discounts on BETTER and SAFER driving.
During February to June 2018, 100 Road Angel customers allowed us to review their driving behaviour. We anonymised the data so we had no information on who was doing what but what we did find was that after just 3 months of use of a Road Angel Pure, our flagship speed awareness device, there was a reduction on those breaking speed limits of 65%.
Imagine the potential to save lives
We all like to think we are good drivers, we like to think we do not break the speed limits!
However, I recently attended a speed awareness course as a guest and found that over 90% of the people who attended that cause were not actually AWARE that they were speeding until the dreaded letter arrived! Worryingly, the vast majority also felt that 23mph in a 20mph zone was not that bad!
It is always challenging to change ingrained habits but if the insurance industry could reward better driving rather than reporting of bad driving, we might just be able to make a huge change and more importantly, save lives.
- Source is DFT Reported road causalities in Great Britain: main results 2018
