Drivers who participated in insurance programs that use driving data and offer tips to improve habits were less likely to speed, brake hard, or accelerate rapidly, according to a study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The findings were published in Accident Analysis & Prevention.
The study found that speeding decreased by up to 13 percent, while hard braking and rapid acceleration dropped by as much as 25 percent among participants. These safer driving behaviors persisted even after incentives ended.
“Insurance companies are happy to give discounts to customers who drive safer because it means they will have fewer crash claims later on,” said Jeffrey Ebert, PhD, director of Behavioral Science in the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit.
Ebert noted that with over 6 million vehicle crashes and 2 million injuries annually in the United States, widespread adoption of such programs could potentially prevent 300,000 crashes and 100,000 injuries each year.
Most major auto insurers now offer usage-based insurance (UBI) programs. About one in four U.S. drivers participates in these plans, which use smartphone apps to monitor driving behaviors like hard braking and phone use. Safer drivers typically receive lower insurance quotes.
These apps not only promise savings for safe driving but also provide feedback and suggestions for further improvement. “All of this should make usage-based insurance customers safer drivers—and earlier research found evidence that it does,” Ebert said. “But we wanted to definitively test this and ways to strengthen programs.”
To assess whether safety benefits could be improved by focusing on specific behaviors, researchers conducted a nationwide randomized trial involving three different feedback approaches over a 12-week period:
- Standard feedback: Weekly messages about four behaviors—speeding, phone use, hard braking, rapid acceleration.
- Assigned goal: Focused feedback on one behavior selected by an algorithm.
- Chosen goal: Feedback centered on one behavior chosen by the driver.
Participants could earn up to $100 based on safe driving performance. A control group did not receive feedback or incentives. After the program ended, all groups were monitored for another six weeks.
The analysis showed all three approaches led to similar improvements in safety scores. Participants maintained their improved habits after incentives concluded.
However, there was no significant change in phone use while driving. Researchers attributed this to generous default scoring within the telematics app used during the trial. “The average participant was basically told by the program that they had an ‘A’ grade for phone use despite handling their phone 6 percent of the time. Given how dangerous this is, the average should have been a ‘C.’ Drivers likely ignored this behavior and focused on improving in the other areas they considered more important,” Ebert explained.
Researchers suggested that future iterations could yield better results by using behavioral science techniques such as smaller weekly rewards instead of a single larger reward at program’s end. “For example, we have seen before that giving drivers small, weekly rewards can be much more motivating than one big reward at the end of a 12-week program,” Ebert said.
Ebert and his colleagues are hopeful that as more drivers adopt usage-based insurance programs, overall road safety will improve and insurance costs may decrease for policyholders.
The research received funding from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
