Sounds like we should ban cars or phones. Unless you are using it to play music or make a hands free phone call. I guess responding to a text should also be protected but not sending a text except in an emergency like you can't start a text message chain.
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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I don't believe hands free is a safe as people think. It's the divided attention that's the problem, not having only one hand on the wheel.
It's almost as if having them investigate themselves is a conflict of interest or something.
I was curious where the telematics came from, and how they could correlate that with specific accidents...
The telematics data came from Cambridge Mobile Telematics, or CMT, which supplies DriveWell technology used by insurance companies, fleets and various safe-driving programs.
DriveWell isn’t necessarily an app you’d recognize by that name. The technology can live inside an insurer’s branded app and automatically detect trips using the phone’s sensors and location data. Depending on the program, it can record speeding, hard braking, aggressive acceleration, phone interaction and likely crashes.
If you’ve ever agreed to let your insurance company watch you drive in exchange for a discount, there’s a decent chance you’ve met this general species of electronic hall monitor.
Bet that 2% discount isn't looking like such a good deal anymore to some people.
Yeah that's always been a hard pass for me. Insurance companies will always bend facts to suit them not having to pay out. It's the same with police in deciding to arrest or charge you with something. They will bend facts to suit the outcome they want. Why give them extra information to use against you?
It stopped looking good to me about a month into use when I realized I changed my driving habits to make the app happy, not maximize safety/preservation of life. As far as I knew, it only tracked hard braking and speeding. There was an instance where I saw something step out between parked cars and I did a controlled gentle brake instead of a full panic brake. I'm aware a panic brake increases the chance of me getting rear ended, but there should be no second thought about it when you think you might be about to kill a child. Deleted the app as soon as I got home. This was nearly a decade ago.
The irony to me is now seeing overreactive camera-based auto braking that brakes harder and more often than I ever did.
Well this isn't wildly new information. Police can only document what they see or is said to them, and people aren't going to admit they were on their phone while driving. Distracted driving is the single biggest factor associated with causing accidents, and phone use is number 1 in the subcategory.