Skip to main content

Fourth patent related to usage-based insurance

US company Progressive Insurance has received a fourth patent for system technologies used with its optional pay-as-you-drive insurance programme, a usage-based form of car insurance. U.S. Patent No. 8,090,598 relates, in part, to producing a driver safety score based on monitored driving data. Progressive’s usage-based insurance (UBI) scheme, Snapshot, is available in 39 US states and the District of Columbia. It creates a personalised car insurance discount based on customers’ driving habits.
March 23, 2012 Read time: 1 min
US company Progressive Insurance has received a fourth patent for system technologies used with its optional pay-as-you-drive insurance programme, a usage-based form of car insurance. U.S. Patent No. 8,090,598 relates, in part, to producing a driver safety score based on monitored driving data.

Progressive’s usage-based insurance (UBI) scheme, Snapshot, is available in 39 US states and the District of Columbia. It creates a personalised car insurance discount based on customers’ driving habits. Drivers who sign up for Snapshot receive a small device that plugs into the on-board diagnostic port of cars. The device records data from the vehicle and sends it to Progressive, which uses that data to calculate potential discounts.

“For more than 15 years we have invested a great deal into the research, development, testing and piloting of usage-based insurance programmes and will continue to do so,” said Glenn Renwick, Progressive’s president and CEO.

Related Content

  • Avoiding the call of the wild
    June 29, 2018
    Hitting an animal on a rural road can be fatal for all parties involved – but detecting and avoiding them requires clever technology. Andrew Williams carefully scans the horizon for details. Wildlife-vehicle collisions are an ever-present threat in rural areas around the world, and there is certainly nothing funny about suddenly finding an angry moose in your headlights on a sharp bend. A variety of detection and avoidance systems are currently in use or under development to help prevent your vehicle being
  • Here: AI has place in ‘privacy by design’
    June 23, 2020
    Artificial intelligence may improve traffic in cities and keep location data private, but Here Technologies shows that it only takes four points of anonymous data to predict your identity.
  • US eyes European model for Illinois toll road upgrade
    May 30, 2014
    David Crawford welcomes the adoption of European-style ITS technology by the US. The Jane Addams Memorial Tollway in Illinois, US is well on the way towards becoming a ‘smart traffic corridor’, taking full advantage of active traffic management (ATM or ‘managed lanes’) technology that originated in Europe. It is one of the first American toll roads to do so; preliminary work began in 2014 and will continue through to 2016. Jane Addams is one of four toll roads operated by the publicly-owned Illinois State T
  • Can GNSS solve the tolling world’s woes?
    December 5, 2013
    Kapsch’s Arno Klamminger and Wolfgang Fleischer consider the need for an agnostic approach to technology for charging and tolling. Periodically, given the march of technology, it is worth pausing and taking stock of where we have got to and where we go next. Such reflections are necessary if we are to take full advantage of what we have at our disposal and, potentially, avoid decisions which push us down technological culs de sac. A look at the use of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based technol