Hastings YouDrive cancelled my insurance citing harsh braking & acceleration

[m4rmite]

So if you have to brake hard to avoid someone cutting you up, do you get penalised as such in it's data?
Or is it more data friendly to crash?

A friend works for a company who give the drivers bonuses for careful driving, hard accelerating or braking impacts their score and they lose their bonus.
So.. 1 month he didn't get his bonus due to 2 heavy braking instances, to which my friend advised it was to avoid a collision.
What do you prefer heavy braking or a damaged van?
His boss said it was the heavy braking/ bonus deduction could not be overruled.
True to my friends word he said that they wouldn't see any more heavy braking.

I think it was around 10 days later he phoned his boss and said the van has been in an accident as someone pulled straight out in front of his from a side street.
But couldn't you have stopped in time??
And he still got his bonus that month.
they fitted dashcams not long after, and review each incident if the driver challenges a bonus loss.

 

[Roger001]

From the limited data I have, it seems that you need to collect a lot of demerits before Hastings does anything and while your 1 year insurance runs, the only option they have is to give you 7 days' notice that they are cancelling the policy, which gives you time to cancel it yourself. The next year's insurance is quoted in part based on the data they have collected.

As for your friend's company's bright idea, it seems a great way for them to end up in a major court battle. Just imagine the issues caused if a driver were to state that they crashed as they were protecting the company's careful driving bonus to the wrong person at the scene of the accident

I should be doing more driving later this week on the type of roads that are causing the demerits, and I'll post what I find. At the moment, I am guessing that the software they are using is from a USA-based company, with data that has never seen drivers on a freeway having to deal with roundabouts every few miles.

 

[Roger001]

Second road trip report

This is my second trip down the A24 in Surrey/West Sussex. This is one of those A roads that over the years has been built from some grand central plans, the joining of a lot of bypasses, with the odd bit of original grade coach road left in place. The result is a lot of high speed roundabout stuck on a road that is jumping between 70, 60, 50 and 40 speed limits.

At many of the roundabouts, I get marked down for "Don't slam on the brakes" when the fact is that I am becoming a hazard to other drivers due to trying to slow down far earlier than them, while also dropping to a near stop. So rather than staying in lane, they start to change lanes to get around me.

The issue is that at such roundabouts, it is common practice for drivers to slow down from normal speed to a low speed and then only stop if there is a vehicle coming across their path. YouDrive seems to want to treat the roundabout as a junction with a stop sign at every entrance.

If you have an Android phone, you can even try out very similar tracking software, without it being linked to insurance, as there is an app called DriveScore that gives the same results as the Hastings device.

Even with all the demerits I received today, my overall score is rising as I'm not recording any demerits on any other roads I use. The result is that I plan to keep the insurance and just monitor the scoring. The worse case is that at some point, I may have to go out and cause several demerits so that I drop the score down so much that I can cancel without any penalty.

 

[Rolfe]

Tell me about it. I lived in Southwater from 1988 to 2006. At one point I remember someone remarking that it (the A24) was a cart track. I did notice a lot of improvements the last time I was there, which was a couple of years ago. If there had been a nanny-bot on me when I lived there I'd probably have been banned for life. I did get stopped by a couple of aggressive cop cars in Dorking, who accused me of carving them up in my XR2. (The boot was entirely on the other foot, I assure you.) And went into the back of someone who jammed on his brakes suddenly at the Pollards roundabout, in my Peugeot.

 

[Roger001]

It is the 2 Southwater roundabouts that I have collected a total of 3 demerits across 4 trips - fast road and roundabouts, which you only stop fully at if a car is going across your path. In general cart tracks have a single designer, while the A24 was designed by 101 people over 80 years, all of whom were only focused on their 3 miles of road and the immediate needs.

I think the road is a major reason why all the Highway Code states about how to use a roundabout is "adjust your speed and position to fit in with traffic conditions".

 

[salty]

I think the road is a major reason why all the Highway Code states about how to use a roundabout is "adjust your speed and position to fit in with traffic conditions".

Ah, that's where I'm going wrong. It's not foot down and pray, then?

 

[Rolfe]

It is the 2 Southwater roundabouts that I have collected a total of 3 demerits across 4 trips - fast road and roundabouts, which you only stop fully at if a car is going across your path. In general cart tracks have a single designer, while the A24 was designed by 101 people over 80 years, all of whom were only focused on their 3 miles of road and the immediate needs.

I think the road is a major reason why all the Highway Code states about how to use a roundabout is "adjust your speed and position to fit in with traffic conditions".

I hardly ever drove the section of that road between the two Southwater roundabouts. On still nights I could hear other people driving it though!

 

[Roger001]

I hardly ever drove the section of that road between the two Southwater roundabouts. On still nights I could hear other people driving it though!

I'd have been one of those people in my MGB

 

[Rolfe]

I'll forgive you! I was far enough away that it wasn't annoying.