Insurance - especially motor insurance - is at best a grudge purchase. No matter what the insurance companies say, we all know that in the long run we are going to spend more on premiums than we will ever get out.
If that weren't true, no insurance company would stay in business very long.
Of course, it would help if the appalling accident rate could be reduced; more attentive drivers, concentrating on what they're doing rather than fiddling with the car's radio or sending text messages, would have fewer crashes, which would also help keep premiums down.
But how to change the notoriously inattentive attitude of the average driver?
Several insurance companies offer cash-back schemes if you don't claim for a given number of years, others lower premiums, but the operative word is just that: years. Not many people can concentrate for that long.
Enter Discovery Insure, the short-term insurance division of the company that turned healthcare on its ear by treating it like a credit-card business.
Wouldn't it be a real incentive, said Discovery Insure CEO Anton Ossip, if insurance policy holders could earn reward points on a monthly basis (there's that credit-card model again!) for driving safely, that could be applied to something tangible such as, say, their fuel bill?
But how do you gauge good driving behaviour? How do you measure someone's Driving Quotient, in real time, every time they drive?
The answer came from an unexpected source: Formula One racing.
At a road show this week at Killarney racing circuit near Cape Town, legendary racing car designer Rory Byrne, widely recognised as the most successful Formula One designer of all time with 99 Grand Prix wins, seven Drivers' and seven Constructors' championships on his CV, and now a specialised engineering advisor to Discovery Insure, explained that the telemetry used to measure all the forces acting on a racing car, which makes it possible for team engineers to set up a F1chassis for top performance, can be applied to the street as well, where it's called telematics.
By measuring the strength and duration of the forces acting on a moving car it's easy to gauge the skill and concentration of the driver. Really skilled drivers move fluently from gentle braking to smooth acceleration to clean, steady steering inputs - and they record phenomenal fuel-consumption figures too.
Cue Deon du Rand, head of C-Track, part of the international Digicore group; C-Track has been using satellite and cellphone transmissions to track commercial vehicles for years. It's taken five years, but C-Track has now developed a three-wire “black box”, about the size of a packet of 20 cigarettes, that can be installed in a concealed place on a customer's car and will measure the forces acting on that car in all six axes (up and down, left and right, braking and accelerating) and send that information to a server in real time.
A relatively simple computer programme (the wired generation would call it an app) converts a month's worth of data (ignoring the occasional panic stop when the neighbour's dog ran out in front of your car and the foot-flat acceleration you used to get by a slow-moving truck, unless they happen all the time!) into a simple report and a score, which earns you a certain number of DQ (Driver Quotient) points.
Those points can then be used to save you up to 40 percent on your monthly fuel spend at BP stations using your Vitality card - that's a real-time incentive for driving like a pro.
Of course, the system knows exactly where you are, plus how well - and how fast! - you are driving, all the time, which opens a huge can of privacy issues, but Du Rand said bluntly that if you didn't want people to know where you were, you'd have to leave your cellphone at home!
Ossip assured us that the information would never be used to repudiate a claim or prejudice a Discovery client unless that client lied about the time or place of an incident, which sounds good, but I can't help wondering how long that attitude would hold in the face of a Supreme Court subpoena.
But, putting aside Big Brother issues, how easy is it to beat the system? The answer is, not very.
Discovery had half a dozen Mercedes-Benz C180's on hand, each fitted with a C-Track Insure, and we were invited to drive around the circuit as smoothly as we could, and then immediately see our lap analysed in terms of harsh driver inputs.
I went round like a real featherfoot, using the motorcycle lines because they're smoother than the ideal lines for a car where you turn in much later and much harder, accelerating smoothly from the apex of each corner to about halfway to the next turn-in point, reaching a maximum of 143km/h and, I thought, floating like a butterfly.
Nevertheless, I lost points for two harsh accelerations and one harsh braking manoeuvre, which proved that yes, you can beat the system, but you have to be a really skilled driver and you have to concentrate on your driving all the time - and there's nothing wrong with that.