Auto accident involving two cars on a city street / Shutterstock
ICBC has been in the news a great deal this year.
With a soaring debt of over $1 billion, as well as a number of questionable policy choices, the insurance corporation has been a point of controversy. With that being said, it hopes to combat road accidents and promote safe driving skills.
According to recent data collected from the corporation, new drivers are 5.6 times more at risk of getting into a crash than those with 20 years of driving experience. Further, those crashes tend to be more severe.
Now, ICBC plans to use telematics research with a new pilot aimed at improving the skills of young drive. They are inviting as many as 7,000 drivers with less than five years of experience to see how this technology technology can improve their driving overall.
Specially, a small, in-vehicle device will communicate with an app in the driver's cellphone. Each time to driver goes for a trip, the app will record behaviours such as speeding, braking patterns and level of distracted driving. Afterward, these are recorded and an overall score is produced. From here, the results will indicate if a longer-term telematics program should be implemented for more customers.
"From our first telematics pilot earlier this year, ICBC has developed a telematics strategy to identify how the technology can be used to improve road safety and drive behavioural change among higher-risk drivers in B.C.," said Nicolas Jimenez, ICBC's president and CEO.
"We heard from those pilot participants that most believed the use of telematics would make the roads safer for everyone. This is our next step in a thoughtful examination of telematics technology and how it might help to keep these drivers safer."
Anyone interested in participating in the pilot can sign up for updates online. ICBC is looking for participants in the Novice stage of the graduated licensing program or with less than five years of experience as a fully licensed driver from all across B.C.
Note: A New driver refers to someone with less than one year of experience as a fully licensed driver.
