So, like a lot of people these days, I always have a phone on or near me, and eventually there was a smart watch and a sorta-smart scale (it reports my weight to the phone when I get on it every Monday morning, I’m not sure if that’s really “smart”) and I have the health app on my phone linked to the EHR at my doctor’s office so those are all talking back and forth. My bank watches my credit score, Amazon and Walmart know what I’m buying, Steam and PSN know what I’m playing, YouTube and Crunchyroll know what I’m watching… in general I just have a lot of devices that are keeping track of what I’m doing at any given time and it’s all being logged in ways that are sometimes more helpful than others.

So, when my insurance company sent me an email offering to send me a little monitor to stick on my car window that would sync to my phone and check my driving patterns and maybe cut my rates, I figured one more set of metrics was a good thing.  After all, I barely drive since moving to full-time WFH back in 2019 and I haven’t been in an accident in 30 years, I must be a safe driver worthy of some healthy discounts.

Well, the little white box arrived and got synced to everything without too much fuss, and after a few days of letting it monitor my driving I opened the app expecting it to say extremely nice things about me.

This is not the screen I saw at the time.  This is the screen I see TODAY.  The screen I saw at the time had recorded 10 trips and both my “Steady braking” and “Smooth turning” scores were in the 30s, which is very bad indeed.

My initial reaction was to be rather upset.  After all, I’m a good driver, right?  It must just be being picky.

Then I noticed that I could review every trip it was tracking and that it would helpfully put up little icons for every “event” used in scoring and it was, well, humbling.  Lots of “oh, yeah, I did kind of stop hard for that yellow light when I didn’t need to” and “I mean, sure, I take that cloverleaf exit a LITTLE faster than the sign suggests I should, but I like the way it feels…”

In short, it wasn’t wrong.  There were a lot of places where I was driving a little recklessly, where I’d been driving a little recklessly for years, and even if it was only being done when there weren’t other cars around the app doesn’t know that it was safe at that precise moment in time.  (Yes, this is my flimsy justification.)

The monitor just sees those extra G forces that make that curve feel more exciting and makes a little note to the effect that I probably shouldn’t be looking for “exciting” when I’m just going to the mall.

At least I don’t tend to speed or over-accelerate, I guess.  And I don’t use my phone when I’m driving, though I’m sheepishly admitting here that I will occasionally glance at my wrist for a notification.

In the trips SINCE, now that I am paying a little more attention to things like stopping smoothly and maybe not chasing that centrifuge feeling through the curves, my score has been slowly improving.  I’ve still had a couple of dumb turns, which I’ll admit to, and one case where I legitimately needed to slam on the brakes because someone pulled out of a drive-thru, but the app is starting to give the meatbag behind the wheel a little more affirmation.

Maybe I’ll even earn that premium discount I thought would just happen on its own.