“IMPOSSIBLE SPEEDS, DODGY GPS & A TABLE THAT CAN DRIVE!”

Two thousand angry words follow. For the hard of reading, the lazy and TLDR version: I fought an insurance company’s lying black box and killed the policy unto a full refund and apology in one e-mail and call round. NOW, we set a top end GPS tracker on the case, to monitor the next company’s black box and issue my threat of exposure to the one going in – if it too, misbehaves – I accuse the WHOLE industry of being lying b*****s.

My title is a quote from a 2016 BBC Watchdog report. Nikki Fox did a set of tests for the legendary programme after a slew of complaints, with The Stig (?) on youngsters’ cars fitted with black box insurers’ units. These GPS boxes were not only showing up errors and absurdities but were also holding youthful drivers personally responsible. These units were impugning their integrity in the process, as casually as you like. The cars could not do what the daft boxes were saying they had, like 119mph in an ageing Skoda. Mind you, ‘Stiggy’ could only manage 103mph in said fifteen year old Skoda on the track. To be honest, I do not think it was he in the clip, seen here, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04gb7h8 as the dude used a bit too many hand actions, like the double thumbs-down on camera.

I have a small job reporting for the Anglers Mail. Mostly, these days it is all about the Where to Fish This Weekend section but it has meant a lot of show reporting in the past. I met a nice chap at a fishing show who is an engineer. My kind of dude, his slidey-whizzy table thingummies are for making the round boiled carp fishing baits or ‘boilies’ at home, by madly enthusiastic home-recipe fisher folk. His are awesome and in fact his kit is also used by a good few small scale bait companies. He sells huge cauldrons and gas boiler rings as well as compressor-powered paste-sausage extruder guns. It is good fun to watch the chosen reeking, fishy (or sometimes, oddly tutti-fruitti) aromatic paste get turned into perfect spheres. Mark Shilham also has his unique ‘grub’ shape that looks like a big fat beetle grub of fishy deliciousness… Once or twice, Mark employed me to video his stuff at a show.

I get a call from him. Mark’s stepson Jon is only 18 and has a Corsa 1.2. It is insured with ‘More Than’, under their Smart Wheels black box programme. And it is giving out absurd results. So bad, it has got his folks angry as they have been out videoing a journey and seeing adherence to the speed limits, yet finding a ‘negative ten’ score on the trip when they get back and check. Jon, a good lad, is also mortified and worried that let alone being charged more than the best driver rate, he may get his insurance cancelled! The sheer basic insult that states he is a liar to disagree with  his black box is the bit I worked out he was most upset about. It was like a ‘given’. LIAR!

 

 

It so happens that for me, mapping and the love of maps or cartophillia, runs deep. I used to go out making my own map of the suburban estate I lived on as a kid. My mum had shown me the huge fold-out map that used to be in the back of the cloth bound hardbacks of the J.R.R. Tolkien Lord of the Rings trilogy. Massive sheets of thick paper, that ended up as a dense inside-the-covers print in later, cheaper editions. A tragedy. I was seven and enthralled. Later, I studied surveying at degree level at university as part of my environmental sciences course.

I love maps .

I was thus gripped when GPS happened. I was taken to Japan to see how the overlaid data to the navigation systems of the day (Level 4 VICS or Vehicle Informations and Communication System) worked to help traffic avoidance and can relate the history of the USA foreign policy issues that suddenly had all all Alpine (and everybody else’s) GPS navigation systems read twenty yards sideways! They threw a huge error into the system, to stop baddies using it to target weapons. It was a brief crisis and passed, the error fading away. It did briefly look daft on the maps as the Alpine demo Fiat Multipla I took to Disneyland Paris was shown driving along through houses and gardens, sideways-on. No idea what the security protection is since but I do know about GPS accuracy and the chipsets.

GPS devices, like anything else, come as good, bad, awful or awesome, depending on what the chipset or device is, the ability of the GPS thing to ‘see’ the sky and grab onto enough satellites to give you a position and the quality of the underlying mapping. Clarion once brought out a GPS navigator – seen here as part of the awesome search ability of my story transfer geniuses – https://www.adamrayner.net/clarion-map-790/ that had a GPS chipset better than in many a pukka navigation system headunit at the time. I recall Mr. Kenwood being astonished. Kenwood is now JVCKenwood and Clarion do not sell after market in the UK any more. CORRECTION! Clarion had their last operating day in the UK, last month and have left the aftermarket entirely, world-wide, in favour of OEM only operations.

Anyway, I have been out mapping new streets in cars bristling with antennae, a student driving like a loon and another speaking into a headset as the car collects position data. I have been to pan-European meetings about GPS back when Panasonic did car audio in Europe and I know that my Road Angel sometimes has lateral issues about speed camera locations alongside where I am driving. That uses GPS to tell you about known speed camera locations yet has no mapping of its own. So if you are on a bypass and a 30mph camera is on a road running alongside, the thing warns me about a 30mph camera on a 60mph dual carriageway.

As for the devices used by insurance companies to keep a BigBrother like eye upon the drivers, well, like anything else, they are subject to their installation quality. And also, in order to get the business of several dozen thousand black boxes to help insure theUK’s youth to drive with such oversight, you don’t half have to get a keen competitive price on your unit.

The units are usually two wires coming from a yes, black box and some simply plop on top of the battery under the bonnet, while others, including Jon’s are fitted inside somewhere. I cannot begin to make first hand observational statements about the installation in this case, nor the unit except that it seems clear to me that the pressure to install many of these units in a day, plus the needfully less costly nature of the product seem to have added up to a mess here.

Thing is, I was told that the in-house owned fitting company that did the car in question were deeply unhelpful when Jon and family tried to complain. I cannot even be bothered to relate all of why the lad got apologised to in the end for the treatment he got at their hands but it was that, rather than any admission of error that they talked about. In brief, it was all about the driver being wrong, along with contradictory statements from their end on different calls to them. Recorded, mind,, works both ways…

Anyway, I waded in, guns blazing and after one e-mail of being pleasant-but-inquistive to the powers that be, I got awfully professionally unpleasant in a pointy way. I always go in via the press office, the soft underbelly as it were. The result after the first volley was a full refund of every penny spent and removal of the unit. Removal upon cancellation is usually £80. It was free. I didn’t get a call back, they never said a word. Fact is, they took the closer look at the case because it became a squeakier wheel to need the grease and knew I would be told immediately. This is the only way to get the dog offa you. Feed it the damn steak it was growling about. And to their credit (and also, I learned, entirely after my efforts) that the story had been to the BBC and made ‘More Than’ famous on Watchdog in the past. No wonder…

So Jon is re-insuring.

And here is where the poor lad has awoken the slobbery dog and now has consequences. I am going to get a SmarTrack fleet tracker unit (see it here http://smartrack.eu/ ) fitted to his car, by the lovely people at Mobile Solutions in Derby. This is superior GPS technology and designed to be affordable to keep track of a set of vehicles. Where many units are fitted to trucks or cars. Yet it can do proper reports and keep detailed records of speeds. This system has no agenda other than its veracity – its accuracy for the fleet boss – and it is a market leader. I would have hated having my boss keep an eye on my Sierra, back when I was a rep! Plus SmarTrack is installed by a dealer network, not over-pressured in-house lackeys with ten fitments to do a day and sometimes 45 minutes of driving between jobs, one of my sources told me. And oh boy have I found some sources… And this system is going to do the ‘controlling the actions of persons in power’ or watching the watchmen. A slice of Latin… yep, I am invoking Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Well, that’d be SmarTrack and Mobile Solutions. Derby, https://www.mobilesolutions.uk.com/  where they will even understand if you go to them as a bass head wanting a big install, as the company Kevin used to work for was called BASS JUNKIES and had huge adverts in Max Power and Fast Car for years!

And here is the ugly bit, my personal professional suspicion lies in only two areas. For no matter how cheap, GPS boxes tend to work. If they don’t, they are found out fast. Like a match that will not light. IF they are fitted within the parameters of what is right for the unit. That leaves bad installation and one last thing…

Algorithms.

I will say this. Insurance companies’ whole purpose is to make money. The folk who ‘work in insurance’ expect to holiday long-haul and drive nice cars. They also employ ‘Loss Adjusters’ whose job is to seek a way not to pay out on your claim. Whether this is because some people routinely see it as their right to defraud an insurance company or because their corporate approach is basically evil in the first place and caused that attitude, I cannot say.

But I do know that treating people as liars is the standard approach, too. Also, these back boxes have a full-on vested interest in mis-reporting unfavourably. I mean, if it was JUST box errors, wouldn’t logic suggest as many silly slow ones as silly fast ones? WHY is it only ever wrong in the punitive direction? And WHY do I get people telling me that their units tend to say their driver is ‘doing better’ and will get a discount at renewal, as they get to the end of their policy?

Either these work on GPS and facts or there are magical amoral algorithms being applied to these policies, making liars of the kids and higher-than-headline-advertised premiums being paid.

I suspect that this is industry-wide. It has to stop. Someone has to have the balls to set four hundred quids’ worth of superior evidence-grade GPS technology and a subscription, so as to sink the technical teeth into the very arse of this tech.

In fact I will draw a line in the sand and add to my threat in the video. I believe all these systems lie, due to institutionalised mendacity. Yes, deliberate untruth in reporting by the technology, because someone at the company, hired for their obvious lack of social skills or empathy, wrote a snotty algorithm to do this. I actually think that.

But my angry bias doesn’t matter, because it won’t be me looking at it..it’ll be a SmarTrack system. I have no idea which black box insurance set up Jon will be ending up with but this time, his truthfulness and behaviour will be DOUBLE scrutinised, poor lad! However, one will be the system used for checking the insurance black box.

Watch this space!