The new one is wireless version which use cell phone network to send the data back.

As you may know, every time you communicate with a cell tower, it can locate you with in … I don’t know, maybe a mile? Same feature on some cellphones with google map.

I really worried how they going to use these information.

And that is with more “sudden starts and stops” than the average MyRate user. If I drove like my mother, I could save over $600 per year.

ECU doesn’t know its vin, doesn’t know the time of day, and it in most cases has no idea if you are putting your foot on the brake (possible in automatics).

The information the insurance company will be after will most likely be the rappid acceleration and miles driven,

both can easily be falsified. USB readers for OBDII are roughly 20 dollars on ebay, a small board can also be created to forward false codes and information into the progressive chip

if you have a carputer installed in your vehicle you can set the cap for RPM and MPH, this can easily fool the insurance company to think you’ve driven less and been more calm in your driving patterns.

The hacking, unless the OBDII and Carputer are already installed would cost far more than you would save insurance wise to validate the reason

just my 2 cents

As long as all the big players in the insurance business follow suit (why wouldn’t they, it helps their bottom line?), then drivers are pretty much required to have one to be insured. Then, there’s not much to stop the insurance companies from extending the functionality of the monitoring devices. GPS would be added under the guise of further monitoring driving habits, perhaps to see if a driver frequents dangerous roads or intersections.

Once the insurance companies have this big brother view of drivers, it’s only a small step to guess that the government will want a piece of the data mining action. One only has to look at the pressures government puts on the telecom industry for wiretapping rights to see where this could lead.

Get everyone to install these to the point that they are so common, no one can or will be insured without one. Then slowly phase in gps based units and eventually they have big brother of the car world. No more privacy when you drive, no more avoiding tickets since they upload your data straight to a police mainframe if you ever speed and the ticket will be posted (heck why not just E-mail it lol) automaticaly.

Accidents are instantly asses to see which driver ran the light, was speeding, was driving dangerously etc etc.

Heck the list is endless, most of it can be used for good (help raise the premium of dangerous drivers, while lowering those of safer drivers etc), but majority of it will just be invasion of privacy (why do they need to know you parked outside a whore house/drug dealers premesis etc?).

TBH I would be very weary of using one of these things for the above reasons, afterall whats $100 more for piece of mind comapared with $100 saving on your cover in return for paranoia?