Have a look at a few dash cam accident videos [1]. There are many maladaptive patterns of behavior, but a frequent one that the average good driver can improve on is limiting speed on two occasions: when approaching a blind spot, and when passing stopped or slow traffic.
That second one gets lots of otherwise good drivers. They seem to think that by limiting their speed vs slow/stopped traffic they'd be encouraging people to dart in front of them. Which is somewhat true. But with limited speed, that's an avoidable or less injurious accident. By gunning it past stopped traffic, you make the accident unavoidable and more serious.
Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.
I (an American) was on holiday and Switzerland and was explained the process of getting your license back if you lose it. It is a big disincentive to driving badly and putting yourself at risk of that, to be sure.
People don’t usually act erratically for no reason. Maybe they suddenly stop because they see a deer sprinting towards the road off in the distance, and the person behind them didn’t see it. There are tons of reasons that look like they “erratically stop”, which are actually genuine safe behavior that the other may not know about.
But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.
One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.
The hard braking heuristic makes sense when estimating risk of road segments, but not as a proxy for driver competence.
35 years without an accident on my record isn't because I'm a magnificent driver, it's because I always try to leave a way out for when something unexpected happens, because the unexpected _does_ happen.
The fact that some people may have the skill to drive more aggressively means nothing in the aggregate as far as insurance companies are concerned. If you are skilled enough to drive in that manner, you are skilled enough to avoid it as well. It's simply statistics.
Then use it? Mandate reaction speed tests or other driving mechanics competency evaluation (not road sign comprehension) and watch insurance margins explode.
The driver in my example did poorly and scored top marks in the heuristic.
> building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.
The cam car did not need to have a hard braking event (HBE) to start building distance.
Even if they did, the insurance companies are looking for a pattern of HBEs to assess risk. I agree that there is a theoretical high-risk driver that never has a HBE because they always try to maneuver instead of breaking. There are other heuristics for this (high lateral acceleration, high jerk). And the ultimate heuristic: failing to avoid accidents, thus having a claim history.
On any modern car, just push it all the way and let ABS and stability control figure it out, and don't let the vibrating brake pedal spook you into releasing it. That's just ABS doing its thing.
Really though, getting a license is too easy in the USA. We really need to require some sort of car control course, including obstacle avoidance in the rain. Would be really nice too if it included an obstacle avoidance course in two cars: A huge SUV or pick-up truck and a more reasonably sized sedan. So many drivers think they need a huge vehicle to be safe while being completely unaware of how well smaller cars can likely avoid the crashes to begin with. Would probably get really expensive really quickly, though.
I realize this may come off as victim blaming, but I feel you should have an obligation to not endanger yourself even if by the laws of the road you are technically in the right. I would rather get cut off by and idiot and be at my destination thirty seconds later than having to deal with car repairs even when it is legally speaking not my fault.
Most people have near zero defensive driving skill, and view someone pulling out in front of them as "nothing I could have done", when the dashcam shows the offending driver showed 5 signs of pulling out ages before the accident occurred.
Much of being a good driver is just awareness.
One time my light turns green, I don't go. As my wife asks what I'm waiting for, a pickup blows the light. We weren't the first car at that light, and years later she still talks about how there's no way I could know. Well, I didn't get us t-boned at 80 so I must have done something right.
I do both and I am constantly surprised at the lack of situational awareness of drivers when I’m a passenger in their cars.
I think truckers probably get the same thing too.
First, the insurance company incurs costs just processing the claim. If things escalate with the other party, they may even incur legal and court costs.
Additionally, there are some costs that are incurred regardless of fault -- like personal injury protection.
Even defining "who was at fault" is a complicated situation. A lot of people presume that it is as simple as: whoever the police issues a citation to at the scene is 100% at fault. But that's not the way things actually work. The way liability is assigned depends on the state, but in a comparative negligence state you could be proportionately liable for as little as one percent of the fault of the accident. Maybe someone else ran a red light, you entered the intersection on green, and hit them. You could end up sharing some of the cost for that, if it is found that you could have avoided the accident but decided not to.
And even after all of this, if the other party runs out of money, doesn't have insurance, or runs away at the scene, your insurance company is stuck paying the costs under their uninsured/underinsurred motorist coverage.
It’s this obnoxious audio warning that tells me I had a hard breaking and it’s 9/10 because I stopped at a red light that I would not have made on yellow. And then it sends me tips and reminders about reducing hard breaking events and it’s annoying. I know they have done the analysis but it detects moderate hard breaking which is frustrating. One of those things that I am sure in net is positive but perhaps slices of the population it does not benefit.