Telematics - The Ultimate Back Seat Driver?

Allow me to identify two random things that irritate and annoy me. One is Big Brother - the hopefully now-defunct 'social experiment' involving fame-hungry simpletons being spied on via the medium of television by people up past their bedtime. And the second - unfairly, ridiculously high car insurance premiums. Now, wouldn't it be just brilliant to combine those two entities into one steaming pile of rancid awfulness? Well, now you can, thanks to the emerging technology on telematics! Or is this actually not as bad as it seems..?

Telematics is easy to get your head around, as you'll see from the video. And on the face of it, monitoring a driver and rating their insurance costs appropriately is a top idea. We know that uninsured drivers add about £30 to our annual renewal, and the misbehaving youth and elderly add about the same again. If we could properly document individual drivers, rather than stereotypes, the roads would get safer and we'd all have more cash to splash. That's the obvious and undeniable up side.

I'm a skeptic though, and allow me to explore the nature of the down-sides that I'd want answering before some corporate-type screwed a spy-box into my pride-and-joy car.

Firstly, if the system monitors driving style, where does its line of disgression lie? I, like many young drivers who can't afford to insure anything else, drive A Slow Car. My 59bhp Ka does 0-60 in about 13 seconds, and runs out of puff before three figures arrives (apparently). The benefit of such glacial straight-line performance is that when the conditions are right and the road clears out ahead of me, I can pedal it along at eight-tenths, knowing that while I'm having fun, I'm nowhere near the national limits, or the limits of my ability. However, what is the box of tricks going to think if it detects 95% use of throttle in the first three gears? Does it automatically calculate that during that time I never exceeded 55mph? Or does it send the boys in blue to me front door thanks to my 'aggressive style'?

Secondly, sometimes the time of day we drive at, and what happens while we're out there, is frankly unavoidable. Take this personal recent example. I was driving through central London at about 11pm on a Sunday evening. I'd rather have not been there at that time, but it just so happened that the commitment I'd been there for had ended at such a time, and I needed to go home. That's why I was on the road, there, then. So I'm minding my own business, and while waiting at a red light at a roundabout, a Ford Fiesta blasts past me at easily double the 30mph limit, running the red light. Moments later, as the lights turned green, two police cars with lights ablaze race through the same junction, giving chase.

I heard the sirens getting nearer, and as the law raced into view, just as I moved onto the roundabout, I had to jink my car left to get right out of the way. My speed was barely into double figures. It was my right of way. And I acted according to the law, the Highway Code, and just as my driving instructor would have wanted me to. But I remain uneasy that a black box would simply note down that late at night in an urban area, I appeared to veer across a lane. Do admin then ring up to hear my side of the story? Or do I simply get a black mark on my record, and an extra zero on my MoneySupermarket.com renewal price? The policemen in the cars knew I was doing the right thing by getting the hell out of their way. A circuit board cannot perform that kind of intelligent calculation.

There are other issues too, which I have no faith in this country's administrative powers to sort. We can't get families through Heathrow without a two hour wait and strip search, and the real-life James Bonds of MI6 leave their top secret gear lying about on trains. If we're that disorganised, who is going to collate all this car data? Who is responsible for working out who was driving at any given time, if the car was stolen, or, if the missus was in labour on the passenger seat, and if it was indeed neccessary to drive 32mph in a 30 zone at 4am?

I'd truly love to see insurance costs go down. It'd hand the public more disposable income to help the economy, and get more young people back interested in cars and driving, which breeds better drivers. But the principle seems to spell the end of enjoying a car enthusiastically on the roads, and provoke the onset of hesitancy and nervousness behind the wheel, terrified that taking action to avoid a jaywalking hedgehog is going to drain the summer holiday fund. We need calm behind the wheel, and having telematics watch our every move, at any time, anywhere is nothing but unsettling. Agreed?