Basing Car Insurance Risk on the Individual

The Minnesota round, dubbed TripSense, uses an inexpensive plug-in device that is free to the customer. The customer can remove this matchbox-size TripSensor and download its readings into a personal computer using software provided by the company. The software shows the driver his or her record and what insurance discounts he or she may have qualified for. The customer can choose to send the information along to Progressive via the Internet, or keep it private.

Earlier this year, a pilot program involving 250 drivers in Minnesota, who were paid $25 to plug in one of the devices and upload their data after 30 days, indicated that the test group would have been eligible for 7.5 percent discounts on average, though in the test discounts were not actually given.

The company will continue to use its conventional rating methods, but will offer TripSense participants discounts of up to 25 percent off those prices. All participants will get 5 percent off for the first six months. After that, they will get 5 percent if they send their data along to Progressive, and as much as 20 percent more based on their driving habits.

Progressive officials say they are learning a lot about what makes for safe driving.

"Generally we would say there are three components" to driving risk. "How you drive, when you drive and where you drive," said Dave Huber, TripSense product manager. "With Autograph, we were automatically gathering all three of those," but "our conclusion from Autograph was that where you drive was less predictive. And that was one of the most expensive pieces of data" to gather because it required GPS equipment.

At the same time, TripSense is paying more attention to high speeds. During Autograph, Progressive officials said they hadn't found a strong correlation between exceeding the speed limit and accidents. With the GPS component to record exactly where the car is, TripSense can't tell whether the speed limit for that road is being exceeded; but it is going to keep track of how much time the car spends going faster than 75 mph.

Huber said Progressive isn't weighting speed as much as mileage in computing discounts. "We recognize [speed] is important; we just don't know how important. We are confident it's worth at least 5 percent," he said.

"It's intuitive," Huber said, that when drivers spend an above-average amount of time going more than 75, "they just have to be at a greater risk of an accident."

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld a preliminary injunction barring tax protester Irwin Schiff of Las Vegas from selling his tax scheme, which according to the court fraudulently claims that paying federal income tax is voluntary. The court rejected Schiff's contention, which was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, that the injunction violated the First Amendment because it prohibited the sale of Schiff's book, "The Federal Mafia."

Don't throw away that diploma-mill diploma. It may be worth something yet. An unaccredited institution in Wyoming is going to federal court to challenge an Oregon law that prohibits using a diploma-mill degree to get a job. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Kennedy-Western University says the law violates its graduates' rights by barring them from including the school's degrees on their resumés.