In 2012, I joined Direct Line Group’s motor team to help build a telematics insurance product. The idea was simple: use real driving data to move beyond crude proxies—age, postcode, occupation—and price risk based on how people actually drive.
Executive Summary
"We measured exposure and called it behavior. We measured compliance and called it quality. We built crash detection that catches the crashes we'd have heard about through a phone call anyway."That's how InsureVision's Dan Freedman sums up his view of where telematics has gone wrong in applications to commercial auto insurance.
Freedman spent years on the inside of telematics, building one of the UK's largest telematics insurance products. He believed in it, as did most people in the industry. But having lived through the experience of what telematics promised and what it ultimately delivered, he now believes the industry measured the wrong things. But hope is not lost, he suggests, reporting that AI processing video footage has changed fundamentally in the last three years.
I believed in it. Most people working in insurance technology at the time did.
Fourteen years on, I think we owe ourselves an honest look at what telematics delivered and what it didn’t, because the gap between what we promised and what we built has real consequences—especially for carriers writing commercial auto.
We said we were measuring behavior, but we were mostly measuring exposure.
The headline metric was harsh braking. Sounds intuitive; drivers who brake sharply are driving less well, right?
Not quite. Harsh braking frequency is dominated by factors that have nothing to do with individual skill. Drive through a city at rush hour and you’ll log far more harsh braking events than the same driver on an empty road at 6 a.m.
These are variables that do predict claim frequency: how much the vehicle is driven, where it is driven, and when it is driven. Commercial underwriters already capture much of this through proxies at bind, including business location, operating radius, industry class, client base, cargo type and hours of operation. A 2025 Risks study of around 100,000 Italian policyholders is a useful warning: Harsh braking looked significant in some univariate analysis, but once the authors adjusted for actual kilometers driven it was no longer significant. So, telematics confirms what underwriters already know, continuously and at finer resolution. That has genuine value, but that value is incremental.
