There’s one topic that can be enough to bring even the closest family to the brink of serious argument --- the car. It doesn’t matter if a big family is sharing two cars, or if it’s a situation where almost every family member has their own car, disagreements arise about how the cars are used.

What is the main source for most of this disagreement? In fact, it’s the inability of anyone to really prove any of the claims they make about themselves or others in relation to driving or overall usage of the car.

When a parent suspects that their son or daughter is driving the car too fast through the village, how can they really be sure that it’s true? What if one sibling accuses the other of driving dangerously when taking corners? Or, that the reason the brakes pads are wearing out too fast is that one member of the family leaves braking until the last minute, making every stop like an emergency stop?

If any of these disagreements or others sound familiar to you, then Pedal® has a neat solution to help. Its name: Safety Score.

Safety Score on Pedal

How Does the Feature Work?

Within your Pedal dashboard you’ll find one very interesting and colourful pod called “Driver behaviour.” This is the hub from which you can determine who truly is the safest and most competent driver in the family.

To engage this feature, all each driver need do is to take the car out for a period of time and allow the Pedal sensor to collect data on five key metrics:

• Acceleration
• Braking
• Right turn
• Left turn
• Idle

The more driving you put in, the more accurate the metrics will be, but the system is capable of building a very accurate picture of your driving comfortably inside of an hour. Each of the five above-mentioned metrics are then given a score out of 100 to create an overall average score. This average is your “Safety Score” and should work as a strong indicator as to who is driving more safely.

Even better than the one-off score that you can collect from a single drive, you can also get a long-term picture. Within the “Driver behaviour” pod, you’ll also find a line chart that offers a picture of each person’s driving over a given period of time, for example two weeks. Using data from the many hours sampled over two weeks, Pedal® can give you a much more accurate picture of a family member’s driving habits.

Why is “Safety Score” a Useful Feature?

Far from just settling family disputes over who is the better driver, there are many obvious safety and other benefits from the knowledge that Safety Score provides. The question of how to keep everyone in the family safe on the road is one that persists in the minds of families everywhere, especially parents of teen drivers and sons/daughters of elderly or otherwise vulnerable drivers.

Deterrent

First of all, the Safety Score works as a kind of deterrent to bad driving behaviour. When someone knows that their driving is being monitored and that this data is being fed back to the Pedal online dashboard, it will discourage any kind of risk-taking behaviour. This is the key to keeping drivers safe, especially young drivers. Youthful exuberance may be the key to the enjoyment of a young life, but it’s also the gateway to risky actions that put the life in danger.

Evidence

Unless the parent is present in the car with their child or other family member, it can be an impossibility to prove that anything is being done wrong. Once the car is out of sight, you lose control over how it is being used. When you voice your suspicions of unsafe driving to another family member, all they ever need do is deny it.

Pedal works as a tool to provide some empirical proof that all is not right with the car. There can be no disputing the data that comes through, and concerned family can use it as a tool to convince another family member that the way they drive is unsafe, or that their behaviour is unacceptable. This is a useful thing if you are the owner of the vehicle but allowing another family member to drive it.

Instruction

The data provided by the Pedal system can also be a point of instruction. If you notice from the driver behaviour data that there is a specific area in which a family member is having a problem, then you can perhaps make arrangements to fix it. If, for instance, you discover that either or both of the right and left turn data scores were very low, then you might hire a driving instructor to help them improve on that. You could even do it yourself if you have the nerve, though an impartial professional might have more luck getting the message through.

Reflection

We’ve talked a lot above about how families with young, new and elderly can make use of the Pedal® Safety Score feature, but of course we mustn’t exclude ourselves from that number. Regardless if you are a single user or a family user, there is a lot that the Safety Score can teach us about our own driving. In fact, the feature is even more useful for single drivers because they normally have no one to offer regular feedback on their driving performance. At least in a family, there’s a good chance that another family member will be in the car to offer comments with or without Pedal.

Many of us imagine ourselves to be quite good and safe drivers. Perhaps the receipt of a below-par score on Pedal will help to remind us that we have things to work on. Making drivers more mindful of their own behaviour on the road is a positive step towards improving the overall standard of driving and hopefully, as a result, the safety of driving.

Safety First

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare to receive a phone call that something terrible has happened on the road. No amount of data tracking can remove any and all risk, but being able to quantify how safe we all are as drivers is a good way to start mitigating the risk. They used to say that “knowing is half the battle.” The first step toward fixing a problem is to confirm that there is one. That’s what this feature is helping drivers to do.

While road traffic accidents and fatalities have come way down since the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, they still haunt our roads. New technology within our cars such as ADAS (driver assistance) features are here that detect our lack of attention or drowsiness, keep us centred in lane, and apply the brakes automatically when the car has determined that we won’t do it ourselves in time. As it stands, however, none of these are a substitute for an alert and well-behaved driver.

Know Your Safety Score with Pedal

All that’s required to learn your Safety Score is to first get your hands on the Pedal® sensor. Plug it into your car’s OBD-II socket, register online for an account and wait for the data to come streaming into your dashboard. The best gift that the system will give you is the knowledge and insight on what to do next. Sign up for Pedal today.