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Canadian Insurance Firm Desjardins Launches Usage-Based Car Insurance Plans

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Canadian Insurance Firm Desjardins Launches Usage-Based Car Insurance Plans

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May 17, 2013
By Ben Bosco
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Desjardins clients in Ontario and Quebec now have the option to subscribe to a coverage plan that the firm calls “usage-based” if they drive a vehicle made after 1998 that is registered in Quebec or Ontario. It is called Ajusto and purports to save drivers up to 25 percent in payments on their car insurance based on their driving habits.


Desjardins will first give drivers the Ajusto monitor to put in their car in order to track how they drive, and will tally the savings under three categories. The first is how much the car is used, which is measured by the distance the car is driven annually. A low score here can save drivers up to 10 percent off their car insurance. The next category is the frequency of hard braking and acceleration and the extent to which it is done. If the driver more often than not accelerates smoothly and stops gently, these behaviors can save them up to 10 percent on their insurance. The final category is the time of day that the vehicle is driven. If it is most often driven at the right times, ones with low volumes of traffic and safe roads, the insurance-holder can save up to 5 percent on that category as well. In the first year, customers also get 5 percent savings just for signing up for this free program.

Ajusto also allows drivers to track what its call their “personalized dashboard” online, which gives readings about their driving habits up to the time that they last used the vehicle, and it allows the user to check their progress and make amends to their driving habits if they are not saving as much as they would like. Despite having a monitor in the car for its Ajusto program, Desjardins does not release the data collected by the monitor, nor does it use the data as grounds to lay penalties on drivers or would use data found in by the monitor to cancel a policy. They claim it will only save the policyholders money.

Naturally, with a GPS device tracking their vehicles, Canadian drivers feel a little leery about installing this device, as well as the criteria not measuring actual driving ability, but just statistics that have more to do with the conditions on the road than anything else. However, this has already been tried in the United States with Progressive Insurance by the program Snapshot, which was essentially the same thing as Ajusto but was met with mixed reviews. The main question that many drivers have is whether the rates of those who do not install the device will increase, even if they have done nothing different in their driving, in order to pay for expenses incurred by the implementation of Ajustos and to cover the savings that the drivers who select it receive. Some speculate it will, but hard evidence is in short supply on that.




Edited by Rachel Ramsey

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