little more investigation,
FAQs: Snapshot Discount, Pay As You DriveŽ, Usage-Based Insurance
needs your obd port, 1996 or newer, might not work with scangauge et. al.
not available in all states.
if you drive between midnight and 4AM you will probably get dinged, not my issue but I feel for the guy/gal who is working the graveyard shift.
if you drive a lot you can get dinged, that much makes sense.
if you have a lot of "hard stops" you can get dinged. Since many hypermilers do this deliberately when approaching red lights/trains/etc and when nobody is on their tail then it could be a detractor. Also a quick early stab at the brakes to time the clearing of an obstruction will create less heat/wear than a long slow application (as evidenced by the retention of energy/momentum).
It is Not GPS based, so they don't have enough resolution to detect minor traffic violations. They might get suspicious if you drive 10k miles without ever coming to a complete stop though, or log anything over 100mph, and I'm sure they will notice if you are unplugging it a lot or disconnecting your battery a lot, will probably void that discount period. Probably not for the weekend racer for that matter.
I don't know what wireless protocol it uses, probably cell based, so they may have access to some low resolution location (<1.5 mile radius) data. The metrics they call out can also be done with just an accelerometer and clock and not need the obd port, and it might actually have those to be redundant to assist with tamper detection, not foolproof but will thwart the majority of attempts, and not AS big brother as GPS and the tomtom fiasco, but still moving in the big brother direction.
I like the comment on priuschat
"I had Progressive for many years.
I found out why they call them Progressive.
Progressive is how your rates escalate every 6 months."
http://priuschat.com/forums/gen-ii-p...ml#post1325703
And of course if progressive is tracking speed/etc then they can be subpoena'd and become a genuine big brother tool in an instant.