Volvo’s new app grades your driving and sends the grade to your insurer

Volvo is launching Safety Coach, an optional app that scores braking, acceleration and cornering, with high scorers offered cheaper usage-based insurance through Volvia. It starts in Sweden and Norway this month, with the United States and other European markets to follow.

Volvo is launching an app that scores how you drive and hands the result to an insurer. Safety Coach monitors braking, acceleration and cornering, and produces a safety score covering the previous two weeks. Drivers who share it can be offered usage-based insurance rates.

It arrives this month in Sweden and Norway, on most Volvos from model year 2020 with the Google-based infotainment system. That covers the electric EX40, EC40, EX60 and EX90 alongside combustion models including the XC40, S60, XC60 and XC90. The United States and other European markets follow later.

The scoring algorithm comes from Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which bills itself as the largest telematics and AI company working on road safety. The insurance offer in the Nordics comes from Volvia, a Volvo and If P&C partnership that has been running since 1959.

Volvo’s argument is about predictability rather than caution. “Our research shows that many accidents involve some form of surprise,” said Mikael Ljung Aust, a driver behaviour expert at the company. Staying in expected speed ranges and avoiding abrupt manoeuvres, he said, makes a driver easier for others to anticipate.

The consent design deserves more attention than the app. Safety Coach is optional, drivers manage their own data, and opting in once does not lock anyone in. They can stop sharing with insurers and start again later.

That reads as a lesson learned from General Motors. GM fed OnStar driving data to brokers who sold it on to insurers without meaningful consent, and the US Federal Trade Commission barred it from sharing that data with consumer reporting agencies for five years.

The scoring model itself is Tesla’s, and Tesla’s has been argued about since it launched. Owners have complained that scores punish them for hard braking they did not choose, and Tesla has since built a way to dispute them.

Being watched from the driver’s seat is becoming standard in Europe regardless. New EU vehicle rules already put a driver-watching camera in every new car, though that system stays in the vehicle rather than reaching an insurer.

What Volvo has not said is the commercially important part. There is no named US insurance partner, no figure for how large the discount is, and nothing on whether a poor score can ever count against a driver rather than simply failing to earn a reduction.