Automobiles and other types of vehicles used for transportation are usually regarded as essential to many activities for a large proportion of the population and have usually represented substantial capital expense. Since such vehicles are subject to damage or destruction and may cause personal injury and/or property damage during events that are largely unpredictable, they have been objects of insurance against the economic loss and cost of such damage or liability. Most jurisdictions in the United States and many foreign countries require liability insurance as an incident of licensing for operation of such vehicles while many vehicles are financed and insurance against the cost of damage to the vehicle, itself, is generally required as an incident of such financing or simply to provide for replacement of the vehicle such that a user may have substantially uninterrupted use of a conveyance adequate to their needs.
The development of many technologies such as arrays of air bags and computerized engine regulation, light weight and/or impact absorbing materials and parts and exhaust gas treatment which support enhanced safety and reduced environmental impact of the use of such vehicles have recently become available and the inclusion of such technologies in currently produced vehicles has been mandated in the United States and elsewhere while their inclusion has often raised the cost of vehicles to a significant degree. Any such increase in cost, of course, increases the potential liability of the insurer and insurance premiums based principally on vehicle cost have increased accordingly to the point of compromising the ability of some vehicle users to procure and maintain adequate insurance. Therefore, insurance providers have sought to potentially reduce premiums based on the driving records of users and prior insurance claims. However, driving records can contain only historical information and are usually insufficiently complete to accurately reflect the driving habits of particular vehicle users and thus may not accurately predict actual driving habits or the increase or reduction of actuarial risk to insurers.
In an effort to obtain more current information from which driving habits can be assessed in regard to risk of accidents or insurer liability under an insurance policy, several systems have been proposed to collect information concerning operation of respective vehicles on a substantially real-time basis. Such information can then be analyzed to allow a more accurate assessment of driving habits and the relative risks of insurer liability that may be projected from such driving habits. Many, if not most, of the arrangements that have been proposed to perform such a function provide for collection of information only upon the occurrence of events such as excessive longitudinal or lateral acceleration that are perceived to be correlated with a risk of insurer liability and are, hence, very coarse-grained in the information provided. Further, generation of events that cause reportage may not accurately reflect the true risk incident to particular qualities of individual driving habits and, moreover, may not allow such information to be optimally current. Unfortunately, increasing currency or making collected data more fine-grained by altering thresholds of vehicle operation condition events which will cause an event to be reported carries a large cost in number of vehicle operating conditions reported and transmitted as well as in storage and processing of increased amounts of collected vehicle operating condition data. Further, such increased volume of collected data due to alteration of reporting thresholds will be incrementally less and less correlated with the risk of insurer liability.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds