Assessing driving quality/safety automatically is a very difficult task.
One of the most dangerous forms of driving is when people rely on their reactions to get out of trouble, rather than avoiding the problem by anticipation.
A friend (who worked with Jackie Stewart on race driver preparation) told me that this is typical of young, high mileage commercial drivers. Even if they don’t drive insanely fast, they consistently avoid collisions only by braking hard and accelerating out of trouble. They are thus a big cause of accidents by other drivers (who get surprised and overreact).
Today’s invention is a way for these drivers to be identified and retrained before everyone’s insurance costs cripple all road use.
A set of accelerometers fitted to a car could record only sudden slowing or hastening events in 3D space. If a driver records a pattern of these over say a month, even without accidents, he or she should be given some help to anticipate more and drive with lower stress -before causing repeated collisions by other road users.
