Snapshot Test Drive: Our Results #TrySnapshot

As a participant in the Snapshot Test Drive Program, I received gift cards to facilitate my driving and tests of the device as well as branded merchandise.

You may recall that back in August, Jai took the Snapshot Test Drive 30-day challenge to see how much he could save on his car insurance. Well, we now have our results in to share!

First off, let me run down how Snapshot works. You are sent a device that you plug into your car, which tracks your driving and watches for things like rapid accelerations and hard brakes. Your score then goes up or down accordingly, which affects how much of an insurance discount you are offered. Jai had Snapshot in his car for 30 days, and it was an interesting experience. When he had to hit the brakes – sometimes not even that hard – the device would actually beep at him as a warning! While we understand the purpose of tracking hard brakes, Jai found it a little frustrating because it would ding him for defensive driving. For example, there were times when he had to brake to avoid someone pulling out in front of him – what was he supposed to do, hit the car? Yes, it would still be their fault, but we kinda try to avoid car accidents no matter what. 😉 He also wasn’t too thrilled to have to brake for a wreck on the road in front of him and get beeped at by the Snapshot. But of course, the device can only track so much and it doesn’t know the difference between whether you were “Right” or not – but it certainly holds any and all hard braking against you. We’re not sure how sensitive it is with regards to acceleration or speed because the only dings he received were for defensive breaking.

So, you might be wondering why it took me so long to report on our findings, since it was only a 30-day test. Well, there was actually a snafu in retrieving my quote on the Progressive website (You can’t get it over the phone) that resulted in waiting months to find out our results. Long story short, the device was put into my name so that my blog posts could be easily tracked, even though Jai was the one doing the test and the owner of the car/policy. I was told we could just switch his name onto the quote at the end if he decided to purchase the policy, but it ended up causing major problems with getting the quote. I’ll spare you the details, but I ended up spending hours – literally – on the phone with Progressive, not to mention on email and the website, trying to figure out why I couldn’t pull my quote up on the website or get it emailed to me. Now, this isn’t a problem that the average person would encounter, since I’m with the media and the problem was specifically caused by how my name was listed instead of Jai’s for the purpose of tracking my blog posts. However, I have to say that my encounter with customer service was convoluted at best – I kept getting different answers, contradictory information, and transferred to departments that were completely irrelevant. This really surprised me, because I’ve been a customer with Progressive for years and years and the customer service had always been excellent. Finally, one of the customer service representatives came up with a work-around where she basically started a new test policy in Jai’s name, transferred over the Snapshot data, and then canceled the policy so we wouldn’t be obligated.

So! After all that, how did Jai do? Well, he qualified for B+ savings, which is 9-15% off the normal rate. Without Snapshot, a 6-month policy would be $539; with the Snapshot savings, his 6-month total was $433, or $72. He currently pays $68 for his auto insurance, so he doesn’t plan to switch, but it was definitely an interesting experience trying it out!

For more information on Snapshot, click here to visit Progressive.com.