“Smart Driver”

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Insults are literally being added to injuries.

The latest example being what GM styles “Smart Driver” – which isn’t a “service,” either. It is embedded in new GM vehicles whether the owner (sic) wants it or not – and it collects data about the owner’s s driving, which is then sold to the insurance mafia, which adjusts what the owner (sic) is forced to pay, accordingly.

GM – and it’s not just GM – puts it this way:

“GM’s Smart Driver service is optional to customers. Customer benefits include learning more about their safe driving behaviors or vehicle performance that, with their consent, may be used to obtain insurance quotes. Customers can also unenroll from Smart Driver at any time.”

Italics added.

Malarky obvious, hopefully.

“Customer benefits?” Is that like “safe and effective”? It’s certainly worse than “the check’s in the mail” (and another one that doesn’t need repeating but which everyone already knows).

How does the customer benefit from having data about how he drives recorded and transmitted to the insurance mafia?. Oh! That’s right. The customer can “learn more” about “safe driving habits.” As if driving with the flow of traffic – which is almost always flowing faster than the speed limit – had anything to do with unsafe driving habits. The same goes for other driving habits the system is designed to take note of – such as what is styled-to-shame “aggressive” acceleration. Everyone does that, too. Because if they don’t, they’ll get hit by the car they just pulled out in front of.

And how, pray, is a person supposed to brake gently when trying to avoid a kid or dog that just ran into traffic without running over said kid or dog?

LexusNexis, which aggregates the data culled from “connected” vehicles, says this “sevice” enables the mafia to “create more personalized insurance coverage.”

Indeed.

But this not about “safe driving habits” anymore than “wear your mask” was about “stopping the spread.” It is about laying a pretextual guilt trip on people in order to get them to accept being abused for normal, reasonable, rational action.

GM says the “service” – the same kind of servicing you get from the IRS – is “optional,” which is a lie – because the system is embedded in the car and you cannot opt out of having the car equipped with it. Your “option” is to “unenroll” – and believe that GM, et al, aren’t watching you.

And if you believe that, here’s a “vaccine” that is guaranteed to prevent you from getting and spreading the ‘Rona.

How dumb are people?

Even The New York Times concedes the point. Well, at least as regards “Smart Driver.”

A news story references several people who own GM vehicles who – as far as they knew – never “enrolled” in the “service. Yet found out later – in the mail – that they were. This includes owners of Corvettes, the high performance sports car. What is the point of owning – of paying for – such a car when driving it more “aggressively” than an ’80s-era Yugo will be a guaranteed “ticket” every time you do?

EV lovers ought to chew on this a little.

Many pf them bought an EVs because they are quick and that quickness compensates for the slowness of recharging them. How about when they aren’t quick anymore, either? Or at least, when their quickness capability becomes a kind of talking-points-only codpiece? One that’s as ridiculously useless as those fake testicles some people hang from the axles of their megatruck?

This is what comes of the collusion between car companies and insurance companies – both of whom now regularly collude with government. You are no longer a customer in the eyes of the car companies. You are a product. The car you bought sells you – and this is literally true. It collects all kinds of data about you – not just about your driving – and that data is a valuable commodity to interested parties looking to make a buck off what they can find out about you.

And then sell. Or use to make you pay.

In this particular case, data about your driving – collected in real time, as you drive, very much like the telemetry stream from the Apollo lunar missions broadcast live, back in the day – is sold to a “risk broker” (LexisNexis) which then sells the valuable data to the insurance mafia. It is valuable to the mafia because every “incident” of “unsafe” driving recorded by your car – the one that sold you out, literally – can then be used to justify forcing you to pay the mafia even more money than you’re already forced to pay. News stories about this ugly little arrangement describe inexplicable “adjustments” of more than 20 percent.

“Inexplicable” italicized to reflect the fact that the people hit with these adjustments had not hit anyone. They hadn’t even gotten what is styled a “ticket,” the term used to soft-peddle the piece of paper handed to you by an armed government worker when he “pulls you over” for having disobeyed a statute such as the ones everyone (including the armed government workers) disobeys, such as those that forbid driving any faster than “x.” Of course, everyone does – because these speed limits are deliberately set so low that everyone drives at least a little faster – so that almost everyone is in perpetual danger of being “pulled over” and issued a “ticket.”

But now it’s not necessary to “pull over” the driver – even though he just was and didn’t realize it. And then – again! And one more time. He has no idea he got all these “tickets” until he gets his “adjustment.”

And now he knows.

And so do we.

We also ought to know how stupid they think we are. That is the meaning – in the Freedom is Slavery sense – of “smart,” whether applied to drivers or phones or utility meters that are designed to monitor and control us. Whenever you hear that word applied to a tool or technology, run.

And shun.

Be smart, instead.

Stop buying “smart” things. And by doing so, make it clear to them that you aren’t stupid.

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