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Originally Posted by upflying
Few people would voluntarily purchase an EDR option for their new car.
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Didn't think so either. But at least it would put its existence out there for all to see at car purchase time, without a cost penalty to GM et al for doing so. You might get a few more taking it if there was a little $ incentive to the sales force for pushing it a bit.
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Some insurance companies (Progressive) are offering insurance discounts if you voluntarily install a code reader/memory into your OBDII port.
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I figured this was going to come up sooner or later, and it's somewhat more widely known. Since one of the things those devices track is the number of "hard braking events", lots of hard braking earns you the right to pay a higher insurance premium.
That would be regardless of whether you're a garden-variety moron driver who ends up stomping on the brakes due to inattention (people that insurance companies certainly have the right to identify) or are intentionally keeping current with being able to properly modulate hard braking all by yourself (a road course/autocross skill that does directly transfer over to your street driving).
Just swapping to a more aggressive brake pad formulation would very likely put somebody whose braking was consistently just below the tracking device's threshhold just over it at least in the short run. The example I know of here is Hawk HP+ pads, which while still legitimately streetable really do bite that much harder than HPS or most any other street-only pad.
The larger issue is that those who would continue to extend the monitoring and regulation of individual lives either don't stop to consider the unintended downstream consequences of their decisions - or they do and figure people won't notice or care if it's done gradually and quietly enough. Never mind that lots of people apparently believe that individual behavior, skill, and responsibility should always be considered to be of lesser value than arbitrary regulation and control by others.
Norm