Last week a press
release from ‘pay-as-you-drive telematics-based car insurer
Coverbox’ landed in my inbox. Its first line gave me pause for thought:
Technology
which can measure the level of impact in traffic accidents – and help determine
the likelihood of whiplash injuries – is already installed in thousands of
vehicles insured by pay-as-you-drive telematics-based car insurers.
The press release
was issued on behalf of Coverbox, a company at the vanguard of what is known as
‘telematics insurance technology’ because it installs equipment in vehicles
which track their every move. As Coverbox’s managing director, Johan van de
Merwe, puts it: “When a driver takes out an insurance policy with a telematics
insurer, we install a small box which records the distance the vehicle covers,
and charge accordingly. But the equipment also records many more parameters –
including acceleration, deceleration, speed, and so on – which helps us
determine driving standards.”
According to van de
Merwe, telematics insurance is of more benefit to careful drivers because of
the accuracy of the information about driver behaviour acquired by Coverbox.
This, in turn, “allows us to be far more discerning
in terms of who we insure”.
That’s
all well and good – so far as it goes. Insurers need to be certain of their
technology and, moreover, to remember its limitations. But it seems doubtful
that they do so when they contend that telematics insurance can assist in
determining the extent of whiplash injuries. This was argued by van de Merwe in the Coverbox press release as
follows: “Telematic insurers can also use the
equipment to measure the magnitude of an impact ... [this] can serve as a very
useful guide in distinguishing claims needing investigation from those where a
high probability of whiplash exists.”
Really? I am not so
sure. There is a massive amount of hype about whiplash and a bandwagon of ever
louder import which maintains that it doesn’t even exist. As I have previously
written, members of the Association of British Insurers (ABI) have started using software privately dubbed
as a ‘whiplash lie detector test’ to expose what the ABI believes are almost
always bogus claims. This, despite the cutting edge research and findings of a
clinical psychologist such as Dr Jannie van der Merwe to the effect that even
if physically verifiable trauma does not accompany whiplash, it is no less
debilitating for its sufferer.
Indeed,
from my perspective as a solicitor, it is hard to imagine quite how anyone
would maintain that whiplash is a fiction. My practice has seen many clients
whose experience of whiplash is every bit as real as the accident that caused
it. They are in genuine pain and have every right to claim for compensation. I
cannot, therefore, but be concerned when I read of what seems to be a
technology-based approach to determining whiplash claims. The whole point about
pain is that it is subjective. Symptoms will vary from person to person. Each
person’s physiology is different, too. What has happened to age-old principle,
in tort law, that one must take one’s victim as one finds him?
My
worry, if something like telematics insurance is taken too far, is that we will
forget the human dimension. Insurers may not always like it but the people they
insure are just that – people. They need to be treated as such.
I
am delighted to be chairing a conference on May 15 at the Grange City Hotel on
Cooper’s Row, London that will explore these and other issues. Dr Van de Merwe
is one of the speakers; who knows, perhaps the other van de Merwe (Coverbox’s
MD) will be in the audience. I hope so. There are many issues surrounding
whiplash and the wider ranging the debate, the better. Ultimately, we should
all be pulling together to create a system which compensates its insured
victims fairly – and acknowledges that there is more to an injury than the
visceral evidence of a broken bone.
Whiplash: The Evidence takes place on
May 15 at the Grange City Hotel, 8-14 Cooper’s Row, London EC3N 2BQ.
Registration starts at 08.45. Contact John via john.spencer@spencerssolicitors.com
for more information.
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