Objective Rating of Driver Safety (ORDS)
by Alex Lightman
What Uber and Lyft and Car-as- a-Service Need to Do Next to Deserve Their Privileges and Gain the Benefit of the Doubt With Both Government and The People
Yesterday I had a scare and greyed at least one hair as the car I was a passenger in accelerated, rather than braking, and then swerved hard. I was in a car-as- a-service, and the person who was picked up after me had taken far longer than expected to get in the car. The driver had become like a game character with a 25% boost to ‘haste’, and the peaceful ride I had experienced became a white knuckle ride.
I was faced with a dilemma of whether to say something about what I felt was dangerous driving, and possibly get a low passenger rating, or to say nothing, get a better rating, and just hope and pray this driver didn’t cause an accident. This experience led me to wonder why there wasn’t an objective way to avoid this driver and other drivers like him in the future. I take dozens of rides via apps each month, and it really matters to me whether the drivers are make me more safe than I would be if I drove myself.
In case it seems as though I am not in love with Uber, Lyft and car-as- a-service, I assure you, I am. I love them. They are better than taxis. I have had miserable experiences with taxis in dozens of countries, including terrible driving, speeding, and driving over 20 miles out of the optimal route, and have wondered at those times how to have an objective measure of whether the driver was as safe as I would like.
My recommendation, as an MIT grad who has won four global technology awards, and someone who spends hundreds of dollars a month on Ubers and Lyfts is to install GPS tracking devices in all car-as- a-service vehicles, such as those from Cartrack.com (a publicly traded company with 600,000 intelligent trackers tracking vehicles in dozens of countries) and create an new Objective Rating of Driver Safety (ORDS) that would be visible right alongside the old subjective rating of the driver. The ORDS could also be on a scale of 1 to 5. The score would start at 5, but go down gradually from six things
1. Jerking
2. Speeding (it is possible to see if a driver is keeping the speed limits via these trackers)
3. Harsh acceleration
4. Harsh braking
5. Harsh cornering
6. Vehicle diagnostic codes as they relate to safety… (brakes, tire pressure)
I have been with some terrible drivers, and I don’t think that compares to how the car smells or whether there is an iPhone charger or other little things. Driver (Passenger) safety is what matters the most and these GPS tracking devices are very inexpensive.
With these devices widely installed, I can make the following predictions (and I have published over two million words about the future with no major mistakes)
1. Human drivers would find themselves driving more carefully.
2. App users/passengers would find themselves feeling safer.
3. Usage of Uber, Lyft and car-as- a-service would increase.
4. Accidents would fall.
5. Insurance companies and governments would start to require these devices for more and more drivers, eventually making their use ubiquitous.
6. Bad drivers would be known, and be made to drive less, or to stop driving, and many of those who stopped bad driving sooner, either by getting better, or by finding something else to do besides put people in danger, would have their lives changed for the better by not having the terrible burden of killing or injuring people or other vehicles.
All of the comments above seem to be limited to cars, but they also apply to trucks and buses. In the US, we have laws for maximum Hours of Service (HoS) that for decades have been tracked on paper logs…and are thus easy to write down whatever the boss tells you to write down.
Truck drivers are supposed to limit their HoS to 11 hours of driving after a break of at least ten hours, and they must take at least a 30 minute break after eight hours. They can stop and sleep, eat, shower, or just sit while another driver takes the wheel until their mandatory break period is over.
For all we know, this mandatory HoS has saved thousands of lives. Who wouldn’t prefer to share the busy highways with truckers who have been driving for no more than 8 hours, vs. 14 hours in a row? This GPS trackers can make it much more likely for truckers to comply, compared to use of paper logs, because you can have starting and ending points recorded by latitude and longitude, average speed, etc., so that objective data exists about whether a given driver is getting enough sleep.
These federal HOS rules also apply to passenger carrying vehicles, but without the GPS trackers, how will we know how long the drivers of Ubers and Lyfts are driving? I would love to see when I call for a car how many hours that driver has driven that day, before you or I get into the vehicle.
Wouldn’t you?