So everyone – including Joe Cadillic – knows I’m a coffee fanatic, but would you give up your driving data for a cup of coffee? I sure wouldn’t.
Rhett Jones reports:
Automakers want in on the highly lucrative big data game and Mitsubishi is willing to pay for the privilege. In exchange for running the risk of jacking up its customers’ insurance premiums, the car manufacturer is offering drivers $10 off of an oil change and other rewards. Consumers will have to decide if a gift card is worth giving up their privacy.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mitsubishi’s new smartphone app is the first of its kind. A driver can sign up and allow their driving habits to be tracked by their phone’s sensors, which monitor data points like acceleration, location, and rotation. Along the way, they’ll earn badges (reward points) based on good driving practices like staying under the speed limit. For now, the badges can be exchanged for discounted oil changes or car accessories, but the company plans to expand its incentives to other small perks like free cups of coffee by the end of the year.
Read more on Gizmodo.
Carrot and Stick:
Reinhard Heydrich, who was the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia – formerly Czechoslovakia, until the Nazis decided it wasn’t anymore – was probably the smartest Nazi. He knew how to wheedle his victims into cooperating in their own victimhood.
“His Czechs” – as he styled them – would be rewarded with extra rations and less brutal working conditions when they submitted obediently . . . and punished when not. He called it the “carrot and stick” approach. It worked so well that the Brits parachuted a team of SOE operatives behind the lines to assassinate the entirely too-effective Reichsprotecktor.
Mitsubishi is the first major car company to emulate his example.
Do we really want to be tagged as not-good-drivers because we (along with everyone else) drove 40 in and under-posted 35 zone? Become moving roadblocks for the sake of obeying a secular totem pole, for the sake of a cup of coffee and a discount oil change?
READ MORE:
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2018/07/10/carrot-and-stick/