One of CMT’s competitive advantages is the sheer number of active drivers on the road, millions more than any other telematics service provider. This data trains our machine learning capabilities, meaning our measurements of risky driving behavior, mileage travelled, our driver vs. passenger classifications  and other features of the DriveWell telematics platform are all as accurate as possible, and more accurate than our competition simply because of our scale.

This advantage carries over to CMT’s connected claims product, Claims Studio, as well; with so many drivers on the road, we’re able to get a good look of what the sensors in smartphones and our Tag device measure when crashes occur. But sometimes it’s hard to tell a pothole from a fender bender, and unlike DriveWell, we can’t ask our engineers to take our products on the road with them when they drive and get into crashes for real-world tests in order get a first hand feel for their accuracy.

So, from time to time, we hire professionals to crash cars. Our engineers are on site – close enough to see but far enough to be safe – and we run through a series of scenarios, from backing into light poles to high speed rear-enders. We do this because the more accurate our sensing data, the better we are able to diagnose the severity of a crash and alert authorities for emergency response, and the faster the claims process can get initiated and completed. It’s a commitment to our customers.

Recently, we also crashed cars and measured our accuracy to pit our sensors against the current standard of onboard crash reconstruction, Crash Data Retrieval (or CDR) by Bosch. CDR data is currently admissible in court and used in a wide variety vehicles through onboard sensors. Our crashes  – which were also observed by a major American insurance company – showed that CMT’s sensor data is more accurate and more robust than that recorded by CDR.

To learn more about the crashes and the results, please watch the video above.