This year marks a significant milestone for Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) and Discovery Insure. We’re celebrating 10 years of making the world’s roads and drivers safer.

We created a video to mark the occasion.

CMT and Discovery both share the mission to make roads safer. Discovery’s reason for being is to create a nation of safe drivers in South Africa. CMT’s goal is to create a safe and sustainable mobility world with telematics. 

Our partnership began in 2013 when we read about Discovery’s creativity in auto insurance. We reached out to tell them about what we were seeing in the world of telematics and the new advancements out of MIT.

When we met, Discovery was using expensive, laborious, hard-to-install “black boxes” for telematics. The technology was a blocker to scaling the program.

At the time, most people believed you couldn’t measure driving risk with the sensors on mobile phones.

The problem was technically complex. Ideally, you have a fixed data source in the car to measure risk events like hard braking. But a phone can shift in any direction in a moving car. 

The CMT team made multiple trips to South Africa to experiment and test its solutions with Discovery. We spent many hours on the floor collaborating together, working through various solutions. We put phones in vehicles in all sorts of configurations, drove them around racetracks, and analyzed massive amounts of data.

The core innovation developed at CMT— measuring risk accurately with a phone — unlocked the ability for Discovery to scale its program. The near-instantaneous driving feedback from CMT’s technology helped Discovery engage customers in ways that weren’t possible before. This feedback became part of a larger program design based on evidence-based incentives.

At this point, Discovery didn’t just have a new app. It had a new paradigm for safe driving, auto insurance, and for creating a nation of safe drivers.

Today, a decade later, Discovery’s Vitality Drive program has scaled to the point where it’s benefiting not only Discovery’s customers, but improving road safety across all of South Africa. Customers are obsessed with the program — it’s become a cultural force. Families even talk about who the safer driver is around the dinner table.

And the result? Discovery has seen a drop in crash frequency of 26%. Vitality Drive customers with a telematics device have a 56% lower crash fatality rate. The program has saved lives across South Africa. And now Discovery is bringing it to countries across the world.

After a decade of working together, our partnership has evolved far beyond just being colleagues and business partners. It has transformed into a deep friendship built on a shared vision for creating a better world for drivers and road users everywhere. Discovery has made us better,  sharper, and more innovative.

As we look forward to another decade of innovation, expansion, and progress with our friends at Discovery, we’re excited about what the future holds as we continue making roads and drivers safer and mobility more sustainable.