What if your motor insurance provider told you that you could get up to 25 percent discounted from your next car insurance policy simply by showing them that you were a safe driver? It would sound obvious won’t it - after all, basically, isn’t that what a no claims bonus is all about? Well, you can guess again, because with the new “autograph" device getting up to 25 percent discounted on your car insurance policy in the years to come is going to be a very real experience!

Basically, an “autograph" is a device that you ask a garage to plug into the diagnostic part of your car (which can be found underneath your steering wheel). The autograph will then record all of your driving skills, including how fast you drive, your average speed, whether or not you need to suddenly break (and, if so, how often), the times of the day that you like to be out and about on the roads, what your average mileage is, what your longest and shortest journeys are. In fact, the list is endless. After a pre-determined period, say three or six months, you then return to garage that installed the autograph and they will uninstall it and replace it with a new one. The old autograph is then plugged into a computer and all the requested recorded data is feed into a computer and sent to your motor insurance provider. Your motor insurance provider can then take a look at all of this recorded data and can decide, more accurately, if you are a high or low risk driver!

If you are a good driver, the benefits of agreeing to use an autograph are easy to see – after all, recorded data rarely lies! The downside to using an autograph is the fact that it is recording the data collected in the car. This has two effects – first, you have to have a car capable of recording this data (i.e., not too old); second, the data collection cannot differentiate between drivers. As such, if you have a car in your house that is driven by several different people, the autograph will not be able to tell who is driving the car at any given time. Consequently, if you have your son or daughter on your car insurance and they tell you they like to drive at 50 miles an hour, while the autograph tells the motor insurance provider they like to drive at 120 miles an hour, it’s not likely you are going to be getting the 25 percent policy premium discount you were looking for!

All in all though, as with pay per mile car insurance, getting cheap car insurance using an autograph device, although being the way of the future, is here to stay and will most probably benefit far more motor drives than it inhibits.