Overall, I am currently satisfied with Progressive and their Snapshot program, but I expect others may not be. When I was making the decision, I was disappointed with the lack of information (reviews) so I want to provide another data point for consideration. I will assume you are generally familiar with everything, but if you are not you can review this frugal post from six years ago that seems to do a decent job of reviewing everything.
Their tracking ended last month, having started mid-October, so not quite five months. It was frustrating at times, especially when making the 500-700 mile drives to see family.
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Honda Pilot
- 6600 miles driven
- 33 hard brakes, at least half of which were on the long drives when hitting traffic. Reviewing the logs, I see one 11 hour drive with 8 hard brakes. A miserable day for sure.
- Snapshot discount: 15% off our initial rate for that vehicle
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Honda Fit (manual transmission)
- 741 miles driven
- 8 hard brakes, which is interesting because I felt they recorded a number of false hard brakes, but maybe they reviewed the data and determined they were not real because that number is a bit less than expected
- Snapshot discount: 21% off our initial rate for that vehicle
Though somehow our renewed rate appears to be almost 9% higher than the initial rate. But coming from USAA, the renewal rate is still just barely over half of what we paid a year ago with them.
I am a little confused about about our current rate and I think Progressive is as well. Some details:
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Signed up for initial policy with $2000 deductibles
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Refinanced one of our cars, which required having at most a $1000 deductible, and I think that change caused a $20-$30 increase over what was a majority of the 6-month policy
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The refinanced car was paid off so I changed the deductible back to $2000
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Very shortly after that (a day or two?), they sent a renewal offer that, after Snapshot and other discounts, was over 17% higher than the initial rate
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This morning they sent a new renewal offer for a bit less (9% increase vs 17%)
The change in "renewal offer" probably took into account the higher deductible and maybe also that we paid off the car. Actually, reviewing the website, they still have a lienholder listed so it seems they have not been notified or they have not recorded the change. Hopefully they are done crunching numbers, though I would not mind a lower rate...
So, as expected, Progressive's renewal rate was significantly higher than the initial rate, despite their Snapshot program saying we drive okay, and their Snapshot discounts bringing the renewal offer to a tolerably small net increase. I presume their initial 6-month policy, if issued with Snapshot, applies a 100% perfect "Snapshot discount" and if you fall short of being absolutely perfect then your rate will go up.
That's what I assumed going in, but still we are paying almost half of what we did a year ago. In summary, what I was concerned about going in, and my final impressions:
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Snapshot does not work with and may break a vehicle with a manual transmission -- not true for me, but it took ~30 seconds for the "power on beep" in that car while it beeped almost instantly for our other vehicle
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Progressive will raise their rates at renewal -- true, but the rates are still really good compared to what we had
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Progressive makes up for offering lower rates by "not being there" when it comes time to make a claim -- yet to be seen
March 09, 2019 at 04:11AM
