Buick’s Smart Driver explains why my gas mileage sucks—and my editor’s doesn’t
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Everyone thinks they're a good driver. Despite this, the annual death toll on our roads keeps going up-despite ever-safer vehicles-and human error is to blame for 97 percent of all fatal crashes. Bad driving isn't just about crashes, though; racing from stoplight to stoplight is bad for the planet, since it adds unnecessary carbon to our atmosphere at a time when we can ill afford it. In the age of the connected car, it has become trivial to quantify just how good or bad a driver one is; for some time now, some insurance companies have been supplying customers with plug-in devices that can track their driving and-assuming it's good-offer a discount as a result. But you don't even need one of those dongles to do that, as some new cars can do that tracking on their own.
A while back, we tested out a Buick Enclave that comes with a feature called Teen Driver that lets parents monitor their offspring remotely behind the wheel. And, as it turns out, there's an adult version, too-it's called Smart Driver.
Smart Driver leverages General Motors' OnStar platform. Sensors on the car record events like hard braking, hard acceleration, high-speed driving, late-night driving, and fuel economy, uploading that data to OnStar's cloud where it can be accessed via the myBuick app.
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