Driving score launched in Korea to encourage safer driving
South Korea’s latest national competition sees motorists given a driving score, with drivers ranked according to how safe they drive. The country’s widely used navigation app, Tmap, says it has prevented 31,366 accidents sing this scheme between 2018 and 2020.
This figure comes from an internal model that compares the accident rates of drivers with a high driving score to those with a lower one and adjusted for the distance they drove. The country as a whole records around 200,000 accidents annually.
“Sure, it’s part of the company’s PR,” Chun Ji-yeon, senior researcher at the Korea Insurance Research Institute’s mobility centre said, “but that number is still a concrete, if imperfect, measure of how Korea’s embrace of gamified driving scores might be nudging behavior in safer directions.”
Since the rollout of Tmap’s driving score in 2016, the concept spread to other navigation apps, Naver Map in 2024, and Kakao Map in 2022. Even car hire firm Socar joined the scheme.
A driver’s phone tracks acceleration, braking, cornering, and speed. The smoother and more law-abiding a driver is, the higher their score. Higher points result in insurance discounts, gift credits, or both. Tmap says that last year, it had over 19 million drivers, 10.1 million of whom scored well enough to qualify for insurance discounts.
Most countries which have usage-based insurance systems keep the score private and functional. But South Korea has made it social. Scores are displayed as rankings against those of other drivers.
“It is one of the few score-based competitions in Korea where everyone benefits when scores rise,” said Chun. “Safer driving lowers accident risk, insurers save on claims, and drivers save money. It is a rare alignment of interests.”
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