AVIVA drive App

 Having just taken out car insurance with AVIVA, I thought I'd give the AVIVA drive app a go. I've got a full no claims discount having had one (count them, one - it's relevant later) my-fault accident in 38 years of driving (which happened over 23 years ago), so didn't expect to gain much in the way of additional discounts, but I reckon I'm a pretty good driver and a safe and considerate road user, so I had high hopes of a decent score. And I'm quite competitive and it was a bit of a game, so...

I downloaded and installed it easily enough, and it managed to autorecord my commute the next morning (after I'd completely forgotten all about it), so I started clocking up the miles. You need 200 miles before you can achieve a score that may (or may not) impact on your insurance quote. Let me tell you about my drive. I commute 5-6 miles twice a day, with occasional trips to the shops, ferrying children about and driving to the local railway station. I live in a heavily speed-bumped village and our office location is speed bumped, so I cross between 18 and 57 speed ramps every day, depending which way I go. Much of my route is country roads and there is a chunk of A road, a large proportion of which is 50 mph limited. And I drive an electric car.
So, what about the app? I quickly achieved my "First drive" badge (on my first drive, who'd have thought!), followed by "Fuel friendly", "Smooth accelerator", "Brake master" and "Corner master". I was happily racking up the miles and looking forward to my score. I am not, and never have been an aggressive driver. If you accelerate hard in an electric vehicle it eats up range, so you tend to drive conservatively. I use regenerative braking mode always, so I enjoy putting a mile back in the battery coasting down the hill towards the A34 junction every morning. I use cruise control to help me stick to speed limits (relevant to the 50 mph chunks of the A34), I rarely overtake on single carriageway roads (other than cycles) and I don't burn away from traffic lights.
So, after clocking up 200 miles of normal driving, imagine my disappointment with a score of 6.0 out of 10.
Looking in to my score breakdown, apparently I accelerate too rapidly. I am at a loss to understand this... Of the accelerating I do, other than simply pulling away, most is speed-ramp related or coming out of a 50 mph to a 70 mph zone. Having achieved "Smooth accelerator" and "Fuel saver" badges easily, I really don't see how my acceleration can be letting me down. The only thing I can think of is if the app measures the proportion of each journey you spend accelerating, in which case, given the short duration of journeys and number of speed ramps on my normal commute, would be disproportionately high. Ditto with cornering to a certain extent - I don't know how I can corner more smoothly than I do. I'm not known for chucking my passengers about, and my route is basically left turn out of my drive, left turn out of my road, left turn out of the village, right turn at a T-junction, 1st exit from a roundabout, third exit from a traffic lit roundabout, right turn at traffic lights, right turn into the office complex, left turn into the car park and park - and back again, can't see where I didn't corner smoothly there. I can think of one corner in the 200 mile segment that I took a bit abruptly, but nothing to write home about.
So all in all, I'm not that happy with the app. Apparently, I could achieve a 14% discount on my premium even with a 6/10, but I most certainly would not rate myself a below average driver (remember the one my-fault accident in 38 years, never had a point on my licence...), and to be honest, it's just made me really annoyed.
I'd be interested to know how the acceleration performance is measured, because if my app score is at massive odds with how I think I drive, I assume there must be issues with my near-perfect braking performance too.

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