Motoring with Geraldine Herbert

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The Pat Kenny Show 10 min 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed

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What are penalty points and how many Irish drivers have them?

Geraldine Herbert 0:01

The Pat Kenny Show on

Pat Kenny 0:03

News Talk. Well now it's time to talk motoring. I'm joined in studio by Jer Herbert, motoring editor with the Sunday Independent. Morning, Jer. Good morning, Pat. Now you want to talk about penalty points, and it's not just the points. There is, if you like, a hangover.

Geraldine Herbert 0:19

There is indeed. So figures from out uh insurance show that about half a million people in Ireland have penalty points. The vast majority of those, about 387,000, have three penalty points. Now, what you need to consider is if you go to renew your insurance, and most of these are because of speeding. So speeding is like the the key reason on mobile phones why people get penalty points is it could make a difference to your insurance, but it's entirely up to the insurance company as to how much they weight you.

Pat Kenny 0:43

Do any of them have published policies about what they do?

Geraldine Herbert 0:46

No, now it really depends on you as the driver, I suppose. But the thing to bear in mind is you have penalty points for three years. So even if your insurance company have said to you, Okay, we'll turn a blind eye to the three this time, if you accumulate another three, that's when you really start. Remember they come in threes and up to twelve, then you're off the road. So you really do have to be careful in terms of that. It definitely will make a quite a s it could make a significant difference if you got two sets of three.

Pat Kenny 1:08

Now you wonder uh about how quickly someone might accumulate twelve points.

How do penalty points affect car insurance premiums?

Pat Kenny 1:12

You'd imagine, oh I've got three, oh I've got six, I better watch myself. But still people do reach the twelve and do get disqualified.

Geraldine Herbert 1:20

They do, but in very small numbers. I think what they're saying is about a thousand people have twelve penalty points. And if you look at the figures, Pat, it does act as a deterrent. They're almost like a triangle. Lots of people down the bottom with three, less again with six, less even more, you know, even the reduction is even greater by the time you get to nine, and very few get twelve. So it does make a difference to people.

Pat Kenny 1:39

Do we have any information on how people react to the technology that might control our driving a bit, slow us down or uh keep our eyes on the road?

Geraldine Herbert 1:47

Yeah, I think generally people like that in their cars. You know, most new cars now will come with this speed warning. It will tell you when the speed limit is being changed. And I think because so a lot of people get penalty points moving from maybe a sixty kilometer zone to a fifty kilometer zone and they're still over it. Those sort of things. So I think people welcome that. When it kind of benefits their pocket, they're quite, you know, kind of uh you know. And I mean controlling speed I mean controlling speed by

Pat Kenny 2:09

by having limiters and so on and uh so called black boxes within cars. People say that'd be great to keep the young fellas in in in check. But it might have the alpha's as well.

Geraldine Herbert 2:19

Yeah, they don't realise that. So this again was something Aviva looked at was about three quarters of drivers go, Yeah, black boxes are a great idea, but we tend to associate them only with young drivers. Now there's a very good reason why we put them into young drivers' cars and they do train you and make you, you know, have good habits. And obviously the lower risk you are, the more um insurance will be lower. But interestingly, in the UK they use them quite a lot for keeping older drivers on the road.

What in‑car technologies help drivers avoid speed‑related points?

Geraldine Herbert 2:42

So they're a very good way to monitor when some should maybe surrender their keys. And if you have the data in front of you, maybe it's easier to tell granddad or whatever, look, it's time, you know, you you you surrender the keys because obviously it's a big you know leap for people to do that. So but they have been shown to actually keep people on the road for much longer. So there's a lot of uses of telematics that people don't necessarily consider. I I

Pat Kenny 3:01

wonder if the case for, you know, granddad, he just goes down to the shop to get his pension and a few groceries. That's all the motoring he does. Let's try to keep him going by geo limiting his activities, that kind of thing.