M Connect - The app that rewards smart drivers

Initiative details

Riksförbundet M Sverige has been working to make Swedish roads safer for 100 years. M Sverige, as a member club, holds an important place as an active partner with government institutions and the road using public in the effort to reduce road crashed and reach Mission Zero (Nollvisionen). M Sverige has always focused on and worked with our partners to make roads and cars safer and while also focused on making road users safer, this solution that we have launched goes beyond communication and education and delivers real world, targeted and personal solutions to the Swedish public.

Our main focus with this project is to develop safer road users.

Initiative date

to

Who was/is your target audience?

Policy makers
Car drivers

Topic

Create awareness

Organisation details

Riksförbundet M Sverige
Association
Sweden
Stockholm

Contact name

Marcus Lindholm

Telephone number

+46725421616

Project activities

If you work together with external partners, list the most important partners and briefly describe their role.

Autoliv - the world's largest manufacturer of, among other things, airbags, and seat belts is the provider of the AI and technology behind the solution.
M Connect is based on a Autoliv white label solution called Driving Avatar. Developers at Autoliv are adding the entire rewards system on M Sverige’s behalf.
Telia - Telia Sverige AB, is Sweden's largest telecom operator
The customer side of M Connect is built on a concept developed in cooperation between Telia and M Sverige.
KPMG - KPMG has world-leading competencies when it comes to business consulting and business development
To ensure the success of the project, KPMG was commissioned by M Sverige to conduct a thorough feasibility study.

Please describe the project activities you carried/are carrying out and the time period over which these were implemented.

M Connect is the result of a collaboration between M Sweden and Autoliv, a Furtune 500 company and the world's largest road safety focused manufacturer of, among other things, airbags and seat belts, This project specifically has sprung from a previous collaboration with Telia.
As early as 2019, a combination of two years' membership in M Sweden was launched with a two-year subscription to Telia's Telia Sense service under the name M Connect. Even then, there were thoughts of developing M Sweden-unique services within the framework of Telia Sense. It was a solution based on an OBDII dongle connected to the car's OBD port. The solution made use of sensors similar to those found in a smartphone. Using a SIM card, data was collected for central processing.
To ensure the success of the project, KPMG was commissioned by M Sweden to conduct a thorough feasibility study with, among other things, the following focus areas:
• Business model
• Target group analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Concept analysis
• Member benefits
• GDPR
The feasibility study showed that it was difficult to achieve sufficient reach with the project due to the high cost of the hardware, the dongle.
Part of the project together with Telia consisted of finding a partner who could develop the complicated algorithms required to produce a Safety score on which the entire coaching and reward method is based. After extensive research, M Sverige partnered with Autoliv’s Connected Safety Services division as the best solution from a technical, precision and economic perspective. This in and of its-self provided a greater opportunity to reach more road users with a greater impact on road safety.
Autoliv had already launched a ready to deploy application for mobile phones called Driving Avatar. The solution collects all of the data required to evaluate a driver’s safety level, only utilizing the a smartphone. This solution allowed M Sverige to swiftly move away from the dongle solution, reducing the consumer costs associated with it in terms of hardware and logistics around distribution. This provided a much better opportunity to reach a greater proportion of the road using public.
Moving from OBDII dongle to smartphone-based solution also enabled us to engage with the driver rather than the car.
In December 2020, all agreements with Autoliv were signed and the development project began. Utilizing Autoliv’s White Label solution, we were able to develop the first version of M Connect in just six months.
In parallel with the development work, we have put a lot of work into making M Connect known to our partners. M Connect presents a new marketing channel for our safety conscious partners which they found immediately appealing. Further, their willingness to attach their brands to vision zero by actively rewarding road users who are willing to change their behavior has attracted many companies.
For M Sverige as an organization, M Connect does not only mean the opportunity to positively influence drivers' behavior in traffic. It also gives us a unique opportunity to collect statistical data on how we as a collective behave and where and when we move in traffic. Information that we can use as a basis for providing initiated proposals and advice to decision-makers and other stakeholders.

In essence, within a six month time frame, M Sverige managed to identify and launch a road safety solution, using both push and pull motivations to make Sweden’s roads a safer place for all.

With M Connect we focus on coaching and rewarding good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior. We work to improve road safety in Sweden using a “pull” approach by offering discounts and rewards for improved driving as well as a “push” approach through providing detailed user feedback on an aggregate (60 trips) as well as individual trip information, incident by incident. This supported by detailed and targeted coaching to provide insights and information to help a driver improve their own level of safety.

Safety Score
In M Connect, each driver gets a Safety Score Safety which is based on driving behavior divided into 4 sub scores:
• Speed (Keeping speed limits on the roads)
• Focus (Avoid using the phone for texting, app usage & surfing, as well as avoid handheld phone calls),
• Smooth (Avoid hard Acceleration & braking events)
• Turns (Avoid sharp terms measured by G-forces).

M Connect also has a range of functions & features to create stickiness, engagement and rimprove driving bahavior including:
• Safety Score levels, from ROOKIE to EPIC. Epic being the safest category and Rookie being the lowest.
• Gamification through Leaderboards
• Bonus Program to create a motivation to drive safer over longer period of time
• Rewards for Safe driving as part of the Bonus Program
• Provide Insights on driving style by showing Safety related events in the app
• Coaching, tips & tricks, to guide users what they should do differently to drive more safe

Evaluation

What has been the effect of the activities?

We can show through statistical data and user surveys that we have significantly changed our driver’s behavior for the better.
Internal Survey Results of 510 users surveyed:
• 56% tell us they have new insights into their driving behavior
• 58% tell us that they have changed the way that they drive
• 77% would recommend the M Connect solution

System monitored results
• 79.50% of users rate as “safe” or “very safe” drivers
• 46.20% of lower scoring users have improved their scores over time
• 22.30% reduction in the number of unsafe drivers (note small base)
• 73% of users participate in the “leader board” competition to be the safest driver

Please briefly explain why your initiative is a good example of improving road safety.

Critical to the success of M Connect in improving road safety is that it is a telematics solution that is fully smartphone based, reducing the barriers of adoption, allowing more people access to a driver evaluation and coaching solution.

Of importance is that this application can be rolled out by any interested group within any country or region with little further development. Positively impacting road safety in a short space of time.

For small personal investment, we see drivers improving their behavior on the road, making themselves, their families and the greater road user community safer.

How have you shared information about your project and its results?

Within the Club environment, the application has received a significant amount of interest, presented to a group of European, Middle Eastern and African mobility clubs in November 2022, discussed in detail at a meeting of Nordic mobility clubs in May 2022 and listed on the FIA Region1 innovation hub in 2021.

The application was launched July 12, 2021. Together with advertising agency Volt we launched a campaign on most commercial radio channels and in social media over a 4-week period. Since then, we have continuously run campaigns in social media and in our membership newsletters and our organizations automobile magazine, "Motor" issued 7 times/year. These campaigns are ongoing with the latest blast being a radio and social media campaign over the first three weeks of May 2022.