I decided to take Progressive Insurance up on their offer of a minimum of 5% off of my insurance by trying their TripSense program. The device arrived with some expensive packaging and I had no problems getting it working. It essentially sits on your car's OBDII port and records how you drive. When you want to look at your data and send it to Progressive, you plug it in your USB port and have their software parse the data and shoot it off.

After a bit of research I found that the device is made by Davis Instruments and they even have CarChip Software and a CarChip SDK available at their website. It works perfectly with the device I got from Progressive. It gives you almost complete control of the chip.

I've already tried hacking the thing. It seems like they were anticipating people like me and I cannot easily change the on board thresholds on the device that define "Extreme Acceleration," "Extreme Braking," and the speed bands without getting errors.

The log files that both the CarChip software and the Progressive software generate are identical, so I should be able to see if I screw something up.

Finally, another interesting thing about this device I found: it only records the latest activities. If you fill the small amount of memory on the device, it will delete the oldest log. Basically, I could drive like shit until the last 300 driving hours before I need to submit and start driving like an angel.