Car Tech is Exposing Tales Spun By Insurance Fraudsters

The story began with a 20-year-old Manitoban saying he’d fallen asleep at the wheel in a newer model Chevy Silverado, veering off the road and crashing into a few parked cars.

Fortunately, he told investigators, he’d been travelling only five km/h over the limit in a 50 km/h zone; any faster and the damage might have been much worse.

But as Manitoba Public Insurance (MPI) looked closer at his claim, the extent of the damage appeared excessive for a vehicle barely travelling over the speed limit.

So the insurer’s technical team examined information stored in the pickup truck’s ‘event data recorder’—a crash-resistant device sufficiently akin to an airplane’s flight recorder that it is known by the same name: the ‘black box.’

‘The recorder confirmed the speed of the vehicle, which contradicted what the driver told us,’ says Brian Smiley, a spokesperson for MPI. In fact, at the moment of the crash, the vehicle had been travelling 140 km/h. The brakes were never applied.