Carrot plans to broaden offering to include low mileage products

Telematics business Carrot is exploring introducing a new low mileage telematics product in response to how consumers have been driving and using their vehicles as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown measures.

Due to the change in working patterns for many employees, a large proportion of UK-based staff are no longer undertaking a daily commute in their cars because they are instead working from home.

This, in turn, has had “a knock-on impact on how we use our vehicles” and presents “a significant opportunity”, said Norrie Erwin, managing director of Carrot - especially when viewed in conjunction with the rise of connected cars.

“We’re seeing a lot of interest in low mileage products, so people are saying look, I’m not going to be using my vehicle as much as I possibly have done in the past,” Erwin continued.

”It’s this relationship between miles driven and staying with insurance, insurance products that absolutely, definitively meet that requirement. So, we’re seeing a lot more interest around that.”

If Carrot does roll out a telematics product based on low mileage, Erwin added that this will help to expand the business’s footprint beyond its current target audience of new and young drivers.

He explained: “We’ve got plans to broaden that footprint because we’re seeing opportunities beyond purely the niche that we’re involved in.

“We firmly believe within Carrot there’s an opportunity for a wider footprint of customers that are interested in effectively considering the external environment and how often they drive their vehicle.

Despite showing an evident interest in the creation of a low mileage product, Carrot is “still at [the] research stage and formulating what it might look like”, Erwin said, so it is still “quite early to be having this discussion”.

Making plans

Erwin added that Carrot also plans to expand its operations in relation to connected vehicles.

He said: “There’s a lot of stuff happening from connected vehicles, the use of data and information from some very clever people that can implement stuff with it and design stuff with it and make it work with the use of apps and so on and so forth.

“There’s a significant opportunity. That’s one area where we can widen our customer footprint by using telematics more proactively than it currently is.”

Plus, “we have opportunities to influence the claims environment as well”, Erwin said, “where with the use of technology, we can be much faster on the case. If somebody does have an unfortunate incident, actually we can be alerted very quickly indeed and have all the mechanisms in place to provide assistance”.

The business has also ”recently extended our panel of mainstream insurers”, added Erwin.