My Safe Drive app is your new companion for a safer drive

As reported by the Philippine Global Road Safety Partnership, there was an increase in road crashes in 2015 due to reckless driving. To promote safer roads and smarter use of it, BPI/MS Insurance Corporation brings you the My Safe Drive app.

BPI/MS Insurance Corporation is one of the leading auto insurance companies in the Philippines. It's a joint venture of the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company, one of the largest non-life insurance firm in Japan.

Available for Android devices and iPhone, the new My Safe Drive app uses the smartphone's built-in camera and GPS to detect imminent danger while driving. To prove its effectiveness, BPI/MS Insurance Corporation invited us and a handful of journalist to give the app a go while we drove from Bonifacio Global City all the way to Nuvali in Sta. Rosa, Laguna.

The new My Safe Drive app produces sound and visual alerts to signal the driver whether the distance (or the time gap) to the car in front is too near or if your own ride is leaving its lane. It also warns the driver if he's going beyond the speed limit that the user set.

By the way, the app is smart enough to detect speed limit road signs.

In addition to the basic functions above, the My Safe Drive app can record the actual drive on either photos or video. That's pretty handy especially during road incidents where no one's admitting their fault. Furthermore, it also displays the present speed, distance traveled, and fuel economy.

Another amazing feature of the app is its Parking Locator. A pin can be dropped on the map after you've parked your vehicle. You can then locate the car in case you forgot where you exactly left it.

And that's not all. While on the app's interface, you have 3 functions you could access with just a swipe of a finger. Swipe right to access the dialer so you could make an important phone call; swipe left to access your music and be entertained while driving. Lastly, swipe up to access popular navigation apps.

To keep track of your daily progress, the app also incorporates the data it collected from the drive and converts them into a scoring system – 100 being the highest. To simplify things, every warning or alert that you get will merit deductions. This is a good way to measure if you're being a good driver or not.

You might say that new cars today are already equipped with smart safety features such as the new Ford Focus' Active City Stop System, or the Honda Legend's Lane-Keep Assist System. However, majority of the cars today are not privileged to have those features especially the older ones.

The new My Safe Drive app is great way to improve the increasingly declining driving conditions of our country. Although road safety and smart driving is still on the hands of the person behind the wheel, but a little assistance from an intelligent app won't hurt.