SambaSafety's second annual Driver Risk Report looked at how inflation, driving behavior and other factors intersect.

SambaSafety recently released its second annual Driver Risk Report: Current Trends Shaping Roadway Safety, aimed at helping insurers and employers grapple with challenging market conditions, dangerous driving behaviors and escalating legal exposure by using data-driven risk management.

This year’s report drew on SambaSafety’s extensive network of more than 100 telematics integrations, thousands of court connections and nationwide motor vehicle record (MVR) and CSA data to deliver insight into the behavioral trends driving crashes and claims, exploring the distinctions between age groups, fleet sizes and industry segments.

, CEO of SambaSafety, spoke to Autobody News about some of the takeaways from the report for the collision repair industry.

The report explores the main causes of auto insurance inflation, which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2024 rose another 11.1% year-over-year—far outpacing the general rate of inflation (3.1%) and well ahead of the next strongest contributors of education (+3.7%), medical care (+2.9%) and recreation (+1.8%.)

Insurance premium increases were partly attributed to higher repair costs. As OEMs use more sophisticated, lightweight parts for ADAS components like cameras and sensors, replacement rates are rising—the average number of replacement parts in a repair order has risen 15% over the past five years. In addition, the average hourly labor rate has risen from $53.51 in 2020 to $65.50 in 2024.

Matt Scheuing.

The report also noted tariffs could compound the problem, as the U.S. imported nearly $90 billion in auto parts from around the world in 2024. Tariffs could affect not only prices, but availability for certain OEM parts.

Other factors contributing to insurance premium increases included a rise in distracted driving causing more crashes, medical inflation, and “nuclear verdicts” that award more than $10 million in damages, which often impact the trucking industry.

The report says "data-driven collaboration" will be essential for insurers to navigate the volatile auto insurance market. Scheuing explained how that could involve collision repairers.

“This is one of the reasons we published this report,” he said. “It's really about better information exchange, because collision repair is where bad [driver] behaviors show up eventually. That's where they express themselves in dollars and cents and money out of pocket.”

The report demonstrates that “if you collaborate and exchange data more freely within an industry, you can come up with better outcomes,” Scheuing added.

Insurers, telematics providers, fleets and collision repairers should share more information about the patterns they see developing, to “understand what's being repaired, but also what isn't,” he said.

“What we're seeing, consumers are putting off a lot of repairs” because they don’t want their premiums to increase, or to be potentially dropped by their insurer, Scheuing said.

“The other thing we're seeing is unlike during COVID, frequency is down now,” he said. “There's actually fewer crashes, but boy, when they happen, the claim severities have significantly increased already. So, yes, there's fewer repairs, but the repairs that are there are major. And it costs a lot more and takes longer.”

The Driver Risk Report looked at trends in driver violations based on data from 2023. Overall, it found speeding was by far the most common violation.

“It's always the three big things that get us in trouble: lack of licensing, distracted driving and speeding,” Scheuing said. “If you just focus on those three knuckleheaded things, life would be so much better across the board.”

At a geographic region level, almost every region had a lower rate of violations per 100 unique driver licenses in 2023 compared to 2022, except the Southeast, which rose slightly to 30.3%.

“The Southeast is just younger, more inexperienced drivers, and all our data conclusively shows the younger, inexperienced drivers have more speeding violations,” Scheuing said.

South Carolina alone increased nearly 4 percentage points over the prior year and had the highest violation rate nationwide at 50.3%. Drivers between the ages of 18 and 30 in the state had a violation rate of 62.7%, nearly 10 points higher than for the next highest state. More than 90% of those violations were for speeding.

However, the highest rate belonged to the Mountain region, where 32.8% of driver licenses incurred a violation. It was also the only region where one of its top three most common violations was a major one: driving a defective or unsafe vehicle.

Scheuing said the Driver Risk Report, which in 2025 is only in its second year, is still refining how it gathers data.

“You probably have your own hypothesis on why there is such disparity [among the different regions],” he said. “Are these drivers better, are they just not getting caught?”

The data is mostly reported by law enforcement agencies, but future iterations of the report will use more data reported by vehicle telematics, Scheuing said.

The big takeaways are crash severities are up, while frequencies are down, Scheuing said.

“I think a lot of that is ‘I don't want to pay for things out of pocket,’” he said.

ADAS features and other safety systems can help reduce crashes caused by distracted driving, but they also require calibrations and, often, replacement parts to fix.

“It's not just putting in a bumper. Now that bumper has to be calibrated,” Scheuing said.

SambaSafety is a data company, Scheuing said, but it is giving away the data in its Driver Risk Report to try to “close the feedback loop” between collision repairers and other entities to lead to improvement for everyone.

“We have a lot of data upstream around behaviors, but guess what? Speeding and other things create problems downstream,” Scheuing said. “Having more of that data communicate up and downstream helps all of us.

“One of the things we do is every year we have this executive transportation summit, and it's fascinating,” he said. “These are companies that otherwise would compete. And the one thing they never compete on is safety. Everybody shares safety tips, safety data, because in the end, we all share the road.”

The 2025 Driver Risk Report: Current Trends Shaping Roadway Risk is available for download. For more information and to access the report, click here.