Daniel Vignon Receives NSF CAREER Award to Study the Future of Driving Data, Insurance, and Road Safety
Assistant Professor of Civil, Urban, and Environmental Engineering Daniel Vignon has received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation for research examining how connected vehicle data could transform auto insurance, improve road safety, and create new opportunities to fund transportation infrastructure.
Vignon's project focuses on the growing ecosystem of connected mobility technologies that collect information about how people drive. Through partnerships with automakers, driver behavior reporting companies can gather data on driving habits and share it with insurers, enabling the development of personalized insurance premiums based on real-world behavior behind the wheel.
The research addresses a longstanding challenge in transportation economics: drivers often do not bear the full social costs associated with automobile accidents. As a result, the risks and costs of driving are not always accurately reflected in insurance pricing. Connected vehicle data could help correct this imbalance by providing insurers with more precise information about driving behavior and risk.
“Today’s connected vehicles generate unprecedented amounts of information about how people drive,” said Vignon, who is also a member of the C2SMART center. At the same time, the use of driving data raises important questions about privacy, data ownership, and regulation. Vignon's CAREER project will investigate how different approaches to privacy and data-use policies affect drivers, insurers, automakers, and data providers, as well as the broader efficiency of insurance markets. “This project will examine how that information can be used to improve road safety and insurance pricing while ensuring that privacy concerns remain at the center of policy discussions.”
Using a combination of theoretical and empirical analyses, the project will explore how emerging connected mobility and insurance markets can better price accident risk while protecting consumer privacy. The research will also examine whether driving data could become a new source of revenue for transportation infrastructure, helping address persistent funding challenges faced by governments and road operators.
The work bridges transportation economics, insurance markets, and the economics of information and privacy — fields that have rarely been studied together despite the rapid growth of connected vehicle technologies. By analyzing how data-sharing arrangements influence road safety and market outcomes, the project aims to provide guidance for policymakers and industry leaders navigating an increasingly connected transportation landscape.
“Daniel Vignon's work seeks to answer how society can harness the growing stream of driving data to make roads safer, insurance fairer, and transportation systems more sustainable,” said Juan de Pablo, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology at New York University and Executive Dean of NYU Tandon. “The CAREER Award will help support safer cities through his excellent work.”
Beyond its research contributions, the award will support educational initiatives designed to strengthen economics training for engineering students and help prepare the next generation of transportation researchers and practitioners.
