Governments spend billions to encourage careful driving, but few achieve results as compelling as Tmap. This South Korean navigation app rewards safe driving in a playful and effective way. As a market leader, Tmap assigns a driving score to its users based on their behavior. It claims to have prevented 31,366 road accidents over three years and already has 19 million participating drivers.
An Ingenious Rewards Program
Introduced in 2016, Tmap’s “Driving Score” program works simply: the driver’s smartphone analyzes acceleration, braking, cornering, and speed. The smoother and safer the driving, the higher the score. This score can even help users get discounts on their car insurance. Out of the 19 million users, over 10 million have already received some form of credit or discount on their policy.
A Unique Alignment of Interests
“It’s one of the few score-based competitions in Korea where everyone benefits from improved results,” explains Chun Ji-yeon, a senior researcher at the Korean Insurance Research Institute. “Safer driving reduces the risk of accidents, insurers save on claims, and drivers save money. It’s a rare alignment of interests.”
Gamification for Safety
The idea is that by accumulating high scores, drivers climb rankings and are rewarded in real time. Integrated into an already widely used app, this feature requires little effort from users to participate and reap the benefits. “When I got a perfect score of 100 last month, I posted it online like a medal,” shares Lee Ji-yeon, a Tmap user.
Tangible Results on Road Safety
Road safety in South Korea is objectively improving. The number of road accidents dropped from 223,552 in 2014 to 198,296 in 2023, and the mortality rate per 100,000 people fell from 9.4 to 5.0. While technology and enforcement remain key drivers, the private model adds a new dimension: it rewards good behavior, something government programs struggle to do on a large scale. Since its launch, the concept has been adopted by other apps and by the car rental company Socar, proving that enthusiasm for safety can spread where public campaigns sometimes fail.