The next time a woman needs bragging rights around a group of men, she should bring up the empirical evidence that her gender is comprised of statistically better drivers than their peers.

This is just one of several insights that LexisNexis’ UK-based Wunelli has gathered after recording and analyzing over 1 billion miles of data on driving behaviors.

Wunelli’s data is particularly impressive when considering much of it was gathered by smartphones, including iPhone and Android devices.  While designing a user-friendly telematics app is relatively painless, the “back end” technological infrastructure proved to be a challenge.

“One of the things that’s really difficult when you’re doing hard install black boxes, we inspect them so they’re all exactly the same.  But the phones are all very different, especially the Android handsets.  They use different chips, they have different GPS modules, and are configured differently,” said David Lukens, LexisNexis director of vertical marketing. “So when you’re ingesting data from all these different phones, you need to do a lot of filtering to make sure the end result is identical, regardless of the handset that’s generating the data.”

In fact, Lukens notes that about 80% of the effort put into the company’s telematics smartphone technology happened “behind the scenes,” since they wanted to ensure that it captured accurate and reliable information.