A driving score that shows its working.
Four components with published weights, three grades on scales road engineers use, and a driving style profile once there are enough trips to draw one. Nothing is a black box.
The four components
Each is computed from the filtered GPS trace of the drive, then weighted into one number.
| Component | Weight | What it measures | What moves it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smoothness | 30% | The 90th percentile of jerk, the rate of change of acceleration, over the moving part of the drive. | Sharp throttle and brake transitions. Calibrated so 2.5 m/s³, the ISO 15622 comfort ceiling, scores 50. |
| Cornering | 30% | The average of the per-corner performance scores, penalized for jerk inside corners. | Apex speed relative to entry, exit speed relative to apex, and lateral G held through the corner. |
| Speed control | 25% | The average absolute rate of speed change while moving, a proxy for speed variability. | Surging and hunting on a steady road. Traffic-forced changes count, so a jammed commute scores lower. |
| Efficiency | 15% | Cruise ratio, idle ratio, hard accelerations and speed variation, combined into an energy score. | Idles longer than 45 seconds, repeated hard launches, and a low share of time at steady speed. |
A component under 40 applies an extra penalty to the overall score, so one weak dimension shows through. Weights and thresholds are from the analysis configuration the app ships with.
Safety, comfort, road.
The score is about the driver. These three are about the drive, and two of them grade the road and the car as much as the person.
- Safety. Hard brakes and aggressive turns, normalized per 100 km so a long drive is not penalized for its length.
- Ride comfort. Frequency-weighted vertical vibration on the ISO 2631-1 scale, from A+ under 0.315 m/s² RMS to F over 2.0.
- Road quality. An IRI-style roughness index in m/km, graded with highway thresholds above 50 km/h and more forgiving urban ones below.
The driving style profile
After 4 scored trips, the Recap tab draws a radar with four axes: Aggression, Cornering, Cruising, Performance. Aggression comes from the rate of hard events, cornering from the corner scores, cruising from the share of the drive at steady speed, performance from the speeds and accelerations reached. The dominant axis gives the trait, and the shape gives one of six tags: Corner Hunter, Straight-Line Demon, Zen Cruiser, Veteran, All-Rounder, Thrill Seeker.
The tag is descriptive. A Zen Cruiser is not a better driver than a Corner Hunter; they are different shapes on the same chart, and the chart moves as the record grows. The app also keeps a milestone label for the record as a whole, from Off to a Great Start through Building Momentum and Getting Serious to Veteran Driver.
Why the formulas are public
A score you cannot inspect is a score you cannot improve against. Every threshold in Torq's analysis is a named parameter, the research behind the smoothness, cornering and speed-control formulas is cited in the project, and the data the score is computed from is exportable as a raw file. If you think a drive was scored wrong, you can check.
The same openness cuts the other way: the score is an informational figure from a phone's sensors, not a measurement of how safe a driver you are. GPS quality, phone placement and road conditions all move it, and the accuracy page lists how.
Questions people ask
What is a driving score, and how does Torq calculate it?
A single 0 to 100 number for a drive, built from four components: smoothness (30%), cornering (30%), speed control (25%) and energy efficiency (15%). Each component is its own formula on the GPS trace. If any component falls under 40 the overall score is reduced further, so one bad dimension cannot hide behind three good ones.
Is this the kind of score an insurance company uses?
It uses some of the same signals, hard braking and harsh acceleration in particular, and the thresholds come from the same telematics research. But Torq is not an insurance product, does not share scores with anyone, and its score rewards good cornering, which an insurer would not. It is a score for you.
What lowers my score most?
Harsh jerk. Smoothness is 30 percent of the score and is driven by the 90th percentile of jerk, the rate of change of acceleration, so a drive with a lot of sharp throttle and brake transitions loses points fastest. Long idles and repeated hard accelerations cost efficiency points. In corners, scrubbing speed late and exiting slower than you entered costs cornering points.
What are the safety, comfort and road-quality grades?
Three separate grades shown next to the score. Safety counts hard brakes and aggressive turns per 100 km. Ride comfort is the ISO 2631 scale applied to vertical vibration, from A+ to F. Road quality is an IRI-style roughness index with different thresholds for highway and urban speeds. The last two grade the road and the car as much as the driver.
What is a driving style profile?
After 4 scored trips, Torq plots four traits, Aggression, Cornering, Cruising and Performance, and assigns a tag: Corner Hunter, Straight-Line Demon, Zen Cruiser, Veteran, All-Rounder or Thrill Seeker. The tag is a summary of the shape of the radar, not a judgment, and it moves as your record grows.
Can I see how my score changes over time?
Yes. The Recap tab shows the average score, a score trend and monthly figures across every scored trip, and each trip in the history carries its own score. Score history across all trips is a Torq Pro feature; the first free drive shows the full scorecard for that drive.
Does the score depend on where I drive?
The thresholds are tuned to work worldwide, with low minimum speeds so slow city driving is still analyzed. The analysis engine carries regional presets for dense megacities, Japan, Europe and track days with different congestion and speed assumptions, though the default preset is what the app ships with.
A score you can argue with.
Every component of the Torq driving score is a published formula on data you can export. Record a drive and read the working.
iPhone, iOS 17 or later. No account. First drive free.