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To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

money.com

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Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#261

Post by Spivak »

SavageBeast wrote: post #213

A former girlfriend of mine came home one day with one of these devices plugged into her car. She was the kind of person who just said "yes" to whatever was on the form and she simply picked the lowest price option. My head immediately goes to the scenario where theres been some kind of an accident. Maybe it's a fender bender or maybe a pedestrian was hit. In one case you have a couple damaged cars and a deductible.…

> as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money.

But the law is, auto insurance companies can only make money on scale. If they charge premiums that are out of line for the risk being covered they have to refund them. This happened when people drove significantly less during covid.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#262

Post by ThrowAway1922A »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #253
otter-in-a-suit wrote: post #137

I've both worked on systems like that professionally and built some myself just for fun to play with GPS/geospatial data/streaming etc (fun tech). I'd _never_ want something like that installed in my vehicle. First off, you're usually relying on ODB-2 + GPS + usually some type of streaming backend, which means you're looking at 2 unreliable (or, at least, hard to _interpret_) sources of data delivered and presumably…

Why'd you build it then?

Why not? I've worked on systems like this as there is a demand. We offer it on personal lines and people like the discount, but business lines? They actually want these devices on their vehicles.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#263

Post by maldev »

SavageBeast wrote: post #213

A former girlfriend of mine came home one day with one of these devices plugged into her car. She was the kind of person who just said "yes" to whatever was on the form and she simply picked the lowest price option. My head immediately goes to the scenario where theres been some kind of an accident. Maybe it's a fender bender or maybe a pedestrian was hit. In one case you have a couple damaged cars and a deductible.…

All new cars have a blackbox that records what happened before a crash. So it would just stop the constant monitoring point.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#264

Post by sireat »

reaperducer wrote: post #244
stravant wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value proposition. What are you going to do, _not_ walk around with a phone in your pocket?

What are you going to do, _not_ walk around with a phone in your pocket? Sounds like me three days a week. I walk out of my home carrying nothing more than a $20 bill and a newspaper. I go to the French cafe a couple of blocks away and have a leisurely lunch while reading the news without any tech or financial company following me around tracing, tallying, tabulating, and selling my life. I call it "normal."

That was normal 25 years ago.

These days that puts you in a "suspicious person without phone on them at all times" category.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#265

Post by Spivak »

zimzam wrote: post #250
bequanna wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICE vehicles do pay taxes by weight. Larger vehicles use more fuel and pay more taxes.

But this isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of wear-and-tear they cause on roads.

If you want true accuracy you're going to need to track the car 24/7 which would be unpopular.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#266

Post by LeafItAlone »

hgsgm wrote: post #241
rpdillon wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading is the lower initial price is a incentive to allow the company to collect data. The data can then be used as evidence of poor driving, which then allows the company to raise prices. Although I've never used such a tracker, my understanding is they use proxy metrics for safety (accelerometer thresholds vs. accident record) that can facilitate this.

If your theory is that they can raise prices arbitrarily for profit, then you have to explain why they have not already done so. Insurance companies complete on actuarial accuracy. I'd rather bad drivers pay more, and be in incentivized to drive better, than young drivers and all drivers pay more.

> then you have to explain why they have not already done so

That may be easy: there is a lot of competition in the market. If one company raises their rates too high above others, it is very easy to switch. Lots of people switch every few renewals, chasing a cheaper price.

With the individualized data, they can selectively raise their rates and either take more in from those customers, or get them (and just them) to flee. All without having to wait until _after_ an accident.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#267

Post by lm28469 »

timbre1234 wrote: post #179
parl_match wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas That's because they kind of are. Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes. EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight. And it's not linear wear per pound, either. This is going to require a significant shift about how states and cities think about their road maintenanc…

EV drivers more than make this up by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers. Gas drivers seem to always conveniently forget those real societal costs when they're trying to talk about "fairness".

> by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers

Depend where you get your electricity from. Also most of car pollution comes from tires and brake dust, which EV create more of given their weight and torque

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

See, we can play this silly game all day long or just all chip in.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#268

Post by bequanna »

timbre1234 wrote: post #179
parl_match wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas That's because they kind of are. Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes. EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight. And it's not linear wear per pound, either. This is going to require a significant shift about how states and cities think about their road maintenanc…

EV drivers more than make this up by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers. Gas drivers seem to always conveniently forget those real societal costs when they're trying to talk about "fairness".

That’s a very cute argument, but it doesn’t pay for the roads.

Also, having lived in a city I can tell you that brake dust and tire wear is also a big part of car pollution.

Unless you want 100% toll roads, we need to come up with fair-ish way to tax EV road use.

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#269

Post by lm28469 »

midasuni wrote: post #198
tomp wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Roads are a public good. Having a road available to use, is worth almost as much as actually using it. Not to mention all the positive externalities of a better connected country (more trade, business, economic growth).

I use a road in my 1100kg car, you use it in your 2200kg car. You cause 8 times the damage. Do you generate 8 times the positive externalities?

Do you eat red meat ? sugary drinks ? do you exercise ? Do you have XYZ gene ?

You're costing X times more to the system because you're diabetic/obese/predisposed ? You should pay more!

That's how it sounds, and if we want to live like that we can go back to cavemen times, because we didn't built societies to play this silly game

Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

#270

Post by gwbas1c »

> Insurance companies may think you’re a higher-risk driver if you’re accelerating fast, braking aggressively, making sharp turns, using your phone while you drive, coming home at 3 a.m., taking dangerous roads or simply driving a lot.

Is there any proof that any of these behaviors actually correlate with tangible risk? (I mean, I can understand that "simply driving a lot" increases risk.)

Personally, I'd be more interested in cars with cameras using machine learning to build a risk profile of other cars. I'm not the only person who sees dangerous behavior all the time. It would be interesting if I could sell a stream from my cameras to a company that builds risk profiles based on observed behavior.

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