Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

money.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 414 posts

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

#291

Post by incone123 »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #260
zimzam wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who's an actuary, and the reality is much simpler: people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits. It gives the insurance company a way to identify a lower risk group of drivers so they can charge that group lower prices.

> people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits Is that true? The handful people I know who have/had these devices are definitely wouldn’t fit that category. And most removed it after a while because their premiums went back up (because of their driving). They just chose it because it offered cheaper rates and they all said the…

That seems to support the point you replied to. You point to a group of people who opted out of monitoring and exhibited risky driving behavior, leaving leaving lower risk people in the monitored group

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

#292

Post by danielheath »

Chaosvex wrote: post #220
danielheath wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2255kg is the maximum load, and 1700kg is not at all an ordinary car weight; hatchbacks are often closer to 650 and my sedan is barely over 1000. You could argue that those aren’t luxury vehicles, but downmarket EVs need to be heavy too, because batteries do not match the energy density of petrol. Myself, I’m replacing nearly every car trip with biking where feasible (young kids make that challenging, admittedly, but…

I think your figures are off. What hatchback only weighs 600kg? What sedan only weighs 1000kg?

Hrm, digging deeper and you're right, I'm a little light - hatchbacks are closer to 1000 and the commodore sedan starts at 1370.

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

#293

Post by BeFlatXIII »

getmeinrn wrote: post #79
geitir wrote: post #76

hypothetically it’s pretty easy to fake the odb reader versions of these. Just buy a male to 2 female odb splitter, strip one and hook a 9 volt battery and usb charger to the power wires. Plug your device into your car and turn it on, wait for device to blink green, attach 9 volt and unplug, carry inside and plug in usb charger to the wall.

Might want to rethink posting about committing insurance fraud.

Imagine a society where insurance fraud was so rampant that it regularly got jury nullified as normal behavior.

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

#294

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

bequanna wrote: post #247
tpxl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim. Your source claims no such thing. EVs may be heavier than equivalent ICE cars, but an electric Smart (the brand) is going to do less damage than a loaded Ford F150. Tax the weight, not a shitty proxy for weight.

…and an F150 uses more fuel than a car. Your comparison is misleading. Compare an ICE car to an EV car, not the lightest EV to the heaviest ICE.

That was exactly their point. You can't use 'EV' to mean heavier vehicle across the board.

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

#295

Post by asoneth »

interlinked wrote: post #203
asoneth wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also skeptical of the accuracy of the initial rules but this seems like a domain that should be fairly easy to refine with a large enough corpus of data. Once an insurance company has a sufficient number of claims from telematics users I would wager that they will be able to find strong signals in the telematics data to identify customers who are likely to be expensive.

It's impossible to tell if someone is driving properly based on just sensor data because if it were, we would have full self driving.

Determining whether a particular driver is driving properly seems overkill. Any correlation between driving behavior and insurance payouts seems like it would be sufficient to improve the accuracy of your risk scores.

Let's say you only analyze vehicle speed data. That is clearly insufficient for training self-driving.

But it is very likely there is some correlation between speed and insurance payouts. For example, say you are able to segment your customer base including one subset with drivers who typically drive >80 miles an hour and another subset with drivers who typically drive <55 miles per hour. Are you saying that you would predict that the two populations have identical risk profiles? That speed data has no correlation with risk?

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

#296

Post by mminer237 »

ozim wrote: post #257
hgsgm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"likelihood" is only if you are more likely to be a perpetrator than a victim. Your insurance company pays more if you are at fault, so they'd prefer to prove you innocent.

Or they throw you under the bus. To be liable for all damages. Because they find reason to do so with exclusions they have on policy. I believe any box or anything that monitors car will be used by insurance company to simply not pay up.

There are very few exclusions for auto insurance. Unless you're using your car for a business without telling them or committing fraud, you're almost guaranteed to be covered. The whole point of car insurance is to insure your negligence.

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

#297

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

tokai wrote: post #219
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.…

The only issue with your scenarios is that nobody will ever get in trouble for killing a pedestrian.

I don't see this has a hot take. A couple weeks ago a car intentionally rammed into me from behind.

I called 911 and the police took 30 minutes to arrive on the scene. The officer talked to me for about 3 minutes and then threw up their hands and said they wouldn't do anything because I didn't have a plate number and couldn't identify the driver.

The police didn't even want to bother trying to get footage from nearby cameras when I called back and noted the location of several nearby security cameras that might have picked up the vehicle.

By some miracle, I wasn't seriously injured.

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

#298

Post by throwaway2056 »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #288
tokai wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only issue with your scenarios is that nobody will ever get in trouble for killing a pedestrian.

That’s a disingenuous hot take. There’s a lot of discussion to be had about balancing Justice and societal/personal costs but you’ve gone and skipped past all of that.

I definitely listened in a legal podcast that somehow juries award lower sentences to road accident deaths as compared to others. Seems strange.

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

#299

Post by mminer237 »

mnw21cam wrote: post #289
Kye wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diesel is already taxed at a higher rate than gasoline.

"Fuel duty is currently levied at a flat rate of 52.95p per litre for both petrol and diesel, while VAT at 20% is then charged on both the product price and the duty." https://racfoundation.org/data/percentage-uk-pump-price-whic...

In the US, where Utah is located, diesel is taxed at a higher rate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Gasoline...

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

#300

Post by red-iron-pine »

tomp wrote: post #201
midasuni wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes? The positive externalities created by trucks shipping food into cities massively outweigh almost all passenger traffic. So charging by weight/road damage makes no sense.

The truck that the parent poster refers to is not a 16-wheeler or panel truck used for commercial purposes, but someone's impeccably clean F-150 that hasn't hauled anything in 2+ years
Post reply on HN