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

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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually of course road taxes need to be extracted from something other than fuel. How soon that switch is made just depends on how long you want gas car drivers to subsidize the roads for EV drivers. I think most would agree that the time to stop that subsidizing is "not yet". Why you would need to track how much a vehicle is driven I don't understand though. Unless you want to measure how far it's driven within s…

> Eventually of course road taxes need to be extracted from something other than fuel. If we get to a point where fuel consumption is so low that it stops generating significant tax revenue, then that is a great problem to have.

There's a gulf between "fuel tax drops 50% leading to budget shortfalls" and "drops 99% to insignificant revenue" and states still need to pay for roads during that window.

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a social credit score!

The more time goes on, the less opposed to this I am. There are too many bad actors in society who fuck things up for the rest of us. Behaving is too hard for some people and I'm fine with punishing via a social credit score.

The problem with that is that it assumes both that the people giving the score are good, unbiased actors who agree with your assessment of what is appropriate, and that bad actors will be unable to game the system.

Even in a well-designed system, both of those will be suspect.

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

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

I figured it was implied since we were talking about the US, but context has a way of collapsing in threaded conversations. Thanks for bringing it back around.

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

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a social credit score!

The more time goes on, the less opposed to this I am. There are too many bad actors in society who fuck things up for the rest of us. Behaving is too hard for some people and I'm fine with punishing via a social credit score.

> There are too many bad actors in society

Yet you are arguing for giving some of them way more power to fuck things up.

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they can weasel out of worker's comp payments, of course they want them.

OP was describing a thing they obviously dislike, don't want in their life, don't seem to want to exist anywhere. "Because someone paid me to" is such weak justification for it.

The idea that remunerative & interesting work is at worst morally neutral is one of the foulest norms of this site.

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

#366
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a known date before which this wasn’t the case? If you want to buy a car that doesn’t have such a device, do you need a 2010? A 2019? Country dependent?

90s cars are the sweet spot where electronic fuel injection and emissions controls were mature enough to be reliable and having minimal complexity. It's mostly downhill from there.

You're more likely to be maimed or killed in a crash though

https://jalopnik.com/let-s-watch-cars-from-the-90s-crash-184...

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

#367

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.…

I was fooled into using one from Progressive once. For the record I'm an extremely cautious driver of a 99 horsepower Prius C, exactly the type an insurance company should love to insure. Any breaking of even moderate intensity causes the box to beep and your "safe driving score" goes down. Yellow light, run it or your insurance goes up. Someone cuts you off and you avoid an accident, your insurance goes up. The fina…

That's my understanding, also--they're hypersensitive to the realities of the road. They really need to refine their models a bit rather than simply rewarding what they consider "safe" behavior.

Yes, aggressive driving is a bad thing--but it's not something easily detected by a sensor.

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

#368
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have similar devices on our vehicles at work. I can tell you that they don't work on Landrover Defenders, because they are reading about half way to "OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING" just sitting in the car park with the engine idling.

They have a point. There is probably an expensive repaid coming on from sitting sitting in the car park idling.

I'm not sure how you'd get them from the car park to moving down the road without switching the ignition on. Is there some trick to going from a switched-off stationary vehicle to 30mph without some ramping up in between?

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

#369

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.…

I was fooled into using one from Progressive once. For the record I'm an extremely cautious driver of a 99 horsepower Prius C, exactly the type an insurance company should love to insure. Any breaking of even moderate intensity causes the box to beep and your "safe driving score" goes down. Yellow light, run it or your insurance goes up. Someone cuts you off and you avoid an accident, your insurance goes up. The fina…

While all those incidents you described weren't your fault, surely you have to agree that there's a correlation between driving in situations like that and being more likely to get in an accident? It isn't just about your driving performance, if you're driving in places or intersections where people tend to cut you off or run red lights - or hell, just places with lots of traffic and intersections in general - that's hugely predictive of the chance you'll get in an accident relative to someone that drives a less travelled route.

It's a failure of the industry that they tend to market this monitoring as all about the driver. It's really not, it's just conditional probability.

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

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are both massive cars. Under a ton is more typical and reasonable.

Under a ton?! Do you mean under 1000 kg? How do you figure? The Dacia Sandero, one of the smallest cars I can think of here in France, that's also supposed to be cheap so doesn't have a lot of... anything, has a curb weight of 1,025–1,204 kg (2,260–2,654 lb) according to wikipedia [0]. The previous generation Renault Clio, which is a small city car, weighed around 1000 kg, too (980 at the lowest). [1]. Wikipedia does…

Our country’s Sandero is actually a bit big for the B segment. The Polo, Corsa and Fiesta are all a bit smaller and lighter, at least the previous generation. You’re right about the current generation, though. Not that many on the streets, but they generally are a bit over a ton.

At least the popular A segment cars like the Aygo, Up or 500 still tend to be under a ton.

Sadly even heavier cars are becoming more popular, so in the future a ton will be far from the median.

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