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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

#81
post #38
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try living in California. My $42K EV was closer to $600 for the registration.

Seattle suburbs here. I pay about $500 a year to register my (gas) car so someday I can ride the train they broke ground on 25 years ago.

Wow. I'm on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle, over in Kitsap county, and I'm paying just under $70/year to register my car (a 2006 Honda CR-V).

I knew there were extra costs in King county (and Pierce and Snohomish counties) due to a regional transit excise tax but had no idea it could raise costs that much.

It looks like it is 1.1% of MSRP x depreciation, where depreciation comes from this table [1]. Ouch!

[1] https://www.dol.wa.gov/regional-transit-authority-rta-motor-...

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

#82
post #80
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle suburbs here. I pay about $500 a year to register my (gas) car so someday I can ride the train they broke ground on 25 years ago.

My gas car registration fees in Seattle are $160/year total. Of that either $80 or $120 is flat by weight and the remainder scales by value. If your fees are $500/year, your vehicle is extremely heavy, expensive, or both.

It's a newish BMW SUV, so both.

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

#83

It's starting to feel like Europe. In Belgium you couldn't drive a miles without being recorded on some ALPR camera. Speed cameras everywhere. And the current rage is average speed cameras. So they take your photo on an on-ramp and when you take the exit they'll calculate the average. Above the speed limit: ticket. With no way of facing your accuser in court. The machine said so...

That’s a dystopia right there. Would quit my job before participating in that.

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

#84
I hate this but man am I tempted. I take my old car out for like 2k miles a year.

I think of getting rid of it but it takes so little time & money to keep around, and it's great being able to do occasional road trips. Otherwise I'd totally get rid of it. Insurance is the biggest cost, but pretty cheap all-in-all.

Given how little it's used, and given what a generally chill driver I am, I do think I deserve a better deal. Then again, it's old & I don't think it has OBD, so I'm probably not eligible anyways.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, and it's not great, but I think the flip side of this is that as I get older I find myself increasingly paying for the anti-social behavior of others. There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,…

Is respect for social contracts really all that's necessary? I don't see it as adversarial, so much as I see it as "normal _and_..." for many vendors. For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?

Because they really don't like the TV for some reason/ Or an expensive purchase that should last for years falls apart after 9 months? Leaches who have made many companies cut back on generous return policies with "my ten year old coat is worn out, replace it" are basically turds who make life worse for other people.

ADDED: Furthermore, research has has shown (e.g late pickups at daycare) that when you add a fee to an anti-social behavior it can actually make the behavior more likely because it's now a transactional activity.

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

#86
post #2

It feels to me more and more like you need to be rich to afford living without bartering away your personal information. I'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth." And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.

But at the same time, I feel like this creates opportunities for enterprising individuals. How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?

Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.

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

#87
post #6

Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas. So they have a "deal" for EV drivers: pay an exorbitant registration fee (hundreds more than other vehicles) or install an OBD device in your car and carry a surveillance app to be charged for how much your vehicle is driven [0]. The measurement route requires 2 separate accounts with 3rd parties, one of which has your payment information on file. Given…

> 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…

IMO gas and diesel vehicles should pay a higher tax for all the air pollution they create that the public has to clean up or deal with (in terms of adverse health effects, health care, etc).

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, and it's not great, but I think the flip side of this is that as I get older I find myself increasingly paying for the anti-social behavior of others. There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,…

Is respect for social contracts really all that's necessary? I don't see it as adversarial, so much as I see it as "normal _and_..." for many vendors. For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?

> why not return it and charge a fee?

Your suggestion proves my point! With social contracts I don't need to pay this fee, but by getting rid of them I do; I'd be getting charged for other people's anti-social behavior!

Stepping back, social contracts are forms of trust at the societal level. Any economist or business person will tell you that being able trust others dramatically lowers transactional and operational costs. I want to be trusted so that I can take advantage of those lower costs.

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

#89
post #86
post #2

It feels to me more and more like you need to be rich to afford living without bartering away your personal information. I'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth." And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.

But at the same time, I feel like this creates opportunities for enterprising individuals. How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost? Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards…

> How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?

Wouldn't that be fraud?

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

#90
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage Wow, that’s crazy high. In the UK my Porsche 911 (992) is cheaper to insure than that! (Without an insurance tracker) Anyone know if US insurance generally much higher (than other comparative nations)? Or is SF an anomaly?

About $868 of that is for "Comprehensive" and "Collision" coverage, if it helps. It's possible it's just me, though. I've crashed my car once, and been hit on my motorcycle. In general, given that, I would assume it's more because of that than in general since I'm obviously a high risk driver. When I set my address from San Jose to San Francisco (I used to store the car at my friend's) it went up $200/yr so that's th…

> How much do you pay?

About $1100 (comprehensive). I’ve never made a claim and have no speeding points, so I guess I get a good rate; but the OP rate still seemed pretty high for the model.

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