Let's use your data; they currently pay ~$1,090 per customer. So for the sake of argument, let's say that they charge $1,100 and keep that $10 in expectation. Now they install GPS trackers, and they can identify two classes of behavior; class A drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 4% accident rate, and class B drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 16% accident rate. The combined rate is still 10%.
Class A drivers cost 48 * 1e2 + 2 * 1e4 = $24,800 = $496/driver
Class B drivers cost 42 * 1e2 + 8 * 1e4 = $84,200 = $1,684/driver.
So this is great -- good drivers pay less, risk profiles are narrowed, etc. Maybe the bad drivers can be given feedback that will tell them what things they can do to minimize their accident rate based on the GPS data, and get some feedback on that -- "drive slower", "stop at red lights", "stop running into parked cars" -- things that both improve the metrics for the GPS and result in safer drivers.
But maybe the metric that the adjusters found are "frequently drives in historically Irish neighborhoods", or "drives to fast food restaurants more often". Now things get diciers. And what if the things that the GPS is measuring are not proxies for how bad a driver they are, but how willing they are to settle with cash without involving insurance. Or the correlation is a false one -- it could be that most of the Class B drivers are excellent drivers, as good as Class A, but they have to pay Class B rates because they got lumped in with a secondary association not related to quality of driving.
This is a problem with any attempt to bring more metrics to bear in computing insurance rates, but is especially exacerbated by the invasive nature of GPS-based metrics, which can be used as proxies for all sorts of socioeconomic signals that allow open discrimination.
The issue here and my concerns with GPS trackers in general is if they are seen as providing valuable insight to how a person drives. This simply is not the case because so much of driving is context dependent. A few weeks ago, my brakes gave out briefly and I swerved sharply into the shoulder of the on-ramp I was on and finally came to a stop in the median between the on-ramp and the road I was trying to merge on to. Purely from GPS data that looks like erratic and dangerous driving when in reality I saved the insurance company money by managing to avoid hitting anything with my car.
Worse than this, who say's they'll use the data honestly or competently?
Maybe they will draw false inferences from your innocuous driving data and still label you a 'bad' driver.
Then, if you try and argue with them, they'll make an appeal to the data, and attempt to shut down all debate.
2. It's called bumper to bumper traffic for a reason. Following distance is <1 cars length. Anymore than that and some bozo is going to slide into your lane.
3. You know nothing of me nor my driving habits. I simply pointed out that brakes can fail or appear to fail for reasons other than mechanical failure.
Yes, but that's not because of your driving habits, is it?
> 2. It's called bumper to bumper traffic for a reason. Following distance is <1 cars length. Anymore than that and some bozo is going to slide into your lane.
Heaven forbid your ego take a little blow to make everybody safer.
> 3. You know nothing of me nor my driving habits. I simply pointed out that brakes can fail or appear to fail for reasons other than mechanical failure.
I know exactly what you've told me: You drive in a manner likely to cause your brakes to overheat and fade, a problem that many, many other people driving in the same conditions as you are able to avoid. Therefore, you should pay more than them for insurance, all else being equal.
Also: when you have an automatic and can’t depend on your engine for some braking power to take a load off the brakes.
Also, I haven't worked in property/casualty insurance, but my understanding of these trackers is that they don't include GPS capabilities, almost certainly for those sorts of reasons you mention. The risk of bad headlines incentivizes carriers to do what they can to ensure that the false-positive Class B drivers are not correlated with anything potentially sensitive.
A friend has one of these in her car and it literally has an LED labelled GPS. Which makes no sense because one of the arguments I heard they need GPS to get mileage and speed, which you can already get from OBD.
If the data collection is verbose enough, dead reckoning from speed/acceleration information can be used to unmask some non-driving information. It can't be generally unmasked completely, but even small correlations, like "they start slow in the morning but go faster after xx seconds" -> "they live near a freeway" -> <regional information> -> "they are slightly more likely to be rich" -> "they under-report accidents" can be inferred, leading down the same path. This is the sort of thing that I was indicating above -- a lot of "good" drivers can be lumped in with the "bad" ones to make Class B, if you can establish an attributes that appears to be causal but whose accuracy is low.
I would rather we not normalize technology that really has no reason to exist but to allow insurance companies to optimize the last meaningless % of their margins at the cost of a slow erosion of an expectation of privacy. (companies who already have a history of doing questionable things to deny claims and avoid liability, enoughso that I have personal stories on this matter)
As the insurance company couldn’t determine your driving ability themselves, and therefore offers the same price regardless of ability, the black box allows customers to pre filter themselves before applying, hopefully reducing the average accident rate.
There’s decreasing value to pooling when the risks are perfectly quantified at the customer level.
To give a simplified example, say a good driver costs an average of $100 per year and a bad driver costs $10,000. If without trackers, you can get 100 customers where 10% end up ultimately being bad, the cost over the year ends up being $100 * 90 + $10,000 * 10 = $109,000 or $1,090 per customer. If trackers let you get down to just 8% bad drivers, your expected costs are $100 * 92 + $10,000 * 8 = $89,200 or $892 each.
That lowered cost means more competitive rates, which in turn drives positive selection (i.e., good drivers will be more likely to sign up for your service in the first place). Those bad drivers you passed on also aren't just going away - they're going to competitors and driving up their costs.