If this were accurately reflected in the rates I'd be interested, but past experience suggests that it's going to be more like "if you drive perfect you might get $5/month savings, but if you brake hard that one time your rate will shoot up by $50/month".

You assume extra risk that the company won't screw you over for what is likely to be a very modest upside. There are lots of case studies of people who got massive unexpected bills because they were trying to save a few bucks. Especially since they will be able to assign the blame to the customer for their high rates. Never trust corporations more than you have to.

Hmm. Car insurance is one of the most competitive industries in the US. Lots of players, slim margins, commodity product, etc... I wonder how long a company could charge people $50 more for braking hard and not lose customers. I know if I saw a surprise like that, I'd be getting quotes immediately.

There's lots of places where tiny upsides come with huge downsides. And yet for some reason people still accept them! My partner's manager signed up for a summer energy program that could cut off her HVAC system in exchange for a super-paltry discount on her monthly electricity bill. She cursed her decisions a few hours in to the next heat wave.

I don't think they are all that competitive when it comes to insuring electric cars.

Teslas at least are very expensive to repair. Despite the high premiums, they may be competitively priced.

I suppose time will tell. If Tesla's insurance product becomes popular (in states/jurisdictions where it's offered), that would imply that big insurance companies are not pricing competitively.

Tesla gets to cheat a bit here, in that they don’t have to charge themselves markup on replacement parts for this own cars. So in theory they should always be able to outprice other providers for Teslas.

They also are only marketing to their own customers who generally have much safer lives than the Altima and Town and Country crowd.

When FSD matures it won’t matter how good of a driver you are it will matter what percentage of time you let it drive you.

The worst nightmare of consumer privacy: A car that monitors your every move.

My wife activated this on her insurance. Got an email last week saying that she is in the top 5% of “worst drivers”. Which was both scary and funny at the same time. We investigated why they deduct so much points for her driving, and the majority of the points was conducted for her being on het phone while driving. Then we realized that we drive around with her car most often and she is on the the phone while I drive..

These models has it’s problems but they are getting better - it’s just so easy to make wrong assumptions from ML models which only include a subset of variables.

Coming up next, a fingerprint sensor on the steering wheel to determine who is driving!

and a mental state, attentiveness, etc. sensor - "Your driving performance in the next hour is estimated to be 10% worst than your average, and will incur 20% insurance premium increase for that trip. Do you still wish to start the car? "

Me: No, I wish to sit in the car and bang my head on the steering :(

I think the new Genesis cars have this as a feature, on the start button. The upside is you don’t need to carry keys.

So it is measured with a phone app and not e.g. an OBD dongle with built-in cell modem? Why not install the app on a second phone which always gets left at home?

“Congrats you win worse driver in America award!”

How do you inspire the lowest performers?

We're on the path where each of is monitored by (hopefully benevolent) AI from birth to death. Such a scenario is really the only way for humanity.com to continue scaling, as each of us has the potential to very negatively disrupt anything/everything.

The issue with this is that in the limit it just makes the insurance premium exactly equal the payout + some margin. Some of the point of insurance is cost sharing of extreme events.

It's perhaps a little better when we are talking about behaviors that are entirely under the driver's control, but gets potentially ugly if for example someone has slower reaction time due to genetics or health and thus gets priced out of insurance.

>The issue with this is that in the limit it just makes the insurance premium exactly equal the payout + some margin.

At which point there's no point in insurance, it's a glorified bond or escrow service depending on how you squint.

> Some of the point of insurance is cost sharing of extreme events.

I guess this borders on a philosophical point, but I don't agree. car insurance is not (or shouldn't be, imo) a payment plan for likely crashes. if, for whatever reason, a person's reaction times are so slow that they would be priced out of insurance entirely, they shouldn't be behind the wheel at all.

Progressive patented this in 1998

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5797134A/en

Traditional insurance companies have been offering a version of this for a while now. Apparently the term of art is usage-based insurance. https://wallethub.com/edu/ci/usage-based-insurance/14118