I'm completely guessing here, but I'm wondering if this was spawned from looking at their own internal data on Adwords? I'm sure there are advertisers spending ungodly amounts of money toward auto insurance.. and Google probably thinks "oh we can do that easy and better, and take premium space on search". I think I remember reading an article somewhere that it was one of the most expensive keywords possible (Although this article is dated):

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/07/18/most-expensive-...

What does it matter? Are you going to invest heavily in this car insurance comparison service? Are you worse off now that Google tries this thing out?

Maybe he goes shopping for new car insurance every six months and can't be bothered learning a new auto insurance comparison interface every time. This is a big problem for the two people who do that.

It's most devastating when you've built up a community, a way of life, around a car insurance comparison tool. Then the company pulls the plug, and even if you can download an archive of your data, you lose a lot that of the connections between you and your car insurance social network. That's why car insurance comparison is best as a decentralized network, so that if one provider goes away, you can still call the other fifty providers as usual.

Maybe he's working on a car insurance quote comparison startup.

I see that they are paid to promote some of those cards and that influences which ones they recommend, so this is just more Google sleaze.