7 ms·

Insurance companies should reflect unlock vulnerability of a car model in its premiums. That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium

by tromp 3y ago

Insurance companies should reflect unlock vulnerability of a car model in its premiums. That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy. What would help is a widely used certification system kept up-to-date by certification authorities in cooperation with insurance companies, similarly to what we have in place for a car model's fuel consumption.

elif 3y ago
Crashes are such an outsized component of insurance coverage compared to theft that this would not be a substantial motivation for manufacturers.
- shagie 3y ago
  From this month a year ago - State Farm declares 105 Kia, Hyundai models ‘ineligible’ for new insurance in Louisiana - https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/kia-hyundai-models-ineligible-insurance-louisiana-state-farm-list/article_55fae098-a30d-11ed-afaa-5faa28983298.html https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/kia-hyundai-models-in... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642224 40 points | Feb 3, 2023 | 90 comments ) Which then - Dealers still sell Hyundais and Kias vulnerable to theft, but insurance is hard to get https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173048646/hyundai-kia-car-theft-tiktok-insurance-dealerships https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173048646/hyundai-kia-car-th... And in October - Wheels Of Steal: Some Kias, Hyundais Easy To Hotwire; Owners Sue Carmakers, Get $200 Million https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/kia-hyundai-antitheft-settlement/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/kia-hyundai-ant... The Challenges of Insuring a Kia or Hyundai in 2024 - https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-services/insuring-your-kia-or-hyundai/ https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-services/insuri... --- I suspect that this has lead to Kia and Hyundai taking note of insurance rates and changing things.
drdaeman 3y ago
This penalizes unaware pre-existing car owners. Not only they got a crappy car, they now have to pay more for it - all because the vendor was sloppy. Doesn’t seem fair to me. The responsible party should be the automaker that built or installed the security system, not the person who was sold a lie.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  Or, you know, the people _stealing_ cars. I feel like this is bizarro world where what was previously accepted as adequate deterrence is now penalized because actual criminals have fewer and fewer incentives to follow established normal behaviors. “Maybe your face shouldn’t have been so punchable” is not a reasonable position to take, imho. Flipper, lock picks, bolt cutters, etc. are all reasonable tools. So is the expectation that using them to commit a crime should result in penalty for the individual committing a crime using those tools, not the target of the crime they are committing.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Kia and Hyundai saved like $20/car by skimping on a part that all the other major manufacturers include by default, leading to cars that were insecure by design. That's negligent. Punishing people for taking advantage of that vulnerability is certainly warranted, but it's also closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.
    - jonhohle 3y ago
      What harm did Kia cause its customer? How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea, where there are 1:20,000 car thefts per capita yearly vs 1:350 in the US. The locks are not the problem. Stealing cars is the problem.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        > What harm did Kia cause its customer? They sold a negligently defective product. > How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea... They aren't. If I write code with a SQL injection in it, it's bad code even if no one winds up attacking it.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        One of these problems is far easier to solve than the other.
      - 3y ago
hansvm 3y ago
> That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy. It doesn't help that premium calculations are nonlinear and trade secrets. In the real world, it would take a computer and a large database to fuzzily estimate the impact of a particular car purchase on your personal premiums forecasted over the next few years with an error margin any less than a few hundred dollars per year (unless your life is particularly stable and well aligned to some major stereotype you can use to get a closer estimate). If each insurer just published a table of the incremental impact of a given model of car (or better yet, how linear contributions for theft vs crash-rate vs death-rate-on-crash vs ...) then that'd be easy enough to use during purchasing. If you own a 90s civic in Oakland vs Redwood City though you're much more likely for the defective security measures to be used, and the insurers use a proxy for that information in their calculations, so in practice you have to get a personalized quote for every single car you might be interested in purchasing. Moreover, if you buy the car in a low-car-crime locale and move you can still be surprised by the massive rate hike [0]. And so on; modeling arbitrary risk is complicated, which is (part of) why professionals get paid the big bucks to do it. If there are other workable solutions, I'd prefer most of those to requiring the general public to have to do non-trivial math and statistics for every car purchase, especially above and beyond what they already have to do when estimating the total lifetime costs due to fuel economy or whatever. [0] My personal solution was just to sell the car in that low-car-crime locale where it had a market value and buy a new vehicle in my destination, but then you're trading premiums for transaction costs, which isn't easy to model if you don't know how often you'll move in 5yrs either (hindsight, definitely worth it by a wide margin).

by tromp 3y ago

elif 3y ago

Crashes are such an outsized component of insurance coverage compared to theft that this would not be a substantial motivation for manufacturers.

shagie 3y ago
From this month a year ago - State Farm declares 105 Kia, Hyundai models ‘ineligible’ for new insurance in Louisiana - https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/kia-hyundai-models-ineligible-insurance-louisiana-state-farm-list/article_55fae098-a30d-11ed-afaa-5faa28983298.html https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/kia-hyundai-models-in... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642224 40 points | Feb 3, 2023 | 90 comments ) Which then - Dealers still sell Hyundais and Kias vulnerable to theft, but insurance is hard to get https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173048646/hyundai-kia-car-theft-tiktok-insurance-dealerships https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173048646/hyundai-kia-car-th... And in October - Wheels Of Steal: Some Kias, Hyundais Easy To Hotwire; Owners Sue Carmakers, Get $200 Million https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/kia-hyundai-antitheft-settlement/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/kia-hyundai-ant... The Challenges of Insuring a Kia or Hyundai in 2024 - https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-services/insuring-your-kia-or-hyundai/ https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-services/insuri... --- I suspect that this has lead to Kia and Hyundai taking note of insurance rates and changing things.

drdaeman 3y ago

This penalizes unaware pre-existing car owners. Not only they got a crappy car, they now have to pay more for it - all because the vendor was sloppy. Doesn’t seem fair to me. The responsible party should be the automaker that built or installed the security system, not the person who was sold a lie.

jonhohle 3y ago
Or, you know, the people _stealing_ cars. I feel like this is bizarro world where what was previously accepted as adequate deterrence is now penalized because actual criminals have fewer and fewer incentives to follow established normal behaviors. “Maybe your face shouldn’t have been so punchable” is not a reasonable position to take, imho. Flipper, lock picks, bolt cutters, etc. are all reasonable tools. So is the expectation that using them to commit a crime should result in penalty for the individual committing a crime using those tools, not the target of the crime they are committing.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Kia and Hyundai saved like $20/car by skimping on a part that all the other major manufacturers include by default, leading to cars that were insecure by design. That's negligent. Punishing people for taking advantage of that vulnerability is certainly warranted, but it's also closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    What harm did Kia cause its customer? How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea, where there are 1:20,000 car thefts per capita yearly vs 1:350 in the US. The locks are not the problem. Stealing cars is the problem.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      > What harm did Kia cause its customer? They sold a negligently defective product. > How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea... They aren't. If I write code with a SQL injection in it, it's bad code even if no one winds up attacking it.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      One of these problems is far easier to solve than the other.
    - 3y ago

hansvm 3y ago

> That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy. It doesn't help that premium calculations are nonlinear and trade secrets. In the real world, it would take a computer and a large database to fuzzily estimate the impact of a particular car purchase on your personal premiums forecasted over the next few years with an error margin any less than a few hundred dollars per year (unless your life is particularly stable and well aligned to some major stereotype you can use to get a closer estimate). If each insurer just published a table of the incremental impact of a given model of car (or better yet, how linear contributions for theft vs crash-rate vs death-rate-on-crash vs ...) then that'd be easy enough to use during purchasing. If you own a 90s civic in Oakland vs Redwood City though you're much more likely for the defective security measures to be used, and the insurers use a proxy for that information in their calculations, so in practice you have to get a personalized quote for every single car you might be interested in purchasing. Moreover, if you buy the car in a low-car-crime locale and move you can still be surprised by the massive rate hike [0]. And so on; modeling arbitrary risk is complicated, which is (part of) why professionals get paid the big bucks to do it. If there are other workable solutions, I'd prefer most of those to requiring the general public to have to do non-trivial math and statistics for every car purchase, especially above and beyond what they already have to do when estimating the total lifetime costs due to fuel economy or whatever. [0] My personal solution was just to sell the car in that low-car-crime locale where it had a market value and buy a new vehicle in my destination, but then you're trading premiums for transaction costs, which isn't easy to model if you don't know how often you'll move in 5yrs either (hindsight, definitely worth it by a wide margin).