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Self Driving Car Insurance
- justapassenger 9mo agoI'm 200% sure it's subsidized by Tesla and they have a deal that any losses they'd get Tesla is going to pay Lemonade for them.
- yencabulator 9mo agoAnd how much money will Lemonade make from tracking & selling your exact location?
- mr_unmatched 9mo ago> Lemonade Autonomous Car insurance is the first car insurance designed specifically for self-driving cars. With their claims of it being the first one available designed for self-driving and driverless cars, I wonder how it differs to other options that have been available (albeit not in the US) for 10+ years. https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/driverless-cars/driverless-car-insurance-has-arrived/ https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/driverless-cars/driverless-car-...
- FrankWilhoit 9mo agoOne's first thought is that they ought to be running away from underwriting this as fast as they can go. But then one realizes that it is all profit -- they need never pay a claim, because in accidents involving autonomous vehicles, it will never be possible to establish fault; and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility.
- tehwebguy 9mo agoOne might imagine that lower courts won’t determine fault, one would be wrong.
- nradov 9mo agoYou're not making any sense. In terms of civil liability, fault is attached to the vehicle regardless of what autonomous systems might have been in use at the time of a collision.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoOr even who was driving it, in the case of ordinary cars.
- jgbuddy 9mo ago> and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility. Are you saying that the investments in FSD by tesla have been with the goal of letting drivers get a way with accidents? The law is black and white
- FrankWilhoit 9mo agoWhat is the "driver"? Who wrote which line of the software? Who tested it? Who approved its deployment? The rest is lawyers.
- deelayman 9mo agoI think there's a narrow unregulated space where this could be true. I'm exercising my creativity trying to imagine it - where automations are built with the outcome of obscured responsibility in mind. And I could understand profit as a possible driving factor for that outcome. As an extreme end of a spectrum example, there's been worry and debate for decades over automating military capabilities to the point where it becomes "push button to win war". There used to be, and hopefully still is, lots of restraint towards heading in that direction - in recognition of the need for ethics validation in automated judgements. The topic comes up now and then around Tesla's, and impossible decisions that FSD will have to make. So at a certain point, and it may be right around the point of serious physical harm, the design decision to have or not have human-in-the-middle accountability seems to run into ethical constraints. In reality it's the ruthless bottom line focused corps - that don't seem to be the norm, but may have an outsized impact - that actually push up against ethical constraints. But even then, I would be wary as an executive documenting a decision to disregard potential harms at one of them shops. That line is being tested, but it's still there. In my actual experience with automations, they've always been derived from laziness / reducing effort for everyone, or "because we can", and sometimes a need to reduce human error.
- sabareesh 9mo agoTesla have their own Insurance product which is already very competitive compared to other providers. Not sure if lemonade can beat them . Tesla's insurance product has similar objective in place already where it rewards self driving over manual driving.
- kjksf 9mo agoTesla is cooperating with Lemonade on this by providing them necessary user driving data. If Tesla didn't want Lemonade to provide this, they could block them. Strategically, Tesla doesn't want to be an insurer. They started the insurance product years ago, before Lemonade also offered this, to make FSD more attractive to buyers. But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things. In conclusion: Tesla is happy that Lemonade offers this. It makes Tesla cars more attractive to buyers without Tesla doing the work of starting an insurance company in every state.
- mullingitover 9mo ago> But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things. If the math was mathing, it would be malpractice not to expand it. I'm betting that their scheme simply wasn't workable, given the extremely high costs of claims (Tesla repairs aren't cheap) relative to the low rates that they were collecting on premiums. The cheap premiums are probably a form of market dumping to get people to buy their FSD product, the sales of which boosts their share price.
- Veserv 9mo agoIt was not workable. They have a loss ratio of >100% [1], as in they paid out more in claims than received in premiums before even accounting for literally any other costs. Industry average is ~60-80% to stay profitable when including other costs. They released the Tesla Insurance product because their cars were excessively expensive to insure, increasing ownership costs, which was impacting sales. By releasing the unprofitable Tesla Insurance product, they could subsidize ownership costs making the cars more attractive to buy right now which pumped revenues immediately in return for a "accidental" write-down in the future. [1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insurance-innovation-meets-reality https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...
- jasoncartwright 9mo agoIf it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?
- jgbuddy 9mo agoBecause the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?
- throw20251220 9mo agoWho’s the “operator” of an “autonomous” car? If I sit in it and it drives me around, how am I an “operator”?
- renewiltord 9mo agoIf you get on a horse and let go of the reins you are also considered the operator of the horse. Such are the definitions in our society.
- kyleee 9mo agoGreat analogy, lol
- jasoncartwright 9mo agoSounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.
- scottbez1 9mo agoYeah, Tesla gets to blame the “driver”, and has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible. And the system is designed to set up drivers for failure. An HCI challenge with mostly autonomous systems is that operators lose their awareness of the system, and when things go wrong you can easily get worse outcomes than if the system was fully manual with an engaged operator. This is a well known challenge in the nuclear energy sector and airline industry (Air France 447) - how do you keep operators fully engaged even though they almost never need to intervene, because otherwise they’re likely to be missing critical context and make wrong decisions. These days you could probably argue the same is true of software engineers reviewing LLM code that’s often - but not always - correct.
- cebert 9mo agoI own a Model Y with hardware version 4. FSD prevented my from getting in an accident with a drunk driver. It reacted much faster to the situation than I could have. Ever since, I’m sold that in a lot of circumstances, machines can drive better than humans.
- throw20251220 9mo agoSo does AEB in any modern car.
- fred_is_fred 9mo agoTesla fans have not realized that every car made since 2021ish can do this.
- cucumber3732842 9mo agoAbout once a month my car makes me look like a piece of shit because the AEB gets confused by lane changes when you maintain speed coming up to slow traffic in order to wait for a good spot to move over. As you go to move over it'll flip out and brake as you slide left and no amount of gas pedal will override it so you wind up moving over a lane only to brake check that lane. Thankfully it doesn't do a full stop, just brakes for long enough to realize there's nothing there. 0/10. Someone is gonna cause a multi-car pile up with this. I'm sure it would work great to prevent me from texting my way into the back of stopped traffic though.
- throw20251220 9mo agoObviously.
- mullingitover 9mo agoMy 2016 Honda Civic has automatic braking (and it has lanekeep assist, so it's technologically superior to a 2026 Tesla).
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoIt does more than AEB. It also knows to swerve out of the way during E: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1MWml-81e0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1MWml-81e0
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoA 50% discount is pretty damning empirical evidence for FSD being better at driving your Tesla than you are.
- jerlam 9mo agoWe don't know if 50% makes it actually cheaper than other car insurance companies, or the coverage is comparable, or if they have comparable service. Or if they sell your location information to marketers.
- dangus 9mo agoOr a price hike if the fleet API tattles on you for negative driving behaviors. It may not be on the marketing copy but it’s almost certainly present in the contract.
- _diyar 9mo agoAssuming this discount is offered broadly and indefinitely. Otherwise these might just be marketing dollars.
- Veserv 9mo agoNo it does not. A 50% discount and the insurance still having industry average profit, or at least being profitable at all, would tell you that. Selling at a loss does not indicate your costs are actually lower. You need to wait until we learn if it is actually at a loss.
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoSir, your bias is extreme. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Veserv https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Veserv
- Veserv 9mo agoAh yes, posting well documented video evidence of reality is bias. How silly of me. The only unbiased take is to ignore my lying eyes and make logically unsound arguments in favor of endangering the public. That is what unbiased people do. I also like how you completely avoided addressing my argument in favor of a attempted ad hominem.
- t1234s 9mo agoWhat happens if you have FSD turned off and like to drive fast on public roads. Will they see this telemetry and raise your rates?
- jerlam 9mo agoIt seems the answer is yes. From their web site: > Fair prices, based on how you drive [...] Get a discount, and earn a lower premium as you drive better.
- t1234s 9mo agoBummer.. its super fun to floor them off the line.
- giobox 9mo agoThis (instant torque) is exciting for about the first week of electric car ownership, it gets old very fast. I have far more fun driving my much slower gas-engined cars.
- dzhiurgis 9mo agoIt doesn't get old. What a ludicrous statement. I did get lots of traction issues with FWD EV, any sort of wet - you need to baby it.
- giobox 9mo agoThere’s much more to enjoying cars than speed in a straight line, which I do not disagree at all most EVs are exceptional at. Booting the go pedal at every stop sign or light just feels like being a bit of a childish jerk after a short while on public roads once the novelty wears off.
- darkwater 9mo agoSpeak for yourself. Over 3 years and 100k km and still enjoying it.
- theturtle 9mo ago[dead]
- xnx 9mo agoMarketing stunt
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rebelde 9mo ago99/month is more than I have been willing to pay for FSD, but if it lowers my insurance by 200/month, I could be convinced.
- vel0city 9mo agoLowering by $200? Full coverage on two recent model cars here and that's nearly three quarters of my monthly insurance bill. Insane what people are paying for insurance these days.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- drnick1 9mo ago> automatically tracking FSD miles versus manual miles through direct Tesla integration. No thanks. I unplugged the cellular modem in my car precisely because I can't stand the idea that the manufacturer/dealer/insurance company or other unauthorized third parties could have access to my location and driving habits. I also generally avoid dealers like the plague and only trust the kind of shops where the guy who answers the phone is the guy doing the work.
- iknowstuff 9mo agoAnd yet you have a phone on you, probably using its navigation too. You’re totally right so much safer to trust Google/Apple with your location and driving habits
- hamdingers 9mo agoThe whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.
- BarryMilo 9mo agoImagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized... Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS services so far.
- Sayrus 9mo agoFocusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware. Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
- theLiminator 9mo ago> Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits? Yeah, this would rely on robust competition.
- bluGill 9mo agoCars and personal computers have advantages over shared resources that often make them worth the cost. If you want your transport/compute in busy times you may find limitations. (ever got on the train and had to stand because there are no seats? Every had to wait for your compute job to start because they are all busy? Both of these have happened to me).
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- FlyingBears 9mo agoLemonade purchased Metromile and significantly increased prices. 2.5x if I recall correctly. This has forced me to move to Geico. Now, since prices have increased and new self driving car insurance is giving a discount, are you effectively paying same old rate?
- redanddead 9mo agoJust curious about this, this was Lemonade's integrated insurance to the Tesla right? How's Geico like for you? Probably just fine right? Any differences?
- aanet 9mo agoIt would be interesting to see if Lemonade requires a Driver Monitoring System (DMS) to see if the driver/operator is actually paying attention (or, like sleeping / watching Netflix / whatever) while at the driver's seat. Anybody know?? Tesla FSD is still a supervised system (= ADAS), afaik.
- rogerrogerr 9mo agoFSD won’t stay engaged for very long if you’re not paying attention. It’s getting pretty smart about how much attention it wants you to pay in different situations, but there are no situations where it will let you just sleep.
- sktb 9mo agoHmmm. The source for the "FSD is safer" claim might not be wholly independent: "Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving"
- gizmo686 9mo agoI would be surprised if that was what they were actually looking at. They are an established insurance company with their own data and the actuaries to analyze it. I can't imagine them doing this without at least validating a substantial drop in claims relating to FSD capable cars. Now that they are offering this program, they should start getting much better data by being able to correlate claims with actual FSD usage. They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future.
- Veserv 9mo agoThey are a grossly unprofitable insurance company. Your actuaries can undervalue risk to the point you are losing money on every claim and still achieve that. In fact, Tesla Insurance, the people who already have direct access to the data already loses money on every claim [1]. [1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insurance-innovation-meets-reality https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...
- navigate8310 9mo agoTesla expanding into insurance actuarial science, isn't it a conflict of interest if they offer it for their own cars?
- redanddead 9mo ago> They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future What do you mean?
- ErroneousBosh 9mo ago> "Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving" Teslas only do FSD on motorways where you tend to have far fewer accidents per mile. Also, they switch to manual driving if they can't cope, and because the driver isn't paying attention this usually results in a crash. But hey, it's in manual driving, not FSD, so they get to claim FSD is safer. FSD is not and never will be safer than a human driver.
- cs702 9mo agoTL;DR: 50% insurance discount for Tesla vehicles driven by Tesla FSD. On the surface, this looks like an endorsement of Tesla's claims about FSD safety.
- recursive 9mo agoAssuming the non-discounted rates are market-competitive.
- notahacker 9mo agoAnd that the sort of miles accrued when using FSD in Arizona aren't >50% less likely to result in a claim than the average mile driven regardless of who's driving
- dmitrygr 9mo agoFleet API gives location data, no? I bet this discount will be paid for by this location data
- kittikitti 9mo agoI have Lemonade for my home insurance. It's been reliable for several years and the customer service is great. I don't have a self-driving car but I wouldn't hesitate to sign up. Their rates are very affordable.
- ajcp 9mo agoI've had their Home Insurance since they started up and grabbed their car insurance a couple years ago. Competitive price, excellent customer service, no notes.
- culopatin 9mo agoHave you cashed a claim from them?
- ajcp 9mo agoYup! Two or three times at this point, and haven't had an issue. When I've filed they just process it straight through, and then one of their actual reps emails within x hours to just check in, give an update or clarifications, etc, but that's it really. IIRC their whole approach to competitive pricing is doing away with manual claims investigations below a certain threshold, so this tracks.
- thewillowcat 9mo agoYou're telling me this car insurance drives itself?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- philip1209 9mo agoI was curious what the break-even is where the insurance discount covers the $99/mo FSD subscription. I got a Lemonade quote around $240/mo (12k mi/yr lease on a Model 3), so 50% off would save ~$120/mo - i.e. it would cover FSD and still leave ~$21/mo net. Or, "free FSD is you use it". I believe, at the end of the day, insurance companies will be the ones driving FSD adoption. The media will sensationalize the outlier issues of FSD software, but insurance companies will set the incentives for humans to stop driving.
- IshKebab 9mo ago$240 per month? That's literally eight times what I pay in the UK. Ok I don't have a fancy electric car but still... what.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> $240 per month? Are Teslas still ridiculously-expensive to repair? (I pay $1,100 a year (~$92/month) to insure my Subaru, which costs more than a Model 3.)
- bradleyjg 9mo agoWe have contingency fee personal injury lawyers and you have loser pays. Your system works better.
- freedomben 9mo agoYep, also people who will spend thousands of dollars to get a tiny scratch repaired because for some reaosn in the US everyone expects cars to be utterly perfect.
- philip1209 9mo agoI don't have a car so I don't know what is normal. i just went through the lemonade quote process. (I have a license and my record is clean, though - so there shouldn't be any high-risk flags.)
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- microtherion 9mo agoI'm quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims. But for exactly that reason, I welcome a company like Lemonade betting actual money on those claims. Either way, this is bound to generate some visibility into the actual accident rates.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago> quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims I'm sceptical of Robotaxi/Cybercab. I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.
- misiti3780 9mo agothis ^^
- madsmith 9mo agoHaving handed over control of my vehicles to FSD many times, I’ve yet to come away from the experience feeling that my vehicle was operating in a safer regime for the general public than within my own control.
- Rover222 9mo agoI think you greatly overestimate humans
- ihaveajob 9mo agoThe problem IMO is the transition period. A mostly safe system will make the driver feel at ease, but when an emergency occurs and the driver must take over, it's likely that they won't be paying full attention.
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- einpoklum 9mo agoNow all that's missing is a self-insuring car and we're set.
- cptaj 9mo agoSo, here's a thought... If FSD is going to be a subscription and you will never own our fancy autopilot feature. Why should the user pay for insurance? The user is paying for a service that they do not control and which workings are completely opaque. How can responsibility ever lie with the user in such a situation?
- cesarvarela 9mo agoIf you buy an autonomous killing robot and ask it to kill someone, who's responsible?
- _ea1k 9mo agoYou know what's weird? This is a company that has been using the fleet api for quite a while now to monitor non-professional drivers using FSD on their daily commute, often while distracted doing other things. The latest versions even allow some phone usage. And yet people are skeptical. I mean, they should be skeptical, given that the company is using this for marketing purposes. It doesn't make sense to just believe them. But it is strange to see this healthy skepticism juxtaposed with the many unskeptical comments attached to recent Electrek articles with outlandish claims.
- FloatArtifact 9mo agoYes, this is giving away everything about your vehicles driving to a third party for sale or, manufacture. I don't like this personally and I don't like it for my vehicle either. Where I go in my vehicle and when I do it is my business. With vehicles being IoT connected, we are forced to surrender that data as there is no opt-out except for disconnecting the antenna. Not to mention going in to be serviced what kind of data is pulled off.
- sergiotapia 9mo agoI wish this was available in Miami! I would switch in a heartbeat.
- pcchristie 9mo agoNot directly related to the topic, I spose, but I have a Model 3, and absolutely love it, but the Smart Cruise Control/Driver Assist is, I hate to admit it, pretty annoying (I think it's gotten worse, too). It's incredibly "jumpy" and over-cautious. A car could pull out in your way 300m ahead of you, totally safely, and the car will shit itself and slam on the brakes to be over-cautious. Same thing with pedestrians who are walking alongside the road, posing no risk. It's so jarring at times that I'll often omit to use the Cruise Control if I have my wife in the car (so as not to give her car sickness) or other passengers (so as not to make them think I'm a terrible driver!). I now have developed a totally new skill which is to temporarily disengage it when I see a mistake incoming, then re-engaging it immediately after the moment passes. NB I am in Australia and don't have FSD so this is all just using Adaptive Cruise Control. Perhaps the much harder challenge of FSD (or near-FSD) is executed a lot better, but you wouldn't assume so.
- losvedir 9mo agoFSD is way beyond AutoPilot (the free Traffic Aware Cruise Control + Lane Keep). Autopilot uses an entirely different, hand coded system from several years ago, which they haven't updated at all. FSD is a Deep Learning neutral network based system.
- navigate8310 9mo agoApologies for my novice question, does deep learning neural network give rise to hallucinated brakes and accelerations?
- losvedir 9mo agoI haven't noticed inappropriate acceleration (i.e.: driving at something too fast), but "phantom braking" is real. I'm not sure "hallucinated" is the right term for it, since it's not an LLM, but it definitely can get tricked by shadows or bridges in certain circumstances and start slowing down.
- iknowstuff 9mo ago
- socalgal2 9mo agoThis is the biggest scam I can think of. You are not driving the car. If it crashes while its "self driving" the company that made the self driving system should be at fault. The End! Gees! Come on! PS: I'm not talking about Tesla's fake FSD.