8 ms·

Lower Your Car Insurance Bill, at the Price of Some Privacy

28 points by plg 12y ago

kator 12y ago
This seems interesting but they recorder is missing a lot of context. If you drive Los Angeles freeways you'll be hitting the breaks a lot for random people who cut you off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the data will only show you stomping on the breaks all the time and the insurance company might conclude you're a bad driver because you're not paying attention. Also how does it distinguish between drivers? My kids often "borrow" the car and I'd like to be able to "advise" them when they're causing our insurance to go up by driving poorly.. :-)
- morgante 12y ago
  > If you drive Los Angeles freeways you'll be hitting the breaks a lot for random people who cut you off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the data will only show you stomping on the breaks all the time and the insurance company might conclude you're a bad driver because you're not paying attention. That is the correct conclusion though. The insurance company could care less whether you're a bad driver—what they really care is how much of an accident risk are you. Even a good driver frequently caught in LA traffic is a higher risk than a good driver elsewhere. Hence the device is reporting exactly what the company needs.
  - jdjb 12y ago
    I've used one of these devices in my car for the last couple of years and have enjoyed really cheap car insurance as a result (variable based on my driving but usually $30-$35 CAD/month). It is very true that if you are driving in rush hour traffic you have no choice but to appear to be a bad driver. The irony of this is that the accident happening in rush hour is probably minor, yet when I'm barrelling down the highway at a steady pace I appear to be a great driver whereas an accident would be very costly (fatal perhaps). Also they normalize your infractions (sharp breaking, sharp acceleration, speeding, etc) by distance driven so long highway driving is even more beneficial (few infractions, long distances) than traffic jams (many infractions, short distances).
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Insurance companies have a strong financial incentive to have their models be well calibrated with reality, so you should expect it more and more with time that when an insurance company thinks you're a bad driver then it really means that your driving sucks.
      - arjie 12y ago
        True, but they'll happily take 10 horrendous accidents over 1100 minor bumps if the bumps cost them a thousand each and the bad accidents cost them a hundred thousand each. Our incentives are different. We would rather have many tiny incidents (up to a limit) than a few life threatening incidents. Therefore, while an insurance company would happily put into place a process that turns a small number of drivers into maniacs and everyone else into placid sheep they'd take it. Not that they are, and it sounds unlikely that such a process can even exist, but it's important to know that our incentives aren't aligned.
- chrisBob 12y ago
  I don't think it needs to distinguish between drivers. Your kids probably should raise your rates if they are driving poorly.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    Kids on your policy pretty much raise your rates, period. And the insurance companies have been doing this for a long, long time. Many moons ago (pre-internet) I worked summers doing telemarketing for a Very Large insurance company. When people signed up for auto policies the agents would casually ask the ages of the children during conversation. That information was stored away for years, sometimes a decade, until the kid turned 16. My job was to call and "casually" ask questions like "so, which of your cars is Johnny driving when he gets the keys?". You can guess the rest.
- rmc 12y ago
  Insurance companies usually want to have accurate models and accurately predict the future. Hence, I presume they'll figure out the "LA freeway braking" issue.
wallflower 12y ago
One of my siblings had one of these. It constantly squawked/beeped at them when they went too fast/they braked too hard (which is actually a lot more often that you might think - the deacceleration threshold ). It got to be a point of humor in their family. "Mommy, you're driving too fast!" It did lower their car insurance considerably. Thankfully, it was a temporary deal to have it installed, not a permanent commitment.
hendzen 12y ago
And again, Evgeny Morozov is shown to be uncannily prescient about how technology is affecting our society.
BrandonMarc 12y ago
When they installed license-plate scanners on bridges, government buildings, and roaming police cars, there was initially the claim that this system wouldn't be used to create a giant centralized database tracking everybody's movement. We all know how that turned out. And now with these airplane-style black boxes inside cars (the manufacturers have their own black boxes, too) ... I'm sure the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc would never start drinking from this firehose of data, and mis-use it. I'm sure Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, etc would find this info useful, too ... although with the installed user base of Android phones, Google / Apple pretty likely already have quite a bit of this info.
- jimmaswell 12y ago
  Can you give me one example of the government "misusing" the data from license-plate scanners? I know how it "turned out"; it turned out to be an effective means of tracking people on the run.
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    Here's one such example; http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-police-collect-millions-records-drivers-4883 http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic... Two-year database of every car's location at specific times & dates. Though it is hard to say if it's been misused or not since they frequently ignore FOIA's about its existence.
  - evv 12y ago
    As with most surveillance, there hasn't been much misuse of the data yet. The things I worry about for the future: 1. Evidence of everybody breaking the law. (In this case, speeding). If everybody is in violation of the law, the government can choose who to prosecute. 2. Extortion. You might not care about privacy from big brother, but what if your friends and family were to know everything you had ever SMS'd? One day, boom, that might happen to everybody with a low credit score. Everybody else would need to pony up if they want their data kept secret. 3. Data leaks. With these huge vaults of private information, some is bound to leak before too long. Once the data is leaked, there is no putting it back. Eventually, all recorded data from this time period will enter the public record.
BrandonMarc 12y ago
Hmm. * Old title: Safety Spies * New title: Lower Your Car Insurance Bill, at the Price of Some Privacy ... the new title's better, but I think adding (safety spies) in parentheses at the end would be a good compromise.
- dang 12y ago
  The NYT changed their title, as they often do. In such cases we follow suit.
  - BrandonMarc 12y ago
    Sounds good, and I agree with the change. That said, something to convey "spying on you to keep you safe" has a nice Orwellian ring to it, which I feel this topic deserves. Just my two cents, that's all.
throwaway0010 12y ago
Interestingly these programs are currently disallowed in California, I believe due mostly to Prop 103: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/focusarea/prop-103-california-insurance-reform http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/focusarea/prop-103-californi...
blackaspen 12y ago
I don't think that braking slower, or accelerating less (or even limiting turning g-forces) is really an indicator of "Safe Driving". Yes, it is definitely a signal, and obviously a good one otherwise insurance companies wouldn't be using it. But I think that the mark of good driving is knowing what you and your car can do, and actively paying attention to the road around you (several hundred feet behind and in front), and thinking about piloting the 2 ton piece of metal you're in as opposed to blindly doing it. A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance -- but it has to be all in or nothing. On the flip side, I would find it somewhat amusing to put one of the trackers in my track car and see what they think of that...
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > I don't think that braking slower, or accelerating less (or even limiting turning g-forces) is really an indicator of "Safe Driving". Yes, it is definitely a signal, and obviously a good one otherwise insurance companies wouldn't be using it. But I think that the mark of good driving is knowing what you and your car can do, and actively paying attention to the road around you (several hundred feet behind and in front), and thinking about piloting the 2 ton piece of metal you're in as opposed to blindly doing it. If it is a "good signal" then it's an indicator pretty much by definition. The thing is, it doesn't matter what is the poetic mark of "good driving"; what counts are accident statistics going down. One constant about all humans is that you can't ask them to think, or care, or be nice, and expect them to change behaviour. You need to make them change, by changing their habits and/or incentive structures around them, of which, in the case of cars, the insurance bill is a very important part. People behave in a deterministic way, especially when you look at big groups (such as drivers). You don't yell at a river and expect it to change it's way, you force it to do it. > A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance That would most certainly help, but I wouldn't call it the number one thing (the number one thing would be banning human drivers and replacing them with self-driving cars). I'd love to see driving licenses requiring training comparable to pilot licenses.
  - 12y ago
RexRollman 12y ago
No thank you. Plus, you just know that sooner or later, this data will be used by law enforcement.
jksmith 12y ago
Next: "Insurance companies warn against unsafe, self-driving driving cars." Spy on me then kill the very thing that could make car insurance obsolete. Fuck off.
- eurleif 12y ago
  Are you really getting angry about something you're imagining?
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your stay!
  - jksmith 12y ago
    Actually it's an exercise in manipulation. HN tends to take itself too seriously sometimes (you know, pressure for intellectual rigour and all that), so occasionally I'll throw something out there to see how many points I can lose.
tomjen3 12y ago
Now people will optimize for whatever this meassure, at the cost of driving safely. Don't take the route that has slow driving traffic, take the one with fast moving traffic even though you are going to cause far more damage. Don't stop for a red light, it will cost breaking points. You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Isn't the whole point of an insurance company figuring out how to measure things that are hard to measure? Presumably they can stop offering the discounts if they don't actually reduce accidents.
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  > You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents No, their job is to collect as much money as they can from the best drivers possible while avoiding having to pay anything at all. That's how health insurance works, that's how auto insurance works, that's the nature of insurance. "Avoid paying out unless legally required to, and then pay out as little as you can legally get away with." and the best way to do that is to have a customer base comprised of people who you're unlikely to have to pay out for (good drivers, healthy people)
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    To a point - if I don't ever get into accidents that are my fault, why have insurance in the first place?
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > Now people will optimize for whatever this meassure, at the cost of driving safely. The point is, insurance company has a strong financial incentive make the measure be as much an accurate proxy for driving safely as possible. If people start ignoring red lights to avoid braking points, insurance companies will try to get to that data (by offering you discounts for providing it). This is a good scheme; the best way to "outsmart" insurance is to drive safely. This can be a textbook example of http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/. Thinking about it, I'm starting to believe that speeding tickets should be sent to insurance companies directly. I.e. keep driving like a moron, and soon you won't be able to afford to drive. (also, it would be helpful to replace point&click speeding cameras with average-speed computing ALPRs) > You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it. No, if people don't cause accidents then insurance company gets free money.
Spooky23 12y ago
This is the future. Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways. Solutions using GPS mileage logging devices are already being piloted in Oregon to implement a tax per mile model. Also by 2020 wireless broadband will be mandatory in vehicles, and studies are being conducted re feasibility of providing remote management of vehicles from state traffic management centers. http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2014/USDOT+to+Move+Forward+with+Vehicle-to-Vehicle+Communication+Technology+for+Light+Vehicles http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2014/USDOT+t... "The safety applications currently being developed provide warnings to drivers so that they can prevent imminent collisions, but do not automatically operate any vehicle systems, such as braking or steering. NHTSA is also considering future actions on active safety technologies that rely on on-board sensors. Those technologies are eventually expected to blend with the V2V technology."
- maxerickson 12y ago
  It's also interesting for off road rights of way for things like snowmobiles. Landowners are going to be more willing to allow access if there is a way to get paid for it.
- bostik 12y ago
  > Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways Then they might as well take a page off the Finnish playbook of late 1990's. (The "financially molested" chapter, to be precise.) Finland has long had a punitive annual tax for vehicles that use diesel. After all, for a very long time, diesel was way cheaper than gas. In 1990's, the tax was ~5k FIM/year. Professional drivers had calculated that the break-even point was about 30000 km a year, and if you drove more than that, diesel was still cheaper. Then, a company came up with a fully electric van. It ran on batteries only. It was cumbersome, and it was suited for in-city travels only. Nonetheless the Finnish legislators freaked out. A car that ran on something that didn't produce tax revenue? An abomination! So they did what any (in)sensible legislators would do anywhere in the world: they mandated an extra tax to be levied on all-electric cars. Namely, 20x annual diesel tax. (A good van cost about 100k FIM at the time.) The net effect was that for the privilege of owning an all-electric vehicle you would have needed to fork out roughly the price of the new car every single year as taxes. This particular law was struck off the books a few years later, when the onslaught of hybrids and electric cars had become apparent. But it did show exactly how car owners were viewed, and how even a prospect of missed tax revenue was a cause for extreme measures.
Niezgoda 12y ago
1) Concerning privacy: I imagine that with systems like eCall in Europe drivers privacy is/will be a fiction (eCall is intended to bring rapid assistance to motorists involved in a collision). 2) Methodology for calculating premiums: in my opinion one of the most interested technology for premium calculation was introduced by UK-based company http://mydrivesolutions.com http://mydrivesolutions.com. The basic difference between this one and most of US solution I've seen so far is about getting context information from the environment to better calculate the risk for the insurer. They extract information from road attributes and build behavioral map to better understand driving behavior in a certain context (events are more complex than braking and accelerating).
rjsw 12y ago
I'm surprised it has taken so long for insurance companies to start to do this, I was working with systems that could have done this over ten years ago.

28 points by plg 12y ago

kator 12y ago

This seems interesting but they recorder is missing a lot of context. If you drive Los Angeles freeways you'll be hitting the breaks a lot for random people who cut you off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the data will only show you stomping on the breaks all the time and the insurance company might conclude you're a bad driver because you're not paying attention. Also how does it distinguish between drivers? My kids often "borrow" the car and I'd like to be able to "advise" them when they're causing our insurance to go up by driving poorly.. :-)

morgante 12y ago
> If you drive Los Angeles freeways you'll be hitting the breaks a lot for random people who cut you off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the data will only show you stomping on the breaks all the time and the insurance company might conclude you're a bad driver because you're not paying attention. That is the correct conclusion though. The insurance company could care less whether you're a bad driver—what they really care is how much of an accident risk are you. Even a good driver frequently caught in LA traffic is a higher risk than a good driver elsewhere. Hence the device is reporting exactly what the company needs.
- jdjb 12y ago
  I've used one of these devices in my car for the last couple of years and have enjoyed really cheap car insurance as a result (variable based on my driving but usually $30-$35 CAD/month). It is very true that if you are driving in rush hour traffic you have no choice but to appear to be a bad driver. The irony of this is that the accident happening in rush hour is probably minor, yet when I'm barrelling down the highway at a steady pace I appear to be a great driver whereas an accident would be very costly (fatal perhaps). Also they normalize your infractions (sharp breaking, sharp acceleration, speeding, etc) by distance driven so long highway driving is even more beneficial (few infractions, long distances) than traffic jams (many infractions, short distances).
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Insurance companies have a strong financial incentive to have their models be well calibrated with reality, so you should expect it more and more with time that when an insurance company thinks you're a bad driver then it really means that your driving sucks.
    - arjie 12y ago
      True, but they'll happily take 10 horrendous accidents over 1100 minor bumps if the bumps cost them a thousand each and the bad accidents cost them a hundred thousand each. Our incentives are different. We would rather have many tiny incidents (up to a limit) than a few life threatening incidents. Therefore, while an insurance company would happily put into place a process that turns a small number of drivers into maniacs and everyone else into placid sheep they'd take it. Not that they are, and it sounds unlikely that such a process can even exist, but it's important to know that our incentives aren't aligned.
chrisBob 12y ago
I don't think it needs to distinguish between drivers. Your kids probably should raise your rates if they are driving poorly.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  Kids on your policy pretty much raise your rates, period. And the insurance companies have been doing this for a long, long time. Many moons ago (pre-internet) I worked summers doing telemarketing for a Very Large insurance company. When people signed up for auto policies the agents would casually ask the ages of the children during conversation. That information was stored away for years, sometimes a decade, until the kid turned 16. My job was to call and "casually" ask questions like "so, which of your cars is Johnny driving when he gets the keys?". You can guess the rest.
rmc 12y ago
Insurance companies usually want to have accurate models and accurately predict the future. Hence, I presume they'll figure out the "LA freeway braking" issue.

wallflower 12y ago

One of my siblings had one of these. It constantly squawked/beeped at them when they went too fast/they braked too hard (which is actually a lot more often that you might think - the deacceleration threshold ). It got to be a point of humor in their family. "Mommy, you're driving too fast!" It did lower their car insurance considerably. Thankfully, it was a temporary deal to have it installed, not a permanent commitment.

hendzen 12y ago

And again, Evgeny Morozov is shown to be uncannily prescient about how technology is affecting our society.

BrandonMarc 12y ago

When they installed license-plate scanners on bridges, government buildings, and roaming police cars, there was initially the claim that this system wouldn't be used to create a giant centralized database tracking everybody's movement. We all know how that turned out. And now with these airplane-style black boxes inside cars (the manufacturers have their own black boxes, too) ... I'm sure the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc would never start drinking from this firehose of data, and mis-use it. I'm sure Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, etc would find this info useful, too ... although with the installed user base of Android phones, Google / Apple pretty likely already have quite a bit of this info.

jimmaswell 12y ago
Can you give me one example of the government "misusing" the data from license-plate scanners? I know how it "turned out"; it turned out to be an effective means of tracking people on the run.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  Here's one such example; http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-police-collect-millions-records-drivers-4883 http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic... Two-year database of every car's location at specific times & dates. Though it is hard to say if it's been misused or not since they frequently ignore FOIA's about its existence.
- evv 12y ago
  As with most surveillance, there hasn't been much misuse of the data yet. The things I worry about for the future: 1. Evidence of everybody breaking the law. (In this case, speeding). If everybody is in violation of the law, the government can choose who to prosecute. 2. Extortion. You might not care about privacy from big brother, but what if your friends and family were to know everything you had ever SMS'd? One day, boom, that might happen to everybody with a low credit score. Everybody else would need to pony up if they want their data kept secret. 3. Data leaks. With these huge vaults of private information, some is bound to leak before too long. Once the data is leaked, there is no putting it back. Eventually, all recorded data from this time period will enter the public record.

BrandonMarc 12y ago

Hmm. * Old title: Safety Spies * New title: Lower Your Car Insurance Bill, at the Price of Some Privacy ... the new title's better, but I think adding (safety spies) in parentheses at the end would be a good compromise.

dang 12y ago
The NYT changed their title, as they often do. In such cases we follow suit.
- BrandonMarc 12y ago
  Sounds good, and I agree with the change. That said, something to convey "spying on you to keep you safe" has a nice Orwellian ring to it, which I feel this topic deserves. Just my two cents, that's all.

throwaway0010 12y ago

Interestingly these programs are currently disallowed in California, I believe due mostly to Prop 103: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/focusarea/prop-103-california-insurance-reform http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/focusarea/prop-103-californi...

blackaspen 12y ago

I don't think that braking slower, or accelerating less (or even limiting turning g-forces) is really an indicator of "Safe Driving". Yes, it is definitely a signal, and obviously a good one otherwise insurance companies wouldn't be using it. But I think that the mark of good driving is knowing what you and your car can do, and actively paying attention to the road around you (several hundred feet behind and in front), and thinking about piloting the 2 ton piece of metal you're in as opposed to blindly doing it. A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance -- but it has to be all in or nothing. On the flip side, I would find it somewhat amusing to put one of the trackers in my track car and see what they think of that...

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> I don't think that braking slower, or accelerating less (or even limiting turning g-forces) is really an indicator of "Safe Driving". Yes, it is definitely a signal, and obviously a good one otherwise insurance companies wouldn't be using it. But I think that the mark of good driving is knowing what you and your car can do, and actively paying attention to the road around you (several hundred feet behind and in front), and thinking about piloting the 2 ton piece of metal you're in as opposed to blindly doing it. If it is a "good signal" then it's an indicator pretty much by definition. The thing is, it doesn't matter what is the poetic mark of "good driving"; what counts are accident statistics going down. One constant about all humans is that you can't ask them to think, or care, or be nice, and expect them to change behaviour. You need to make them change, by changing their habits and/or incentive structures around them, of which, in the case of cars, the insurance bill is a very important part. People behave in a deterministic way, especially when you look at big groups (such as drivers). You don't yell at a river and expect it to change it's way, you force it to do it. > A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance That would most certainly help, but I wouldn't call it the number one thing (the number one thing would be banning human drivers and replacing them with self-driving cars). I'd love to see driving licenses requiring training comparable to pilot licenses.
- 12y ago

RexRollman 12y ago

No thank you. Plus, you just know that sooner or later, this data will be used by law enforcement.

jksmith 12y ago

Next: "Insurance companies warn against unsafe, self-driving driving cars." Spy on me then kill the very thing that could make car insurance obsolete. Fuck off.

eurleif 12y ago
Are you really getting angry about something you're imagining?
- joezydeco 12y ago
  Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your stay!
- jksmith 12y ago
  Actually it's an exercise in manipulation. HN tends to take itself too seriously sometimes (you know, pressure for intellectual rigour and all that), so occasionally I'll throw something out there to see how many points I can lose.

tomjen3 12y ago

Now people will optimize for whatever this meassure, at the cost of driving safely. Don't take the route that has slow driving traffic, take the one with fast moving traffic even though you are going to cause far more damage. Don't stop for a red light, it will cost breaking points. You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it.

maxerickson 12y ago
Isn't the whole point of an insurance company figuring out how to measure things that are hard to measure? Presumably they can stop offering the discounts if they don't actually reduce accidents.
BrainInAJar 12y ago
> You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents No, their job is to collect as much money as they can from the best drivers possible while avoiding having to pay anything at all. That's how health insurance works, that's how auto insurance works, that's the nature of insurance. "Avoid paying out unless legally required to, and then pay out as little as you can legally get away with." and the best way to do that is to have a customer base comprised of people who you're unlikely to have to pay out for (good drivers, healthy people)
- tomjen3 12y ago
  To a point - if I don't ever get into accidents that are my fault, why have insurance in the first place?
TeMPOraL 12y ago
> Now people will optimize for whatever this meassure, at the cost of driving safely. The point is, insurance company has a strong financial incentive make the measure be as much an accurate proxy for driving safely as possible. If people start ignoring red lights to avoid braking points, insurance companies will try to get to that data (by offering you discounts for providing it). This is a good scheme; the best way to "outsmart" insurance is to drive safely. This can be a textbook example of http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/. Thinking about it, I'm starting to believe that speeding tickets should be sent to insurance companies directly. I.e. keep driving like a moron, and soon you won't be able to afford to drive. (also, it would be helpful to replace point&click speeding cameras with average-speed computing ALPRs) > You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it. No, if people don't cause accidents then insurance company gets free money.

Spooky23 12y ago

This is the future. Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways. Solutions using GPS mileage logging devices are already being piloted in Oregon to implement a tax per mile model. Also by 2020 wireless broadband will be mandatory in vehicles, and studies are being conducted re feasibility of providing remote management of vehicles from state traffic management centers. http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2014/USDOT+to+Move+Forward+with+Vehicle-to-Vehicle+Communication+Technology+for+Light+Vehicles http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2014/USDOT+t... "The safety applications currently being developed provide warnings to drivers so that they can prevent imminent collisions, but do not automatically operate any vehicle systems, such as braking or steering. NHTSA is also considering future actions on active safety technologies that rely on on-board sensors. Those technologies are eventually expected to blend with the V2V technology."

maxerickson 12y ago
It's also interesting for off road rights of way for things like snowmobiles. Landowners are going to be more willing to allow access if there is a way to get paid for it.
bostik 12y ago
> Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways Then they might as well take a page off the Finnish playbook of late 1990's. (The "financially molested" chapter, to be precise.) Finland has long had a punitive annual tax for vehicles that use diesel. After all, for a very long time, diesel was way cheaper than gas. In 1990's, the tax was ~5k FIM/year. Professional drivers had calculated that the break-even point was about 30000 km a year, and if you drove more than that, diesel was still cheaper. Then, a company came up with a fully electric van. It ran on batteries only. It was cumbersome, and it was suited for in-city travels only. Nonetheless the Finnish legislators freaked out. A car that ran on something that didn't produce tax revenue? An abomination! So they did what any (in)sensible legislators would do anywhere in the world: they mandated an extra tax to be levied on all-electric cars. Namely, 20x annual diesel tax. (A good van cost about 100k FIM at the time.) The net effect was that for the privilege of owning an all-electric vehicle you would have needed to fork out roughly the price of the new car every single year as taxes. This particular law was struck off the books a few years later, when the onslaught of hybrids and electric cars had become apparent. But it did show exactly how car owners were viewed, and how even a prospect of missed tax revenue was a cause for extreme measures.

Niezgoda 12y ago

1) Concerning privacy: I imagine that with systems like eCall in Europe drivers privacy is/will be a fiction (eCall is intended to bring rapid assistance to motorists involved in a collision). 2) Methodology for calculating premiums: in my opinion one of the most interested technology for premium calculation was introduced by UK-based company http://mydrivesolutions.com http://mydrivesolutions.com. The basic difference between this one and most of US solution I've seen so far is about getting context information from the environment to better calculate the risk for the insurer. They extract information from road attributes and build behavioral map to better understand driving behavior in a certain context (events are more complex than braking and accelerating).

rjsw 12y ago

I'm surprised it has taken so long for insurance companies to start to do this, I was working with systems that could have done this over ten years ago.