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Everyone comparing this to minority report needs to calm down. Believe it or not, more accurate insurance premiums are a good thing.. if you are a good driver. And if there’s one thing that everyone agrees on, it’s that “I’m a good driver”.

If Tesla starts charging people who push the petal to the medal at every green light, or take every turn at 2G’s, then good drivers rejoice. I was a pricing actuary in a prior life, I would LOVE to see what kind of loss information they get from granular driving habits.

They are a good thing until they're not. Is already very bad for health insurance, with people being denied to have an insurance just because they're slightly overweight or they have pre existing conditions (like meh, is that the whole reason why I'm buying an insurance in the first place?)

Now fast forward 20 years and you can't buy a car insurance because you push too hard on the break.

> Is already very bad for health insurance, with people being denied to have an insurance just because they're slightly overweight or they have pre existing conditions

Are you talking about the US? Because the ACA made that illegal years ago.* Your slippery slope hand-wringing doesn’t hold water.

*Under the ACA, premiums can only be based on three factors, IIRC: age, sex, and whether you’re a smoker. (And zip code.)

Not in the US, but I've a close friend of mine who got rejected for an health insurance cause he's slightly overweight (and other people for preexisting conditions)

I'm not sure how that is in the US, but the abuse can come from anywhere and the result is likely to be worst that what they claim to be helping preventing.

> Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer. They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.

I'm happy to see that is not the case in the US, but my was a general comment non necessary related to the US. But the fact that they're till law in the US presuppone that insurance company were behaving they way before.

Sex yes but weight no. Such a weird law.
You can't (fully) control your health but you can control your driving style
...right until someone cuts in front of you or a kid runs after his ball onto street.
Accurate premiums are nice...if they don't require surveillance. Which this is.

Focusing on bean counting is missing the point.

In my mind the is absolutely the right kind of data collection we should be encouraging. Do I want Tesla to sell my driving behavior to 3rd party vendors? No. Do I want them to plug it into an algorithm and give me an insurance (hopefully) discount? Absolutely, 100x yes. Not ALL data collection is the evil eye of Sauron leaching off your personal life. Put it to good use, give us more accurate premiums!
> Do I want Tesla to sell my driving behavior to 3rd party vendors? No.

Am I confident that they won't? Also no.

This isn't a better use for data collection, we're just getting paid for the loss of privacy instead of giving it away for free.

> If Tesla starts charging people who push the petal to the medal at every green light, or take every turn at 2G’s, then good drivers rejoice.

The problem is that those things aren’t inherently what makes a good vs bad driver. If it was - are all race car drivers shit at driving? What about people who never do any of that and yet wreck their cars all the time?

Number one reason for people crashing is being distracted.

I'm not a good driver. That's why I use Autopilot. Wonder what my premiums would look like. Technically I rarely drive these days.
Insurance is only ever a good deal to those with bad habits or are unlucky. Truly Accurate insurance premiums become bad for everyone, as in a perfect information insurance system, you always pay in more than you take out.
Wouldn't not pressing pedal to metal at green light indicate a driver with very poor reaction times thus potentially higher risk in executing effective braking? And thus someone deserving higher premiums?
It's unrelated. A person might just want to get to the cruising speed so it doesn't need to constantly monitor the speed.
Nice, welcome to the era of tailored fees based on assumptions rather than facts.

It used to be that you'd get a high insurance fee only if you cause incidents or damage.

But now not, you get to pay more if the Algo thinks that you drive shit.

Minority report is one step closer.

Since when? For a long time, it's been higher fees if you're in the wrong cohort, whether or not you in particular have been in an accident is secondary.
Not sure where you are from, but where I live is the way I described it.

There are factors such as driver experience, age and precious track record (good/bad driver based on accidents) but never based on driving style.

Right. How is your age or gender less of an "assumption" than your actual driving style?
> welcome to the era of tailored fees based on assumptions rather than facts. > It used to be that you'd get a high insurance fee only if you cause incidents or damage.

> There are factors such as driver experience, age

So making assumptions based on "driver experience" and age is not making assumptions?

Trying to imagine funny examples here: "Collision imminent! Your insurance is now $500 per second for the next 1.215 seconds"
Insurance companies have been offering discounts to install tracking and hard acceleration detectors for decades. None of this is new.

As a safe driver, I welcome these types of discounts based on good driving habits. If you do something associated with risk, like a sudden stop, then you should change your behavior.

To quote Warren Buffett: "If you've got a cop following you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket". When you have someone or something following you every second of every minute, with a perfect memory and no other context, your insurance is going up. And I'm sure some will say Tesla's AI can get context through other drivers actions; that's not quite right though - Tesla only knows what the other vehicles are doing, not the drivers.
Sure, but this isn't a cop. Insurance is a civil contract driven by market choice. This system isn't authoritarian - it's optinal and the customer has buying power.

Because of this, these systems typically are used exclusively to offer discounts against the baseline insurance premium and they can only lower the premium relative to the assumed default risk. It's all carrot, no stick.

https://www.nationwide.com/personal/insurance/auto/discounts... "Can SmartRide increase my premium? No. This is a discount program."

https://www.usaa.com/insurance/safedriving "Will my driving information impact my insurance rates? No. We will only use your driving information to calculate your discount."

Insurance companies are willing to offer these steep -- 40% -- discounts because bad driving is so extremely expensive and damaging. The added signal of driver behavior patterns can allow the insurance company to lower their rates by almost half. Almost half!

As an aside, these are the types of insurance premium reductions we should expect, or better, when self driving cars first become a reality.

Yes but was optional this is the difference.

Who does tell you that I drive dangerously in the road?

Maybe I bring my car in a circuit every now and then to have fun.

Have you never bought insurance before? Car insurance at least has always been based on assumptions from a bunch of data about you.
Of course I did, but apparently seems like you're the only one having bought before right? I never paid more based on the driving style, simply because they no way to check.

There are overall considerations (eg. Age of the driver, cat accident history etc) but was never about how I drive my car.

Insurance already discriminates on age/car make based on shitty risk models, what's new
I think car make is reasonable thing at least for coverage of the car itself. More expensive and more expensive to repair models should have higher premiums. And they should not be subsidised by owners of cheaper models.
We could do better and not worst maybe
So what are you arguing for?

A) Insurance shouldn't know how often you hard-brake or tailgate (aka privacy)

B) Insurance shouldn't use the above data to "assume" how safe of a driver you are

Tesla assuming the financial liability for their cars may be what the self-driving industry needs for faster adoption.

One of the big questions with self driving cars is "who is at fault" and if Tesla the corp defacto volunteers by underwriting the liability, then that may pave the way for laws/policy aimed around the car manufacturers holding the blame.

That's not what this is. This is similar to what legacy auto insurers use to price risk using a mobile phone app or a telemetry device to gather data about your driving habits [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. Tesla's primary use case was risk rating drivers for FSD beta access, but the secondary use case (or more likely, an adjacent use case with delayed deployment, never let a code path go to waste) is improving risk rating their insurance customers (good drivers pay less for insurance than bad drivers).

The differentiator here is that the functionality is built into the vehicle natively, and when on Autopilot, those miles are not included in your scoring (which aligns your interests with Tesla’s; they’re incentivized to make Autopilot safe and you’re incentivized to use it).

[1] https://www.statefarm.com/customer-care/download-mobile-apps...

[2] https://www.usaa.com/insurance/safedriving

[3] https://www.amfam.com/insurance/car/knowyourdrive

[4] https://www.allstate.com/drive-wise.aspx

[5] https://www.progressive.com/auto/discounts/snapshot/snapshot...

(disclosure: Tesla owner)

This is not what it is.

It's a regular insurance. Tesla isn't taking liability any more than Geico does.

When robotaxis happen, regardless of who makes them, the maker and/or operator will be liable for accidents.

There will be no big question.

Nothing else makes sense and probably nothing else could possibly be legal.

You can't say "you can go to sleep in a car but if it gets in an accident you'll pay for it".

That's why Tesla says you shouldn't use their autopilot while sleeping. They don't want be liable
I think you're assuming too much benevolence from Tesla here.

First of all, I think the way "FSD" is disclaimed (don't take your hands off the wheel, don't stop looking at the road) is going to mean that Tesla has a much easier time denying claims than a traditional insurance company.

If I'm, say, State Farm, and I'm insuring a Tesla that gets into an accident, I may not be able to prove that the driver was using "FSD" and/or whether they were holding the wheel, paying attention, etc.

Tesla, on the other hand, can get this data instantly and deny the claim based on very minor deviations from the "FSD" instructions.

Tesla controlling the data potentially proving their guilt (and liability as insurer of the guilty) is an obviously undesirable conflict of interests.

We already see this sort of conflict of interests in Kaiser Permanente health insurance and their hospitals, it's a huge problem.

I used a similar service through Progressive nearly 2 decades ago. They sent you a dongle to plug into your OBD2 port and then measured how fast you accelerate / stop etc. It wasn't such a huge discount as to justify the surveillance I guess, but it was something.
Yeah, not stopping at stop signs = higher insurance premium makes sense.
I'd hope that you could come up with something smarter based on some dynamic system that takes the data from people having accidents and scores you based on how close your driving behaviour is to the accident prone.
Can some explain the terms “safety score from trips” and “safety score for rating” as used in the example chart?
Two months offset btw the two.
How long until AI is capable enough to label a good from a bad driver ?
The comments in that article are very revealing. The “safety score” was probably developed by infallible ”data scientists” who know best and can whip up an algorithm in a weekend.
It is full self-driving, so the insurance should be free?
Minority report style