New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums | Hacker News Reader

New Toyotas will upload data to AWS to help create custom insurance premiums

theregister.com

150 pointsmikro2nd145 comments

And here's the thing. These types of driving habit trackers (not necessarily new in the auto-insurance industry) are touted as a means to reduce the cost of insurance for good drivers. But what qualifies as a "good driver" is likely to be more like 10% of drivers. For everyone else, this won't reduce the insurance costs at all.

It's frankly just a way for insurance companies to extort more profit from drivers. I don't want a black box in my car of any type, even if I already qualify for the best possible insurance rates. Your driving habits are a huge privacy concern and we should all guard them very carefully.

> For everyone else, this won't reduce the insurance costs at all.

It will likely raise it to subsidize things, somebody else has to pay your premium... Companies are never in the business of making less money.

"Companies are never in the business of making less money"

That's just a perfect way to word that. Gonna save that one for later.

>It will likely raise it to subsidize things, somebody else has to pay your premium

I don't know what this means, but an insurance company can be incentivized to lower premiums as a means to win new business. If an insurance company offered me lower premiums in exchange for monitoring my driving, I might do it. I already have dash cams to ensure I don't get found at fault if it isn't my fault.

Insurance companies have been offering just this deal for years - they will stick a GPS logger into the OBD2 port on your car, and then ask you to let them pull data off it periodically[1].

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/08/14/data-moni...

Root Insurance does this via mobile app. They might be available in your area. Disclosure: I work at Root

In my state, for example, insurance companies required to pay out a percentage of premiums. With the reduction in miles driven across the risk pool I've been receiving refund checks.

It will raise rates for those who are already risky drivers, but will not save money for typically safe drivers. And worse, this will push risky drivers to even more abandon auto-insurance entirely. The good drivers will be forced to carry more uninsured motorist coverage, simply because the for-profit insurance companies decided to drive their bottom customers out of the insurance market entirely.

"Somebody else has to pay your premium" is really just going to manifest itself as an increase in uninsured motorist premiums. Sadly.

I wonder how insurance mandates interact with this trend. When the state requires insurance, but insurance requires disclosure of all movements, what recourse is there? It seems the only party with an interest in privacy would be the purchaser who just wants to drive to work.

This sort of "outsourcing of standards" is really disconcerting.

The state is likely to see this as a positive anyway. Insurance companies can bill this as a major boon to law enforcement, traffic regulation, parking violations, and of course think of the children.

There will always likely be an option without the black box. It will get more expensive though, as drivers self-select into different groups.

> When the state requires insurance, but insurance requires disclosure of all movements

Not necessarily. We do some driver behaviour analisys and it accounts for harsh acceleration/deceleration on some speed intervals and harsh cornering. No other tracking is nedded. One could standardize a set of metrics and give the driver a mark. But it's still discrimination by algorithm without any kind of appeal in the end. If you analyse the data from the GPS for instance, any GPS reflection (eg. tall buldings) could cause a jump in speed and trigger false alarms. Same with the accelerometer but on a lesser extent.

Point well taken, but it’s still another case of “we’ll only use these data, not those, trust us.” Even if the insurance corps are truly trustworthy, it only takes one mistake to have stored data leak. After the last experience I had with USAA after a drunk hit my parked car, I would personally very much like to opt out of trusting in this way. I hope that remains an option.

I just willingly put one of these tracker in my car. I barely drive anymore due to Covid and USAA is attempting to charge me 180 per month. Metromile lets me pay 70 dollars a month + 12 cents a mile. No brainier decision at that price point unfortunately.

It might be a good deal for you. But I wouldn't take the "no brainer" argument here. Driving habits are highly personal and you most definitely should resist being profiled by your insurance company, even for the extra break on premiums. That may be a good deal for you now, but don't count on it for long, I'm afraid.

I already am profiled by my insurance company. Only their profiles are based on correlations rather than a direct line of causation since they lack any data on me beyond inference from the population. As a result, I'm shackled to suffer from the behavior of my peer group, so if I'm young or live in a city I pay more money no matter if I am one of those perfect drivers who goes a lifetime of driving without an accident or ticket.

USAA has been returning premiums to customers during Covid. And I'd pay more to not be tracked.

Just for the hell of it, I once got a quote from Metromile when I was hardly driving at all, and it was HIGHER than my USAA rate.

Insurance companies already stratify premiums. You can be a perfect driver and pay extreme premiums because you happen to be young and live in a certain neighborhood rather than another, since actuaries are forced to rely on correlations rather than causation since they lack this data.

As someone who has never gotten into a wreck nor even gotten a speeding ticket, I for one would welcome a data driven approach to pricing premiums rather than having me binned with my peer group who has no qualms texting and driving drunk over the speed limit, on average.

Fair point about the bins and a "data driven approach" to premiums. But I think you overestimate how much "you could save" by giving away your driving habit privacy. Most auto-insurance trackers are currently offering discounts "of up to 15%" if you qualify as a "good driver". Seriously, that's like what $40 on a typical 6 month policy? And you have to drive perfectly at all times, no speeding ever, no rapid acceleration, no sudden stops, etc. All of that is being tracked. And you most definitely cannot get in an accident at all.

Even with your good driving habits, you are still subject to randomness equally on the road at any given point in time. Your demographics and "bins" aren't going to make the roll-of-the-dice any different for you. Driving is a random series of events and you can be caught in a situation that is your fault (legally) just the same as anyone else on the road.

This move is nothing more than a company trying to make extra money by selling your private data. It's the new business model of the information age, and all traditional companies are looking at new ways to extort your privacy for the sake of profit.

> But I think you overestimate how much "you could save" by giving away your driving habit privacy. Most auto-insurance trackers are currently offering discounts "of up to 15%" if you qualify as a "good driver". Seriously, that's like what $40 on a typical 6 month policy? And you have to drive perfectly at all times, no speeding ever, no rapid acceleration, no sudden stops, etc. All of that is being tracked. And you most definitely cannot get in an accident at all.

This all seems like conjecture. The auto insurance market is pretty competitive, and if an insurance company misprices their insurance, there are plenty of other insurance companies out there that will correct it.

If insurance companies just wanted to raise rates, they already would have.

I'm pretty sure the state insurance commissions have something to say about that, too.

>Seriously, that's like what $40 on a typical 6 month policy?

Interesting that you think car insurance costs around $500/year. Claims that people pay close to triple that on average seem to be abundant.

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/car-insurance/average-co...

OK, fair to call that out. My bad for grabbing numbers from my arse.

So let's take the average, which per your source, says $1400 / year (or $700 per 6-months). $700 * 0.15 = $105 savings per 6 months ($17.50 per month).

So now you need to ask, will you qualify for the full 15% discount? If you stop too quickly or roll through a benign stop sign, you can forget it.

And worse, don't you think that the insurance company in question already raised their rates by 15% only to give you a chance to earn that back with (quote) "good driving habits"? If they ding you for anything, then you're going to pay the higher rate.

It's like a grocery store member card. If you don't have it, they just don't care, they just charge you the non-member price. But their member price is already profitable, so the few shoppers coming through and buying without a membership are just paying an additional gravy to their profits.

Insurance companies want to get into this game, desperately. Oh, you don't have their tracker app installed? Well, you're going to pay the non-premium expensive rate and they get the keep the profit. Your good driving is not going to offset your demographic either.

And then there's all the privacy concerns. No thanks, I'm going to opt out and not buy into the $18 per month non-discount with some gimmicky insurance company and instead give my business to a company that doesn't want to play premium discount games.

>Driving is a random series of events and you can be caught in a situation that is your fault (legally) just the same as anyone else on the road.

This is true, and that's why you pay more for car insurance in Los Angeles than in the desert. There is a base rate for the given area that everyone pays premium to, given the danger of a given square foot of road is different for every area. This is already all quantified and baked in, even driving habits from indirect sources like google maps or road conditions, so personal data collection will not change this.

So why data collect at all if so much variance is due to local danger? Because a huge component of the variance is also explained by drivers skill, and insurers proxy this based on correlations from your demographic data, since they lack any other datapoint on your particular driving habits (other than accident history).

This is why powerful sports cars with a twitchy throttle that are hard for most people to control cost more to insure than a minivan, and why young people pay far more for insurance than older people, and why males pay more than women for insurance as well. These people might operate over the same square footage of road and experience the same risks, but pay sometimes vastly different premiums.

If you were an F1 driver who had split second reaction times and could control a vehicle better than anyone on the road for probably 1000 miles around, certainly you'd like for insurers to take this into consideration before they bin you with the other 23 year old male Los Angelenos who drive a ferrari downtown, probably a rather reckless group of peers if we had to stereotype.

>you overestimate how much "you could save" by giving away your driving habit privacy

It amuses me that when it comes to phones tracking us, apps tracking us, google maps tracking us, etc.. we don't get the same outrage.

Also, the answer to your concerns is regulation. Contact your state reps.

I'm actually okay with pricing based on driving habits. Sure it won't be perfect, but it seems more just than pricing based on whether you're married or not or have a good credit score like insurance carriers currently doing.

Agree. I might not like it for myself. But I benefit knowing there’s a cost for all the horrible drivers out there might make them drive more safely.

Sorry others are downvoting you, I know exactly what you mean. My SO and I are age 24 living in a relatively high-risk area for theft and accidents. But we both live within walking distance of work, and since covid hit, we're not driving hardly at all. Our insurance doesn't seem to care.

We pay close to $300/mo for insurance. What a crazy prerequisite to participate in modern society. Imagine if all that money went towards building a train/subway network instead.

Some quick Googling tells me there are ~2.5M registered vehicles in America, and the average cost of car insurance is ~$1,400 / year. That's $2Bn/yr we could be spending on public transit, even ignoring the costs of gas and car purchases.

EDIT: Found an article [1] claiming that personal transportation costs accounted for $1 TRILLION in spending in 2018.

[1] https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-uni...

You have the wrong insurance maybe? Geico recently refunded money to its customers because of the change in driving habits during Covid quarantine. That seems to indicate a company that at least balances their insurance needs based directly on how many miles are being driven.

We have Progressive because they gave us the best quote when we signed up (neither of us had a car insurance history.)

We look every couple months or so for a better quote, but so far, nothing. Geico would have us paying even more.

Geico refunded customers because they were required to by law as many areas limit the maximum profits insurance companies can make.

> Some quick Googling tells me there are ~2.5M registered vehicles in America

There's no possible way this is correct. If you assume 1 car per 2 people, you get 164M registered vehicles. Google suggests the actual number is 285M.

Though many insurance policies cover multiple vehicles, and that's probably $1,400 / year / policy not $1,400 / year / vehicle on insurance.

Try making a left turn in a state with sub-par signals without tripping the accelerometer threshold for a bad driver. This will punish good drivers forced to deal with bad civil engineering.

Will the >insurance< be >punishing< the drivers?

Or is it more accurate to say it gives them an incentive to address the bad civil engineering through their behavior.

The insurance company is operating on an actuarial table that shows cornering with those accelerometer values is statistically involved in more accidents. The user will slow down because now they're aware of the requirements to make a safer turn. That is a third order effect based on the insurance company adding more information to the driver's calculus.

The 'punisher' here is the design that forces you to choose between dangerous turns or slow navigation.

So traffic gets worse. Got it, thanks.

By the way, I guarantee their actuarial tables don't know whether you're creating high g forces in or out of control.

And now we've created a system that punishes the driver that brakes hard to avoid the tentative turner, who is incentivized to make the situation MORE dangerous by turning timidly.

I reject the certainty with which you stated your opinion. Actuarial tables don't "know" anything, but they are models, and as such, they can include in control / out of control as features.

I think it'd be pretty easy for sensors with a CPU to determine what's out of control. That tech is well developed and very stable, similar to how iOS can tell the difference between me walking and me shaking my phone.

Sensors can't tell what is appropriate. Is a 1.5G acceleration automatically dangerous? Maybe it's necessary, given the circumstances. Circumstances that are never considered when the insurance company chooses an arbitrary number that conveniently boosts their revenue.

That's correct.

Because they're not trying to reward you/punish someone else.

It's a risk mitigation tactic, despite what Progressive's commercials frame it as.

Correct. It's enhanced risk pooling. It's not extortion of one company uses it, it's absolutely extortion when an industry requires it, and states regulate it be adopted.

Your smartphone already knows your driving habits. Mine likes to remind me where I parked my car. (It knows because I connect it to the Bluetooth music player).

I honestly think regulation is the only solution here.

Smartphones might know your driving habits, but is big tech selling your information to insurance companies? That would be a huge breach of privacy and most definitely would result in massive class action litigation against the tech companies.

Your driving information is one of the most private things you can protect. Did you just make a stop by the dispensary? Or park at the cancer oncologist? Or drive into a protest area in your downtown city?

I agree that regulation is needed quickly in this area, but at least in the United States, it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. We need to at least be aware and not so complacent to the changes that big business are trying to do to make additional money from your private life.

Agree, even if it saved me significant money on premiums, I don’t want a third party tracking my location and driving habits. Especially when the third party is probably gonna store the data insecurely and at some point bound to get breached / hacked. This is utter none-sense.

Do they even need to get breached? Or will somebody look at that service and say "You know, this detailed geolocation data we've collected about all of our customers could be a profit center" and start selling it?

They've got more detailed information of exactly where you are at exactly what time, which gives them a competitive advantage for creepy stalking over the CA DMV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24210623

To play devils advocate, you don’t need insurance if you’re driving on private roads. If you’re driving a vehicle on public roads what is the expectation of privacy? Is a pilot’s privacy being encroached when they have to file a flight plan or use a transponder?

There's a huge difference between not having an expectation of privacy and having a positive expectation of stalking.

Even if you are driving on public roads, there is still a certain expectation of privacy.

Insurance trackers can also increase your premiums. If you drive like an asshole, the agreement states they will raise your rates.

I'd argue that most people drive like an asshole at least some of the time, which is exactly the problem. From an insurer's point of view, they want to find ways to qualify you as an asshole and therefore extract more money from you.

These trackers are literally looking at things like aggressive acceleration, sudden stops, lane changes, slightly over speed limits. All of these examples can very much be "safe" driving habits, required to safely move your vehicle in traffic. But any single event, without the context of the traffic surrounding it, can brand you as that asshole. These apps don't care about the context of the traffic around you.

>From an insurer's point of view, they want to find ways to qualify you as an asshole and therefore extract more money from you.

If an insurer starts needlessly penalizing people for minor violations of certain parameters, then another insurer will step up and offer lower premiums. I'm sure there's plenty of smart people at insurance companies that know a single event doesn't make a person more likely to cause a loss.

It seems to me like the brackets should actually be the other way around:

90% of "good drivers" "save money" (all relative, of course), while "bad drivers" who cost a lot will pay way more.

And once they get enough people to sign up, they can punish everyone else by putting them in the "bad driver" bucket.

Like all opportunities to make money it will become a scenario of ‘good drivers’ get to keep the same cost (no discount) and ‘bad drivers’ (the other 90%) get to pay more.

Yes, exactly. There's no winners here except the corporations and shareholders. And it's all at the expense of personal liberty and freedoms afforded by driving.

>I don't want a black box in my car of any type, even if I already qualify for the best possible insurance rates

This seems like an odd statement to me. Of course you don't want a monitor, if you qualify for the best rates. The people who will go along with it are those currently paying the highest rates.

Fair of you to pick up on the oddity of that statement. I didn't put that out there very well.

Agreed, a person with good rates doesn't want this. But that doesn't make a person with bad rates desire it either? Does this really improve their situation any?

Maybe there's a very small percentage of drivers that will try to prove they aren't a bad driver. This (young/male/minority) driver has been boxed into a high risk demographic and wants the chance to prove they deserve an individual rate different than their cohort.

However, what will really happen is that rates will just stay the same for them (they are still afterall in the same demographic), but additional revenue will be extracted from those that might be more aggressive or take more liberties when they drive.

I don't believe you're saving money for anyone with this scheme. All you're doing is adding additional tax to those drivers that might drive more risky. Why should the insurance companies profit any more? They need their stock prices to keep rising, at all costs, particularly at the expense of the clients needing the most insurance product. This is just another scheme to keep profits rolling up, no company wants to charge less to anyone.

The demographic boxes that we are put into for premium rates can be said to be unfair. I don't argue that point. My point is that there's nothing here that actually saves anyone money.

But overall, the more concerning part of this is the loss of privacy and freedom associated with the collection of personal driving habits. Did you drive through a part of town that is notoriously high in crime? Did you make a stop at a liquor store? Did you drive to a political rally for the opposing party?

All of these are deeply concerning questions from a freedom, privacy, liberty point of view. Big brother shouldn't have this much tracking power, and neither should big business.

Rates are regulated by the states so the mileage will vary by state.

Also, I feel like this is much fairer than the current practice of rating based on credit score.

Insurance isn’t without competition. If a group of customers are being overcharged relative to their measurable risk, then that’s an opportunity for a competitor.

Not just driving habits, but timing and locations visited, hence people met, by interpolation. The black box is by all means a bug. Also being all of them closed source, there's no guarantee they don't contain circuitry to listen to conversations or hidden cameras. Paranoia? Yes, totally. Today's world fully justify that.

Whats even worse is if Amazon gets all your driving data to toy around with and advertise to you based on places you visit and other things it may know about you by your car habits + your online habits. Some sites do feature Amazon ads.

On the flip side, it's a way to safely offer more competitive rates and outdo your competitors.

This removes "New Toyotas" from my list of potential next vehicles, though it's likely just a matter of time before all new vehicles have a direct link with insurance companies.

Count me in, there's no way I would touch these things. And that's despite Toyota being one of my fav car brands :/

FYI, Toyota's cover-up on a major defect caused multiple deaths and hundreds of accidents in 2009 [0]. That's criminal.

[0] https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/toyota-pay-12b-hiding-deadly-...

I think most Toyota drivers know about this one, it was a software bug, it's a shame they tried to cover it up, but the bug itself couldn't of been intentional. They were just trying to contain a shitty situation, they make otherwise reliable cars which is why people buy Toyota.

I don't think this is actually true. I have not been able to find any sources referencing an actual bug and patch. Toyota, NASA, and the NHTSA did not report any issues. Nevertheless, Toyota lost a jury trial with this rather hilarious quote available on wikipedia[1]:

"Michael Barr of the Barr Group testified that NASA had not been able to complete its examination of Toyota's ETCS and that Toyota did not follow best practices for real time life critical software, and that a single bit flip which can be caused by cosmic rays could cause unintended acceleration. As well, the run-time stack of the real-time operating system was not large enough and that it was possible for the stack to grow large enough to overwrite data that could cause unintended acceleration."

So... maybe the computer could have physically failed, or a stack overflow, or some other error? Regardless, I still feel like drive-by-wire is scary. The Revisionist History podcast also covers the unintended acceleration recall from more of a psychological perspective[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle...

[2] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game

I thought the consensus was that it was floor mats getting stuck?

There’s quite a few scary stories in the automotive world. It’s quite unsettling.

The GM handling of ignition deaths was upsetting to read about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_swit...

Ford’s 2000s era people carriers with a penchant for self-immolation due to a wiring harness issue iirc.

More recently the Bosch / VAG diesel gate stories that were in the news.

Off setting that was the John Deere move to block aftermarket servicing because end users can’t be trusted...!

I'm basically a Toyota only guy, I have to say, I agree as well. It's a damn shame. This should be completely opt-in only.

Toyota has a history of getting things right. They may well respond to feedback here. In the meantime, their cars last forever so we can probably keep driving Toyota for another 20 years.

As long as I can turn off this AWS nonsense, I will be too. I really want to own a Lexus at some point but it's out of my pay grade currently. Lexus are also top quality as well.

Even toyotas sold today have cellular modems that track your location, it's called "toyota safety connect". There is no obvious way to turn it off either.

Fuse?

I imagine that you can still take the car to a mechanic and ask them to remove the sim card to disconnect the system

if it's put in there with the intent to track you regardless of what you want they'll have provisions to make sure you don't disable it. I.e. not use a SIM card but use an eSIM or CDMA style authentication. Or make the ECU go in to cripple mode if it can't talk to the mothership over the cell connection.

At least for Volvo they are used for by their service mechanics as well, so you will want to make sure it doesn't void any warranty claims.

Tesla and eventually others likely will use your plates to sell info about your driving regardless of which car brand you own. Your car doesn't have to report on you when there is a network of other cars with machine vision and radar that can.

Are there new cars sold today that are not connected to the internet?

I have a "New Toyota", and I was asked before it started uploading data for insurance.

So here is how it works from a friend who worked at a bank.

It turns out that a certain immigrant demographic has the property: many get a credit card, they immediately charge it to the max, they make the minimum payment forever. Another demographic: some of them get a credit card, immediately charge it to the max, they make 2 payments, then they never make another payment again.

The way to do this right is to just spread the risk over everyone so that good people in the second demographic are not penalized by bad ones.

The way it really works is: advertising heavily targets the first demographic, using their national language and excluding other demographics.

So in regard to insurance, good drivers will think "this doesn't apply to me", and bad drivers will be excluded by making them go elsewhere.

My understanding of how it really works is somewhere in between.

Find a group of markers that are collective a very strong proxy for demographic 2, such as zip code, education, credit score, and they charge them higher rates or restrict enrollment.

I'm starting to wonder if there will be a growing market for car shops to do what I've done to my Supra:

Pull out the entire wire harness and replace it with an aftermarket Power Distribution Module system, ECU, and CAN-BUS controller. Remove all this monitoring and connectivity crap, but keep the best parts of a modern Japanese car: the bulletproof mechanical components. It's expensive and time-consuming, but also saves some weight.

Agreed. Though they hold their value/worth extremely well, which means you should be able to work with older, used models for quite some time.

Insurance companies want to double dip: They want to sell insurance and profit off of that, and then profit off of selling your personal location/habit information on the back-end.

Even if they aren't doing it today, they want to be positioned to be in the "data business" tomorrow. It will start out as "opt out" before becoming normalized/expected.

Even putting aside the fact that modern vehicle's electrical systems are already stretched thin and this is yet another constant battery drain. The privacy implications of this cannot be ignored even if the data is "anonymized" (not least of all because multiple sources of "anonymized" data can be combined to bypass it entirely).

And you can be guaranteed the car manufacturers aren't going to be selling them data that would let them do statistical analysis on the vehicles.

I think it'll be super anti consumer. All those systems will be used to "prove" the driver is at fault for everything. It'll never be a mechanical malfunction or an infrastructure issue. It'll always be the "bad" driver that causes accidents.

Part of the slippery slope that insurance companies have been trying to get customers to willingly adopt...

Just install this safe driver app to receive up-to 15% off your rate!

Soon: our company's insurer now requires all employees to install this exercise monitoring app on their phone!

And finally: to be eligible for insurance you must submit a saliva sample.

> Soon: our company's insurer now requires all employees to install this exercise monitoring app on their phone!

Not soon. My employer already offers a 10% premium discount program, but you have to take part in a monthly "healthy living" program that encourages you can hook in your smart phone/watch/etc (you earn "points" towards your discount, not doing so hurts your point totals and you need to do something else privacy invading instead).

It is operated by a third party rather than my employer, but that doesn't protect your privacy in the broad context, just protects you from additional workplace discrimination.

1 year from now: "Toyota AWS keys compromised due to misconfigured S3 bucket."

No it would be more likely that "Millions of Toyota drivers driving data leaked due to misconfigured S3 bucket"

Cars have been so well-built for so long that car companies doing this crap with data (remember that Ford's outgoing CEO talked about monetizing driving data) should cause people (that care) to just stop buying new cars. Bonus: you don't have to agree to forced arbitration for any defects you encounter!

In much of the world, the forced arbitration clauses are illegal and unenforceable anyway for consumer contracts (though often not when the purchase is for business rather than consumer purposes). And there is a bill in Congress that would apply a similar approach to the US if the Democrats manage to take control of the federal government and don't lose their desire to enact the law once they gain the ability to do so.

I admit I'm not sure what the situation would be if I buy a new personal Toyota in my current residence (Quebec, Canada - forced consumer arbitration is illegal) and then later import it into the US as part of a move there. But I'm hoping I'd avoid the trap.

At least the current version of the congressional bill is retroactive in its restoration of access to the courts. I hope that stays true in any final version.

The problem is that it's such a slim majority of the people that care. The sad truth is that the vast, vast, majority of people are completely uninformed. A significant percentage of them wouldn't even understand your concerns if you tried to explain it. All they care about is what vehicle has a big shiny entertainment screen, where the salesman has promised a low enough monthly payment. That's it.

99.99% of people buying a car don't care what the drivetrain is, what differentials are in it, what engine is in it, how anything works, nor do they care. I wonder what percentage of buyers know whether the car they just bought is a FWD/RWD/AWD/etc vehicle, or even know the difference.

I think the sad truth is that because of this there's no market pressure to do things right. There's also the problem of regulation and vehicle manufacturers basically being forced into doing stuff like this as time goes by.

It reminds me of BMW wanting to charge for add on "options" that you paid for at delivery but after 2 years of ownership you need to re-up.

rear view camera/park distance control/cruise control (SaaS).

I guess with car sales going south they need to nickel and dime their remaining customers.

It's interesting to see that most of the discussion here revolves around effectiveness and economic impact of tracking. Ten years ago the talking point would be about invasion to privacy. The personal privacy is vanishing not only in practice, but as a value of the society as well.

Anybody know how to disable the 4G chip permanently upon buying a new car? Are they making ECUs require the 4G chip to be active?

It's a difficult process that changes greatly from model to model, and often comes with... Unexpected... Functionality loss.

Like for a particular VW model I'm thinking of, you need to disassemble the entire front of the car to get at it, and it disables the seat warmer for no obvious reason.

Unless the car is phoning home to enable options you've paid for, you might be able to evade anti-functionality issues by replacing the antenna with a dummy load (resistor) rather than by removing the modem entirely.

I would say "hard pass" on this, but at some point in the future, it will no doubt be significantly more expensive to acquire car insurance without this kind of oversight. Ideally there would be some legislation in place that precludes charging people extra for retaining their privacy, but I'm not holding my breath.

My parents installed one of the addon driving monitors in their car to get an insurance discount. It lasted about a month. Apparently they drive like maniacs.

What a nightmare. Avoiding owning a car starts to sounds better and better every day.

To paraphrase Charlton Heston, you can pry my my manual transmission, non-infotainment having car from my cold, dead hands!

Just go buy a pre-2012 Toyota, take it to a reputable independent Toyota-specific shop in your area, and say "make it good, boss". Pay him whatever he asks.

Then go find an insurance broker, ask them to put you in touch with someone who can provide you with an agreed-value insurance policy. Insure the vehicle for purchase price + what the shop changed you.

Get regular oil changes at Jiffylube, and take the car into the Toyota guy once a year. Although it may not be flashy, you'll have a reliable, efficient ride for many, many years.

New cars simply aren't worth the creepy factor.

I just bought a Volvo (but I didn't get it yet) => apparently all Volvos have an embedded "Event Data Recorder":

This vehicle is equipped with an "Event Data Recorder" (EDR). Its primary purpose is to register and record data related to traffic accidents or collision-like situations, such as times when the airbag deploys or the vehicle strikes an obstacle in the road. The data is recorded in order to increase understanding of how vehicle systems work in these types of situations. The EDR is designed to record data related to vehicle dynamics and safety systems for a short time, usually 30 seconds or less. Etc... The article is here https://www.volvocars.com/ph/support/manuals/xc90/2016/intro... (same for other models).

Personally I'm OK with that - it's not an ongoing recording of how I drive, the data is not pushed out of the car, and it might actually help defending myself if I have an accident and I think that I'm not guilty.

> Its primary purpose..

But what about its other purposes? Form the article linked:

> Volvo may be forced to disclose information of this nature to the police or other authorities

Yep - and at the top the article states:

The EDR is designed to record data related to vehicle dynamics and safety systems for a short time, usually 30 seconds or less.

I'm personally OK with that.

I believe these have existed in vehicles for quite a while and have been used as evidence for/against the driver. According to [1], 85% of all vehicles in 2010 were expected to already have these things installed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder

Thank you, until now I was totally unaware of such systems.

But good to have things stored locally than to have them uploaded anywhere to then be used for some analysis (puah, probably a point to be discussed).

Personally I'm OK if used for&against the driver (from a technical perspective, not as souce of abolute truth) if the duration of the recordings are short.

In a defensive driving course I took in the prior decade, the instructor informed us that these collect data in a rolling 5 minute window until an adverse event occurs.

This and the DLC are the worst trends in new cars.

Hyundai and Genesis have been doing this with their vehicles. They offer a 3 year complimetary connected service program, which includes terms that allow mining of car telemetry and GPS data, which is then sold to data broker VeriRisk, who resells to insurance and other industry.

All this only screws the driver over and most people simply do not know this is happening.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hyundai-motor-ameri...

This is bullshit and is designed to enable Amazon to allow Toyota and its insurance “partners” to extract more money out of the average American driver.

Remember how Kroger/Safeway/friends started their loyalty programs? Just give us your purchase data + a unique identifier and we will only charge you the normal price not the jacked up price. This is the same thing. 20 years from now this will be normal because most older cars will be off the road.

My guess is Give it 5 years and we’ll find out that the algorithm is unfairly targeting minority neighborhoods and jacking up insurance rates too.

If the insurance companies wanted to confirm that everyone who hogged the left lane slowly in a Prius 5-10yr ago traded up to a Tacoma any salesman could have told them that for free.

I wish insurers weren't so heavy handed with this technology. If it's possible to tell if someone is a "good" or "bad" driver via this technology, why not at least just tell the driver without the big brother BS? Many drivers might change their habits based on this information.

I know insurers have apps that you can install on your phone or ODBC modules you can install. Does anyone know of any way to collect this data privately without reporting it to an insurer?

Tesla is doing this with their new Tesla insurance product. But at least they won't be sending the data to other insurers, since they want to keep it for their own use.

Tesla CFO just yesterday bragged about the amount of data that's available to collect from the car for insurance purposes [1]:

> “We’re working now on what we call Version 2 or we can call it the first version of our telematics product. And so really ultimately where we want to get to with Tesla Insurance is to be able to use the data that’s captured in the car, in the driving profile of the person in the car to be able to assess correlations and probabilities of crash and be able then to assess a premium on a monthly basis for that customer. And what makes this very exciting for us is the amount of data that is available with the customers’ permission to use is, it’s not available in any other product or any other vehicle in the world. So this gives us a unique advantage in terms of information.”

[1] - https://electrek.co/2020/08/18/tesla-expand-insurance-busine...

Even if they're limiting the data, it still makes me want to not buy a Tesla.

I really hope they manage to separate the brake and gas pedal technology from the onboard computer. To the best of my understanding, there’s a central processing unit that controls everything and can receive remote commands.

Hacking it is literally the perfect way to remotely and unsuspiciously assassinate people. The 15CY (2015+) vehicles are all interconnected like this.

And also to the NSA.

So, how do I install a firewall on my vehicle?

Well that'll usually be installed by the factory between the engine and passenger compartment.

Ah touche hahaha

Maybe this will lead to speed limit reform in Japan.

There is a legal requirement that the police need to prove that someone is definitely speeding, so police and automated speed cameras both allow speeding 15-20km over posted speed limits, which means that de jure speed limits are all set 20km under the de facto speed limit.

I'm going to keep my dumb, manual transmission, non-Internet enable, 2006 WRX for as long as humanly possible.

Cars kill 35,000 people in America every year. America has over twice the fatality rate of other rich countries.

Adjusted per vehicle mile, or per capita? Is that also adjusted for differences in types of driving (city/highway)? I don't doubt your numbers, just want to make sure I have more clarity before I remember it.

This is how automated driving becomes mainstream.

Insurance companies will classify Automated drivers as "Best drivers" and insurance for those sorts of cars will be really low compared to even blemish free human drivers.

I didn't see it in the article - does anyone know which model year this will take effect from? I'm in the market for a new 4Runner, but that may switch to a used model instead.

I'd like to know this too, same reason. The article sorta makes it sound like current vehicles are already equipped with the hardware.

Need laws to force cars to go into airplane mode and for there to be no loss of non-networked functionality if you remove their modems or go into said airplane mode.

"cars to go into airplane mode"

That sounds so funny and ridiculous.

You can typically find a guide to where any given modem is and manually remove it, but it's increasingly difficult to do so and causes functionally downgrades.

Until their counter move in the cat&mouse game is to embed the radio into the SoC. Maybe find the antenna lead and cut it?

I wonder if you can use CCPA deletion request to remove all the data.

Surely this will be illegal in Europe thanks to the GDPR?

At the same time it demonstrates why laws like the GDPR are needed.

This surveillance capitalism has to be stopped.

Is this something you can turn off?

Cue: Tesla insurance.

I wonder how many people complaining here take their phone into the vehicle, or use Google Maps. Sure, the data from the car (whatever is included there) might give some additional insights, but these are very local (i.e. status of the car and perhaps lane assist) compared to what Google/Apple already collect anyway (i.e. the "big picture", which is far more valuable). At least here you get something tangible out of it: Lower insurance premiums (if they were higher, nobody would buy the freakin cars and I am pretty sure using this data for insurance quotes must be an opt-in anyway)

>Lower insurance premiums (if they were higher, nobody would buy the freakin cars and I am pretty sure using this data for insurance quotes must be an opt-in anyway)

They can just make the insurance premiums the same and just jack up the non-data backed premiums.

In fact, they will be forced to do that.

They will slightly lower rates for the tracked drivers who are low risk, significantly raise rates for tracked drivers who drive like idiots according to their inscrutable algorithms.

Due to competitive pressure these things will come to pass. If one company does that and it lets them lower rates or increase rates slower, more safer people will buy from them. The other companies will have riskier drivers, and have to raise rates, so the cycle will continue unless they all adopt the driving behavior rating.

There are several things wrong with your post. For one, Google/Apple selling your driving data to an insurance company is not likely happening today. This would be the same type of mistreatment of personal information as it would be selling your health data to a health insurance company. Not that I know, but I highly doubt that personal driving data is being shared with insurance companies from big tech. If they are, this would be a huge privacy agreement violation and would cause a massive lawsuit action against said companies.

You're also being misled to believe that these driving trackers will actually reduce costs for drivers. In fact, they only serve as a means to raise insurance premium on drivers that don't qualify for the absolute best rate. Did you ever run a stop sign? 5 MPH over the speed limit? Change lanes without signaling? This level of detail is possible with very accurate GPS and will only serve for the insurance companies to raise rates on most drivers.

There is absolutely nothing good about this move from Toyota, and other auto manufactures will no doubt follow suit. This will likely be yet-another-erosion-of-privacy that only serves big business.

You should not so easily desire a "you are the product" relationship with auto manufacturers.

Why don't insurers just raise all rates 50% right now?

My guess is it's because there's a competitive market.

This doesn't change this. This allows for better price discrimination than our current tables based just on age, car, neighborhood, gender, etc. This will raise rates for high-risk drivers and lower them for low-risk drivers. If the insurer does the first and not the latter, the latter will go to an insurer who does.

It seems like the view here is that everyone will only do the former, but again: why don't they do that right now? Why does the effect of competition vanish in this case?

"Every insurer will use this technology eventually" isn't an answer. Every insurer has accident data by age. As a result, they offer lower rates to lower-risk age groups.

>age, car, neighborhood, gender

I wish. it's even worse than that.

It's priced on your credit score, so if you're poor you're screwed, and it's priced on whether you're married too.

Here's how to get the best rates in the current system. In addition to avoiding tickets/accidents become a 50 year old female married driver who has an excellent credit score and drives a lower trim subaru crosstrek.

Or they could price based on actual driving behavior. Cue outrage.

And how many people complaining are Musk/Tesla fanboys...

There have been no reports of either Google or Apple selling personal data to a third party. It is against there privacy policies and stated intentions. Google certainly collects and uses your data for it's own ends, but unless Google starts selling auto insurance it's not particularly relevant.

Apple claims to go to extreme lengths to anonymize data collected from Maps. Any information about locations visited is kept locally on your iPhone. Whether you trust them or not, it would be major news if it where found to be otherwise.

I think a lot of people are interpreting this as mandatory with no easy way to switch off. The article doesn't indicate how it will work.

Just tell me which rectangle of silicon to drill out.

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