Tesla Safety Score Beta
tesla.com
tesla.com
There are so many people who truly believe ridiculous bullshit with regard to driving.
People have been telling me that SUVs are safer cars (questionable) or that higher powered cars are safer (highly questionable) or that driving slower than the speed limit increases the risk of accidents (no comment).
If this score provides real time feedback to people based on real world data, maybe it can help change somebodys mind. Maybe it can nudge people to become slightly safer drivers.
there's a good correlation (not 1:1 but still, quite good) between car performances and their ability to corner and their braking distance. a fast car driven by an idiot is going to make him more dangerous, but in the hand of an average driver will serve him well in all the emergency maneuver he'll find himself doing.
Nit: this is accurate when all others are driving the speed limit (or greater), given the likelihood of accidents increases as speed differential increases.
and how are SUVs not safer, given they have more mass and a larger crunch zone? also, since the driver is seated higher he can see more what is going on in front of him (a fee small cars ahead)
That helps in a head on collission with a smaller car. But it's even safer if you don't collide with anything in the first place.
SUVs have longer breaking distance because of their mass, and because they are higher they don't corner as well and are at higher risk of tipping over.
These factors increase the risk of dangerous accidents versus a normal car.
Also, around 50% of lethal accidents don't involve a second car at all. If you crash into a concrete wall, or if you run off the road, it doesn't matter that your car is bigger, you are still screwed.
The safest car is the one that doesn't get into an accident in the first place, and bigger cars are not necessarily better in that regard.
I seems that we are heading into this weird world where, like in the movie "Brazil" some weird bug in one of our surveillance and human management systems will end up destroying lives, leaving people completely helpless and plagued for their entire existence.
You probably won't be able to prove that decision was incorrect in the first place.
https://www.onstarinsurance.com/
OnStar equipped vehicles generate a safety score, but your score will only be shared with the insurance company if it was high enough to earn a deduction.
And since it's an opt-in program, the lack of a score provided doesn't give them a datapoint either.
Do we really want these kind of scores to determine our insurance rates, outcomes in the case of an accident and so on?
Insurance is obvious, but I won't be surprised if in the case of an accident arguments are made using such a score to determine who was at fault.
OTOH, I wonder if this is a precursor to Tesla launching its own car insurance program.
2) One of the issues, once the technical issues related to FSD are resolved, is insurance. So, will/does Tesla's insurance have a clause that says that in cases where FSD is at fault, Tesla is the liable party?
Right now, both careful drivers and aggressive drivers pay the same amount for insurance, which means that careful subsidize aggressive ones. Tesla scoring separates those groups and promotes more safer on the roads.
I have no problem with systems like this but making it always-on and non-optional is insane...
The score isn't even geographically adjusted, they posted the formula right there. Good luck my fellow New Yorkers who have to deal with 100x the pedestrians and random obstructions the average driver has to...
Hard turning is punished so good luck if you're like me and enjoy going on curvy roads where you can easily experience .4gs of lateral force at the speed limit...
Our insurance already has ways to model this stuff in much smarter ways. People in New York pay more for insurance without insurance companies needing every single vehicle's data because driver age and historical data exist...
Their comparable programs are opt-in and often can only reduce your rate (I know my old Volt would only share your score if it'd result in an insurance deduction)
Why wouldn’t I? Seems much more fair than criteria such as age, education and marital status that are currently used to determine rates.
1) Assuming you're in the US - Progressive has been offering this for years. Obviously not everyone is enrolled with Progressive, nor do I know how many of Progressive's customers are enrolled in it. But, if you think that it's good, you may want to look into it, again assuming you're in the US.
2) Everyone who drives extremely carefully, say the medical equivalent of young-healthy person, would want to enroll. However, rest of the people won't. Insurance companies want to balance their high-risk with low-risk customers, which is where I think it'll run into issues.
3) The issue comes when your insurance provider has access to detailed data. Say there was an accident where your insurance company would normally pay. But now, they will be able to dig into data and find some clause that they will use to deny your claim and find you at fault. And, therein lies the problem for everyone and not just bad, or less than excellent, drivers.
Like what? Genuinely curious.
Buy comp and coll coverage and they won’t deny, they’ll duke it out with the other party’s carrier to put you not at fault if reasonable evidence shows that
Given extra information to your adversary is foolish.
now you have a way to prove it
No one could possibly be against both...
Not at all a straw-man argument of any sort!
And it’s much more likely to lead to improved driving behavior than charging all 25 year olds more. Or all people with low credit scores more.
What are you going to price on if it’s not directly measuring how one drives? A blanket flat makes no sense.
What do you think rates are based on now?
Either this is another straw-man in the making or you genuinely think they were only based on credit scores?
It's not even allowed to be a factor in some states, and it's not allowed to be the only factor in many more...
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Driver age, home zip code, car driven, miles driven per year, accident history? Do none of those tell anyone anything?
Always-on driver monitoring that's not even adjusted to geography... so someone in midtown Manhattan dodging jaywalking tourists has FCW compared on the same scale as someone on 10 miles from their nearest neighbor in the middle of Wyoming... you think that's more fair?
And mr Wyoming in your example thinks it’s fair he’s higher for driving more miles than city man? (Assuming we aren’t pricing different based on location bc your comment made that assumption) and how does one verify miles driven? Best way is oem vehicle integration like you object to.
Home zip code is pretty discriminatory despite being allowed and also kinda unreliable.
Accident history is okay but not perfect because fault can be hard to attribute.
Some Speeding Tickets can be gotten out of or erased, and out of state ones are hard to locate
No, all those are very imperfect proxies for driving behavior that are often discriminatory against poor people and minorities. It’s better to monitor ACTUAL driving behavior than penalize minorities because cops target them for tickets. Or poor people who drive okay but don’t have 800 credit so they get charged more. If only there was some way to monitor actual driving instead of these problematic proxies…
Tesla will use it for their own insurance but if you don't have that or want FSD Beta you want have to activate this.
> OTOH, I wonder if this is a precursor to Tesla launching its own car insurance program.
They had this for a while.