Hacker News Reader

Comment by CapmCrackaWaka | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

What do you do if everybody rejects you for pre-existing conditions and you cannot buy an insurance? Do you live uninsured?

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.

Those are exceptional cases. It's pretty easy to see when someone is frequently slamming on the brakes vs. occasional being forced to due to external factors.

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.

Tesla has huge PR issues from media outlets jumping on things like autopilot failures as soon as the police report is publicly available. Selling insurance data wouldn't be something they'd benefit from if it meant more PR issues leading to fewer sales (as in, eventually, Tesla will plateau on sales to where every lost sale is important).

There was a time also when we thought Google would do no evil. When are we going to learn to just not trust big corps?

> 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.

Name one single better use of my driving habit data than directly saving me money.

The question is how does it saves you money?

1. By increasing significantly the fee of whom is driving slightly worst than you (thus increasing the chance of having people without insurance driving cars)

2. By not allowing people at risk to purchase the insurance in the first place. Which increases again the chance of having people without insurance in the road.

This definitely helps insurance company to avoid paying compensations in case of accident so that they can insure only people that have very little chance to cause an accidental thus increase their margins

A huge step forward for insurance, a huge drawback for society.

> one single better use of my driving habit data

Keeping it to myself.

Some people get paid to be erotic models; that's you. "Name one single better use of my hot bod than directly making me money."

Other people find it far more valuable to keep that to themselves.

And thus Tesla insurance is not the required insurance provider for Tesla cars, and enabling Tesla insurance telemetry requires clicking through a data-sharing prompt.

For now. And if "more data!" didn't seem to be the rallying cry of modern business, I wouldn't be so concerned.

So, it’s worth pointing out that Tesla already has a history of using telemetry against you, publicly, if you have the misfortune to die while using autopilot.

Till all insurance will be like this and thus no choice for you anymore

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com