To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology | Hacker News Reader

To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

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168 pointsmcone400 comments

Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas. So they have a "deal" for EV drivers: pay an exorbitant registration fee (hundreds more than other vehicles) or install an OBD device in your car and carry a surveillance app to be charged for how much your vehicle is driven [0]. The measurement route requires 2 separate accounts with 3rd parties, one of which has your payment information on file.

Given that states can't even get voting right [1], this is not the future I wanted. (Plus, we should be incentivizing EV purchases at this stage, not punishing them.)

(Heck, they put my marriage license on a blockchain for some dumb reason. I didn't even want it on a blockchain!)

[0]: https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/

[1]: Basically anything by https://twitter.com/jhalderm

That actually kinda makes sense. EVs should pay their share to use the roads too.

(Gas taxes are a relatively small fraction of roads funding, for what it's worth.)

I'd be interested in seeing the numbers, and how they slice it up (whether they're completely treating federal roads separately or using it for the total, etc), as at $0.364 per gallon in Utah, it seems like it results in a large amount to put towards funding something, so it would be interesting to track where it's going.

Utah’s cent per mile program treats all roads the same, including roads outside of the state.

That didn’t answer the question

I was responding to this aside, not the question:

> whether they're completely treating federal roads separately or using it for the total, etc

The tax does not distinguish types of road, much like a gas tax does not.

That sounds like it's equating Utah's taxing to total U.S. road funding, to which I say both "duh" about the result and "that can't be all that's going on in the report if it's about Utah, so there must be some disconnect in what we're talking about."

The context we were in is Utah gas taxes and how much it affects road funding that Utah does. Were you referring to something different? I would assume that Utah gas taxes, if they are intended to fund road work, would go towards state roads in Utah (but that's just an assumption, which is why I was interested in the source).

Indeed, gas taxes act as a sort of carbon tax, so taxing EVs to compensate is like getting rid of a carbon tax.

That isn't the stated purpose of most gas taxes, though. (The stated purpose is funding roads programs.) Intuitively, EVs still need to use and pay for road use. It's probably better for legislatures to explicitly pass carbon taxes (or similar things like cap-and-trade programs).

No, gas taxes were always seen as part of conservation measures as well, especially since the 1970s. I see this claim all the time that gas taxes are purely a use tax, and that hasn’t been true for about half a century or longer, and just about everyone knows this, so I consider that kind of claim to be dishonest.

And yes, it’s less efficient than a carbon tax, but fundamentally you cannot deny the net effect of getting rid of the conservation aspect of gas taxes BEFORE passing a compensating carbon tax would have the effect of basically eliminating a carbon tax.

In other words, let’s talk about adding compensatory EV fees AFTER passing a carbon tax. Sounds fair and certainly better for climate.

> pay an exorbitant registration fee (hundreds more than other vehicles)

By which you mean $130 (equating to ~13,000 miles driven under the 1 cent-per-mile pricing)?

https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/faq.php#fees

I agree it should be easier and more privacy-preserving to measure real usage (e.g., an odometer read once a year or something like that).

No, mine was over $340. The fee for my Civic was ~$100.

Try living in California. My $42K EV was closer to $600 for the registration.

Seattle suburbs here. I pay about $500 a year to register my (gas) car so someday I can ride the train they broke ground on 25 years ago.

My gas car registration fees in Seattle are $160/year total. Of that either $80 or $120 is flat by weight and the remainder scales by value. If your fees are $500/year, your vehicle is extremely heavy, expensive, or both.

It's a newish BMW SUV, so both.

Sounds to me like the system is working exactly as it should.

It's kind of funny, because from my perspective I'm an old man who learned himself a trade decades ago and worked things right to the point that I don't have to drive around a shit-box anymore, but to you I'm a privileged asshole. Which one is the truth?

There’s a big gulf between “not a shit box” and “new expensive luxury SUV” and it’s pretty reasonable to tax more expensive vehicles proportionally.

Nobody called you an asshole, that's you projecting what you assume people think of you. They suggested that your being owning a luxury vehicle means you can afford and should contribute slightly more to society than somebody who doesn't, which is a lot more reasonable than calling you an asshole who needs to be punished.

You aren't taxed more on larger, more expensive vehicles because the powers that be (or the poster you were responding to) think you're a privileged asshole. You're taxed more because heavier vehicles cause more road wear, and because Washington has no income tax (which are typically progressive in nature), so the rest of their tax system needs to lean more progressive to make up for that. Thus, more expensive vehicles get taxed more.

Did you benefit from paying no state income taxes for decades? Well, now you're paying a little back into the system. I'd think you'd be happy to do that, after having paid no state income taxes for so long. I'd also think you were well aware of the registration taxes when you purchased the vehicle? If so, given these two facts, why are you complaining about it?

You can still be an asshole if you want of course, but being an asshole has nothing to do with your registration taxes.

The effect of weight on Washington state vehicle registration cost is small. It is probably only contributing less than $40 to his registration cost.

What is pushing his cost way up by hundreds of dollars is the regional transit excise tax that some Washington counties have. That tax is based on the value of the vehicle, which is the MSRP discounted by a depreciation factor. The tax is 1.1% of depreciated value.

One thing to look into. If you're married, give the vehicle to your spouse, and note the amount of the gift in a notarized letter. That then becomes the value of the vehicle for tax purposes. We live in a state that essentially has an import tax on vehicles. It's unconstitutional, but you'd have to take that to court and that would take years. We did this with our vehicles when we moved to the state. The person at the vehicle registration place was unhappy, but they had to accept it - an extra benefit.

You're not an asshole to drive around a ride you've earned.

Statists will always find some rationale for taxing more that sounds perfectly reasonable and good, when its obvious the motivation is envy.

I need a source to believe gifting something something allows you to use a false appraisal.

Kelly Blue Book is a thing. Possibly enforcement just hasn't caught up with this guy

WA state simply does not recognize valuations below blue book. My dad sold me my first car for below (blue book) market value and it was just assessed as if it were sold at blue book value.

It's just part of the cost of ownership. Not classy to balk about a few hundred bucks more to register your car when you've paid tens of thousands for it, and are also paying more to insure it, and to maintain it, and in depreciation. Presumably you anticipated all that in the purchase as part of the TCO. Not to mention, the tradition of wealthier persons contributing more to society stretches back in Western civ to the Roman period at least. Better IMO to take some pride in your attainment of some small aspect of patrician status rather than resentment at the responsibilities that come with it.

Wow. I'm on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle, over in Kitsap county, and I'm paying just under $70/year to register my car (a 2006 Honda CR-V).

I knew there were extra costs in King county (and Pierce and Snohomish counties) due to a regional transit excise tax but had no idea it could raise costs that much.

It looks like it is 1.1% of MSRP x depreciation, where depreciation comes from this table [1]. Ouch!

[1] https://www.dol.wa.gov/regional-transit-authority-rta-motor-...

OP's car is heavier and 10x more expensive than yours. Don't read too much into their figure. The King County RTA fee floors at $40, I think, which is what you would pay with a 2006 era vehicle. There's also a $40 Transportation Benefit District fee in the city. I suspect you would pay approximately what I do ($160/year) in the city, or less ($120/year) outside of city limits.

West Seattle? :)

My non-plugin hybrid is charged the EV registration fee in WA. They say it's to support adding more EV chargers, but I can't even use them. It's not terrible, but an additional $75/yr is stupid IMHO...this is more expensive that my gas guzzling truck (which is higher than a car because of it's weight).

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/was...

Well it kinda makes sense - eventually you will have to use EV chargers because ICE cars will get phased out entirely(maybe not in 10 but in 30 years for sure) so we're all paying forward for the infrastructure that we're all going to need.

No -- gas cars don't pay the EV charger fee. It makes no sense for GP's non-plugin hybrid to pay it.

Well if they don't then why is OP's car required to pay it then?

I think you've touched on why OP was complaining about it!

If your EV is worth ~2.1x the Civic, that would track (~$210 in value-scaled registration + $130 EV tax). Given how much EVs cost, that ratio wouldn’t be terribly surprising.

> Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas

That's because they kind of are. Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes.

EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.

This is going to require a significant shift about how states and cities think about their road maintenance budgets and the taxes required to sustain them. A lot of states are going to, predictably, get this wrong.

I figure it’s semi trucks that do almost all the road damage. We could just tax the trucks, but that would just get passed along in higher prices for everything. So might as well pay for road repair out of the general fund than have special taxes.

Diesel is already taxed at a higher rate than gasoline.

A diesel truck that has three times the pressure on the road and easily ten to fifteen times the total weight, while getting about 1/3rd the gas mileage of the average US passenger vehicle.

Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car for what amounts to shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars?

> Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car

Wear on the road is a function of weight. It’s really simple and uncontroversial. An EV generally weighs more than an ICE of equivalent size.

Hopefully, the federal push to install tons of charging stations will usher in useful EVs with smaller batteries, lowering weight.

I still think this is BS, considering trucks are causing 2500 times [0] more damage than gas cars and are certainly not bringing tax income proportionally to this. Why should EV then?

[0] https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

This seems like a weird argument to make. We either pay collectively more for taxes for the roads we use, or collectively we pay WAY more for food, materials, and basically everything else if we tax trucks proportionally. Large trucks are carrying stuff, and the cost of that stuff is going to be directly associated with the cost of logistics.

Yes, some states haven't figured out what that looks like, but I really don't think the right answer is to dump all that cost on truckers. I would rather pay more for my car's operational tax, increased EV tax or existing gas tax on ICE, than disproportionately affect the price of groceries for someone living paycheck to paycheck.

Doesn’t this assume that the cost will not effect behavior? If trucking logistics becomes more expensive to properly account for the externalities, wouldn’t companies be more motivated to find more cost efficient methods. I’m sure there are plenty of items that could be shipped by rail, but aren’t because trucking is currently cheaper for the individual company, while the cost in road damage, pollution, greenhouse gasses, increased traffic, etc. are paid by everyone else.

As for disproportionately affecting the poor, sales taxes (like on groceries and other goods) and excise taxes (like on gas) are exactly the regressive taxation systems that burden the very people living paycheck to paycheck. Shifting the tax burden from skimming off the top for the people spending all their income on daily necessities, towards companies paying the full cost of their chosen operations, would give the poor more buying power and allow market forces to find and utilize the most effective and efficient means to provide services instead of the cheapest means that are only cheap because they are subsidized by everyone else.

I think you misunderstood my argument. I'm not saying vehicles should be taxed proportionally to road usage, on this I don't have an opinion. I'm saying either you do this for all vehicles or none. You cannot say "EV vehicles pay proportionally but trucks not" without clearly being biased against EV (whatever the reasons).

The increase in damage due to the higher weight is insignificant if semis and other heavy vehicles are allowed on that road.

Also you could just get a slightly smaller cars since EVs tend to be a bit more space efficient.

Semis aren't typically driving down suburbia or in left lanes on highways.

Noting the increased road damage isn't an attack on EVs, it's a call to be smarter about infrastructure:.

> Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car

This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim. By states, car makers, the federal government, and third party analysis firms. It's incredibly uncontroversial. It's even got a name, and associated math: it's called the Fourth Power Law https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

> shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars

Gas taxes make up a relatively small part of the cost of gas. If you run the numbers, you'll find that it's maybe closer to around 3.5-4x for most passenger EVs. At scale, that becomes a problem, but at the individual level, it's still a relatively small amount - and certainly less than the cost of gas.

> This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim.

Your source claims no such thing. EVs may be heavier than equivalent ICE cars, but an electric Smart (the brand) is going to do less damage than a loaded Ford F150.

Tax the weight, not a shitty proxy for weight.

…and an F150 uses more fuel than a car.

Your comparison is misleading. Compare an ICE car to an EV car, not the lightest EV to the heaviest ICE.

That was exactly their point. You can't use 'EV' to mean heavier vehicle across the board.

> This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim.

It is pretty much insignificant increase on road wear vs what trucks put on it?

Yes, but HGVs don't go onto residential roads.

If you meant SUVs or pick-ups by trucks yeah, insignificant and a bad proxy for weight anyway. No point in taxing EVs when what you need to tax is weight.

The fourth power law is uncontroversial, the fact that on average (or just take per model) EVs wear more than your "average ICE car" (especially as SUVs are the average now) is not

> Gas taxes make up a relatively small part of the cost of gas

Over in the EU it seems that taxes and duties represent at least half of the cost of petrol, more in some member states

https://www.statista.com/statistics/937796/pump-price-and-ta...

Q: How are governments going to replace this?

> Q: How are governments going to replace this?

Add a supplemental registration tax to EVs and hybrids to make up the cost of consuming less fuel. Of course, taxes never go away, so enjoy this new tax as we enter an electric future.

> Add a supplemental registration tax to EVs and hybrids to make up the cost of consuming less fuel

Q: How much fuel duty and tax does the average ICE vehicle (or rather, its driver) contribute?

I did some back-of-napkin math and came up with a figure of €500

I used to have a Dodge 2500 diesel it weighed 4,000kg. For comparison an EV Tesla Model X is 2,500kg. a non-EV Toyota Camry is 1,500kg.

I still have the dents in my driveway pavement!

"Fuel duty is currently levied at a flat rate of 52.95p per litre for both petrol and diesel, while VAT at 20% is then charged on both the product price and the duty."

https://racfoundation.org/data/percentage-uk-pump-price-whic...

In the US, where Utah is located, diesel is taxed at a higher rate: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Gasoline...

I figured it was implied since we were talking about the US, but context has a way of collapsing in threaded conversations. Thanks for bringing it back around.

They do, but it's priced in. Many states have weigh stations as part of enforcing the existing taxation through diesel and licensing.

They also have to go through 3x the registration effort, and do it in every state they drive in.

> and do it in every state they drive in.

Not anymore. You just get an IFTA sticker and apportioned plates.

No, they all just get registered in Maine which supposedly has pretty lax rules on Semis

I travel a lot, and see semis from most states, and commercial pickup haulers from all states. They say NJ, NY, KY, and UT, are especially penurious about additional registration and licensing.

No, externalities should be priced in where practical otherwise the market will be more inefficient, which in this case means the public footing an unnecessarily high road repair bill.

You're right about semis. The most cost effective thing for keeping the roads better is weigh stations open all the time.

However, EVs cause around 2x more damage to roads than non EVs.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/26/pothole-electric...

Wait til the semi EVs hit the road!

EVs also have significantly higher particulate emissions due to increased tire wear.

You know you linked to a fictional news site, right?

Terrible source, yes, but it happens to be at least roughly on point in this instance; if my dim recall of the relevant engineering is correct, road damage grows quadratically to the pressure exerted on the road by tires, and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles.

> and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles.

A 3-series BMW clocks in at 1700-2255 kg. A comparable Tesla Model Y clocks in at 1778-2003 kg (from empty to fully loaded).

2255kg is the maximum load, and 1700kg is not at all an ordinary car weight; hatchbacks are often closer to 650 and my sedan is barely over 1000.

You could argue that those aren’t luxury vehicles, but downmarket EVs need to be heavy too, because batteries do not match the energy density of petrol.

Myself, I’m replacing nearly every car trip with biking where feasible (young kids make that challenging, admittedly, but the car doesn’t see a ton of use these days).

I think your figures are off. What hatchback only weighs 600kg? What sedan only weighs 1000kg?

Hrm, digging deeper and you're right, I'm a little light - hatchbacks are closer to 1000 and the commodore sedan starts at 1370.

Kei cars? The Citroën AX was about 700kg.

Those are both massive cars. Under a ton is more typical and reasonable.

Here in Germany, a 3-series BMW is the standard middle class sedan. Certainly less weight than most SUVs.

Under a ton?! Do you mean under 1000 kg? How do you figure?

The Dacia Sandero, one of the smallest cars I can think of here in France, that's also supposed to be cheap so doesn't have a lot of... anything, has a curb weight of 1,025–1,204 kg (2,260–2,654 lb) according to wikipedia [0].

The previous generation Renault Clio, which is a small city car, weighed around 1000 kg, too (980 at the lowest). [1]. Wikipedia doesn't have data for the current generation, which is somewhat bigger physically.

---

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Sandero

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Clio#Fourth_generation...

Our country’s Sandero is actually a bit big for the B segment. The Polo, Corsa and Fiesta are all a bit smaller and lighter, at least the previous generation. You’re right about the current generation, though. Not that many on the streets, but they generally are a bit over a ton.

At least the popular A segment cars like the Aygo, Up or 500 still tend to be under a ton.

Sadly even heavier cars are becoming more popular, so in the future a ton will be far from the median.

>A 3-series BMW clocks in at 1700-2255 kg. A comparable Tesla Model Y clocks in at 1778-2003 kg (from empty to fully loaded).

A brand new 330i is 3500lbs. A Model Y is 4500lbs. That's a 28% increase in weight for a similar size car.

A Honda Civic is 3100lbs in full trim. A 530i is 3800lbs. My VW SUV is only 3850lbs.

That means more tire wear and more road wear. Are we at the point where EV fans are going to deny that EVs are far heavier?

> A brand new 330i is 3500lbs. A Model Y is 4500lbs. That's a 28% increase in weight for a similar size car.

GP said "and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles"

Also I'm sure you know that 330i is a sedan. Model Y is a SUV. They are not similar. A BMW similar to Model Y would be X3. it's weight is 4150lbs.

Did you know that BMW series 7 is around 4720lbs, compared to 4790lbs of a model S?

EV is heavier than ICE. That's never been a question. EV is gentler to the environment despite the weight.

They are clearly heavier which causes more wear and tear. The estimation that they are nearly twice as heavy is inaccurate. Do you agree with these statements?

Believe it or not, it's proportional to the fourth power (!) of the axle load: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

Yeah, that doesn't work, though. It makes no sense mathematically and can be shown by a simple experiment to break down in practice.

Is “nah I don’t think so” really a powerful counterargument to a page with a list of academic and government citations offering support of its claims?

Well, it's very very simple.

Does a sharp pointy thing poke a hole in a surface more easily or less easily than a big flat thing?

The "list of academic and government citations" is all just finger-in-the-air unscientific "we think it works like this because it fits our primary school child view of the world".

EVs are not double the weight of comparable ICE vehicles. Yes, they are heavier -- but not 100% heavier.

Tax the semi trucks and it makes it more economical to use rail freight.

Hiding the externalities is somewhat communist.

IMO gas and diesel vehicles should pay a higher tax for all the air pollution they create that the public has to clean up or deal with (in terms of adverse health effects, health care, etc).

> Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes.

26% of road funds come from gas taxes; 11 percent from tolls, another 25% from the federal government: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Now, about those "paying their fair share of 25% of the cost of the roads" gas taxes: In Utah, the gas tax was $0.245 in 1997. Today it's $0.34, when adjusting for inflation alone it should be $0.46, so drivers have received what amounts to a 25% tax reduction in the last ~30 years. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in thirty years. So there's another tax break drivers have gotten.

That's just inflation. Average fuel economy has risen from 18mpg to over 22, which means per mile drivers are paying on average 20% less of "their fair share" due to mileage increases alone.

So it's a bit weird that suddenly people in gas cars are getting high and mighty about EV owners "not paying their fair share."

> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher rate. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.

The Ford F150, which is the most popular "car" sold in America, is between 4,069 and 5,697 pounds.

A Tesla Model 3 is 3,862 to 4,048 lbs. A Chevy Bolt is ~3600lb.

Yet..who gets taxed more by Utah? Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?

Also, where were all these concerns about increased road wear on budgets when American purchasing trends tilted toward larger and heavier SUVs and pickups? Average vehicle weight has risen 10%+ since 1990.

EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?

Bish, please.

Utah didn't want to raise the gas tax (it's a political third rail) so they relied on their extremely stupid electorate to buy up the myth that drivers in gas cars are "paying their fair share" and instituted a punitive tax on EVs which Dumb Yokel Bob fully supports because it's sticking it to those "libruhls in them fuckin' priuses an shit", believing everything he hears on conservative radio about EVs (for example, that they 'cost' more CO2 to make than a regular car. Which is true....until around 14,000 miles into ownership when the EV breaks even compared to a gas car.)

>> Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?

Yes, if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.

>> EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?

Would it be better to ignore the problem?

Yes, in the near term it absolutely would because we need to decarbonize transport. Or put another way, fuel taxes are an impromptu way of taxing the huge externalities of ICE vehicles in terms of carbon emissions and exhaust, and unless those taxes are increased, adding special EV-only fees and taxes (which many states already have at much higher rates than the state fuel tax) will actually do the opposite, effectively negating this taxation of externalities that already exists.

> Would it be better to ignore the problem?

Would it be better to focus on the larger problem, rather than distract with a symbolic but ultimately meaningless and punitive "solution"? Yes, it would be better to ignore it for now and focus on adjusting the gas tax to properly reflect how fuel efficiency increases allow for less and less gas to be bought for heavier and heavier weight. To skip over everything noted in the OP comment that hasn't been done to have ICE drivers "pay their fair share" only to then to focus on the tiny minority of EV drivers rings pretty hollow.

>if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.

What if you have an older and less fuel efficient car? Why should new car buyers get a tax break vs older car owners when it is vehicle weight that is doing the road damage? Would it be better to ignore the problem?

California has the nations highest gas taxes yet worst roads...

https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/state-tax/603259/states-with...

https://ktla.com/news/california/these-states-have-the-rough...

This is why I advocate for a gross vehicle weight rating and vehicle miles traveled tax, regardless of energy source (although gas should still be taxed on its own). GWVR and VMT pretty much measure how much impact a car has on road maintenance, so it makes sense to charge heavier vehicles and vehicles that drive more, more.

I think it even makes sense for semis, the cost may go up for goods slightly as they pass that cost onto customers, but we'd be paying less in federal taxes for roads, less in property taxes for roads, and if you drive less (good for health, environment, etc) you'll likely be saving money. It also more accurately taxes EVs with ICEs based on road wear and tear instead of all these haphazard ideas.

Just tax the roads themselves. Wear is the problem after all, disincentivise it.

where are those damn flying cars they promised

> This is why I advocate for a gross vehicle weight rating and vehicle miles traveled tax

The problem is, while that works out on highways and other federally owned road, the distribution on state or county/city level is almost impossible. Say you have a trucking company doing regional service and one doing interstate transport - both their fleets will have similar driven miles because economically, companies want their many-hundred-thousand-dollar assets to be on the road as long as traffic safety laws allow. Now, assuming they both pay the same mile tax to the state... the state makes an insane profit on the interstate trucking company given that only a low percentage of the miles driven were happening on that state's roads, with the clear majority being on federal highways and other states' roads.

I disagree.

Roads are a public good.

Having a road available to use, is worth almost as much as actually using it.

Not to mention all the positive externalities of a better connected country (more trade, business, economic growth).

I use a road in my 1100kg car, you use it in your 2200kg car. You cause 8 times the damage. Do you generate 8 times the positive externalities?

Yes?

The positive externalities created by trucks shipping food into cities massively outweigh almost all passenger traffic.

So charging by weight/road damage makes no sense.

The truck that the parent poster refers to is not a 16-wheeler or panel truck used for commercial purposes, but someone's impeccably clean F-150 that hasn't hauled anything in 2+ years

Do you eat red meat ? sugary drinks ? do you exercise ? Do you have XYZ gene ?

You're costing X times more to the system because you're diabetic/obese/predisposed ? You should pay more!

That's how it sounds, and if we want to live like that we can go back to cavemen times, because we didn't built societies to play this silly game

Maybe we should go back to having private roads then, and have people who own the roads decide.

Instead of that, they could mandate meters on the charging stations that add a surcharge to the electricity. That would be less invasive, and be analogous to how they collect usage fees by taxing gas.

There is a general legal principle that the state must use the least intrusive means to accomplish a goal. A lawsuit might force a change.

Except you can charge from every single outlet.

Sounds like tax evasion.

You still need a charger/adapter between the outlet and the vehicle. Perhaps build the meter into the vehicles charging port.

You have got to be kidding me. Next you’ll say that properly inflating your tires is “tax evasion” because you’ll burn less gas.

In my country you pay an anual fee for having a vehicle, like property tax but for vehicles. The larger the vehicle, more you pay, discount if you have an EV (no emissions). It's not that difficult.

Which is crazy. Use a car for 500 miles a year you pay the same as someone using it for 50,000 miles a year

Just charge on the odometer reading each year. 3p a mile or whatever. Maybe charge more based on weight.

Power and fuel are still taxed on usage basis. There is no real difference except that road maintenance is also funded by a basic fee. It's a two way system.

Which is basically what we do in NZ. We have Road User Charges (RUC) that you buy in advance. We put road tax on petrol, so petrol vehicles don't pay RUCs. But no road tax on diesel, because tractors and other machinery that doesn't go on public roads. So we just extend the same RUC system for diesel vehicles to EVs.

(But not yet because we were incentivising EV up take. RUCs for EVs will be required in 2024 I believe.)

EV drivers more than make this up by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers. Gas drivers seem to always conveniently forget those real societal costs when they're trying to talk about "fairness".

That still doesn't pay for roads. I love EVs and think their use should be more broadly encouraged, but the gas tax made for a very simple use tax and it's not obvious how one would replace it to do the same thing for EVs.

Simply saying EVs are so much better for the environment that they don't need to pay for roads at all seems a little short sighted.

>it's not obvious how one would replace it to do the same thing for EVs.

Taxing tires would work. Also, mileage is already recorded during vehicle inspections. That could be used to calculate tax but would be more open to fraud.

I don't want tires to be taxed, it would incentivize people to use tires more than they would do today, and that is bad news for traffic safety. Not only for themselves but for other people on the road too.

> by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers

Depend where you get your electricity from. Also most of car pollution comes from tires and brake dust, which EV create more of given their weight and torque

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

See, we can play this silly game all day long or just all chip in.

The article you linked is specifically talking about particle emissions, not anything gaseous. If it included the negative externalities of all emissions (CO2, NOx's too), it might paint a different picture.

That’s a very cute argument, but it doesn’t pay for the roads.

Also, having lived in a city I can tell you that brake dust and tire wear is also a big part of car pollution.

Unless you want 100% toll roads, we need to come up with fair-ish way to tax EV road use.

How much fuel-tax revenue do we think Utah is recovering from EV drivers?

I would guess that we are talking about very small numbers -- certainly under 5% of drivers.[1] Whatever principle Utah is asserting to "recover" fuel taxes from EV drivers isn't making much of a difference.

At the same time, the Utah policy is clearly discouraging EV adoption.

> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight.

We are talking about a small presence in the automobile market. If everyone were to drive a Tesla, then yes we would have more heavy passenger cars on the road.

For example, a 2023 Honda Civic weighs between 1,429 kg and 1,517 kg. One best-selling SUV, the Toyota RAV4, weighs 1755 kg.

But the most popular type of vehicle in the US (and in Utah) by sales is the pick-up truck. The top three pick-up trucks each weigh about 2500 kg.

If we are going to start quibbling about weight this way, we will need to recognise that drivers of vehicles should be taxed according to their obesity to maintain our roadways.

[1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/24/current-ev-registrations-in-t...

ICE vehicles do pay taxes by weight. Larger vehicles use more fuel and pay more taxes.

But this isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of wear-and-tear they cause on roads.

If you want true accuracy you're going to need to track the car 24/7 which would be unpopular.

Or worse - it could be popular.

> And it's not linear wear per pound, either.

If it's not linear then the difference between a 4000 lbs car vs a 3000 lbs one is nothing compared to the damage done by a loaded 80 000 lbs truck.

What I notice, on european highways: it's always the rightmost lane that is deformed. The leftmost lane is never deformed. The aquaplanning risks due to water present in two bands on the lane is always on the rightmost lane. Always, always, always.

Why? Because the rightmost lane is the one trucks do use.

Where I live atm, in the middle of nowhere, there are two things deforming the road: heavy vehicles (I'm not talking about 4000 lbs cars here but tractors / trucks) and... Tree roots. Most of the patches made on the road are due to tree roots lifting the road's concrete.

My hunch is that the wear caused by both ic and ev cars is negligible comared to trucks. Thus road use taxes, including gas, subsidize heavy trucking.

It's amazing how nosey Utah is. They want to scan your DL to find out who's buying alcohol, they're demanding id based age verification for watching porn online, and apparently they want to enforce monitoring on your phone+car.

Amazing? Maybe. Surprising? Hardly.

As an outsider my impression of Utah it is just a state run by a religious niche group.

You're not wrong.

The state itself is at least half Mormon. When you get out of Salt Lake and Ogden, it's a lot more. But there's a lot of scenery and skiing and outdoors things to do. There's a lot of things right with the state. (Start with cities that are safer than expected for their size. Mormons have something to do with that, too.)

But in terms of how the state is run... yeah, you're not wrong.

Taxes on EV are just starting. A lot of taxes come from gas in the first place and once the market for EV is ripe the goverment will unleash the tax whip on the EV category before you know it. It is inevitable.

Taxes on EVs will be at a maximum just before around 20% if the market is EV, as they’re seen as a way to soak/punish people who are weird (ie early adopters). Once people actually see how disproportionate the fees are and if significant numbers of voters have to pay them, support will drop.

They will forbid combustion engines anyway so you wont have a choice

WA state is also ridiculous about this: I can understand a road usage tax to replace the gas tax we're not paying, but they also charge an additional fee on top of that for a state fund to add more EV charging stations, even though logically it should be ICE drivers who are paying this to help incentivize the transition! People who already bought EVs clearly aren't concerned with the number of charging stations which exist now.

It strikes me just how detached and ignorant your perspective is, largely not because it bothers me that people like you exist, but how it seems practically impossible for such detached and decadent perspectives to proliferate without collapse being imminent.

So you, member of the spoiled rotten, pilfering upper strata, parasitizing the larger society while at the same time degenerating it, want the regular people you are living off in decadence, to also pay not just current rates, but even higher rates so you can see your utopian, egotist, narcissistic vision come to fruition?

You want people who can’t afford the luxury of EVs and who are already being destroyed and pillaged by the likes of your strata, to on top of that abuse, also pay more?

Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?

It’s unfortunate that humans seem to have made essentially zero progress in preventing what has been captured in numerous stories. Possibly the most relevant one being that Hubris is struck down by Nemesis; the origins of those two words themselves, something most people do not even realize.

If you ever have the chance, there is an excellent statue of Hubris in the Louvre. It is a bit hidden and tucked away, which makes it all the more prescient. Note when it was created.

>Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?

I think billionaires are buying private planes, not EVs. The people buying EVs for their daily transportation several orders of magnitude closer to being homeless than they are to being billionaires.

We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't do that here, regardless of how right your views are or you feel they are.

Normally I'd just post a warning but your account has a pattern of breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Why do you think a few hundred dollars is "exorbitant"?

Greater than the equivalent state gas tax.

It’s not just Utah. Oregon has been talking for the better part of a decade about the best way to have EV owners help pay for road maintenance. Both the things you mention are things they have tried in large scale tests. I imagine most states are trying to figure out the same thing and coming up with solutions similar to Utah (or, more likely, Utah got the ideas from other states).

It's shocking to me that it requires an OBD device and a surveillance app. Can't they just check your odometer when you go to update your registration?

That would require trusting the public. But no, we are required to trust the government and some sketchy third parties I've never heard of.

State probably gets a kickback from the third parties for the information they get about the drivers.

They do that in AU / VIC for the EV road use tax, you have to upload a photo. I don't see the problem, just make it illegal to lie and fine the ones you catch.

Take the car from the ones you catch.

Eventually of course road taxes need to be extracted from something other than fuel. How soon that switch is made just depends on how long you want gas car drivers to subsidize the roads for EV drivers. I think most would agree that the time to stop that subsidizing is "not yet".

Why you would need to track how much a vehicle is driven I don't understand though. Unless you want to measure how far it's driven within some geographical area (such as a state) and can't merely charge for the total distance driven, but that seems unnecessarily complex, given that a car will only be registered in one region and it should balance out across state borders.

So at the anual/biannual mandatory inspections (which make a lot more sense to add if they aren't already mandatory, than any tracking!) just check the distance driven and charge road tax accordingly. I pay around $800/year for road tax for my car. And $8/gallon for the fuel. But I do get great roads for it.

> Eventually of course road taxes need to be extracted from something other than fuel.

If we get to a point where fuel consumption is so low that it stops generating significant tax revenue, then that is a great problem to have.

There's a gulf between "fuel tax drops 50% leading to budget shortfalls" and "drops 99% to insignificant revenue" and states still need to pay for roads during that window.

I don't agree with the language you used but EV drivers are not paying the taxes that were levied to maintain roads. And obviously the EV's use the roads.

A former girlfriend of mine came home one day with one of these devices plugged into her car. She was the kind of person who just said "yes" to whatever was on the form and she simply picked the lowest price option. My head immediately goes to the scenario where theres been some kind of an accident. Maybe it's a fender bender or maybe a pedestrian was hit. In one case you have a couple damaged cars and a deductible. In the other case you're facing down a manslaughter charge and even if you're not at fault it's going to ruin your life.

So now imagine law enforcement has access to your cumulative driving habits/traits and the last 20 minutes of driving that day. Imagine the insurance company has processed that data for its own purpose and assigned some kind of (totally arbitrary and contrived) "aggressive" or "risk" rating to certain actions etc. Law enforcement now has a prepackaged report that will invariably say you're a terrible driver. Of course the data collected is going to say that as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money.

Now, whether or not you were or were not driving in a reckless manner, theres data to make a case with and nobody is perfect. That data may or may not reflect the reality of the situation and even so, prosecutors are known to take the easy route to boost their own stats. Now imagine a prosecutor looking for an easy win has a prepackaged report of biased information from the insurance company?

This whole thing seems like a way to possibly save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you.

The only issue with your scenarios is that nobody will ever get in trouble for killing a pedestrian.

That’s a disingenuous hot take. There’s a lot of discussion to be had about balancing Justice and societal/personal costs but you’ve gone and skipped past all of that.

I definitely listened in a legal podcast that somehow juries award lower sentences to road accident deaths as compared to others. Seems strange.

And you’re using a throw away to make unsubstantiated claims without reference. You’ve given no reasons to take your comments as made in good faith.

I just use the term throwaway instead of JohnDoe. A quick search:

https://abcnews.go[.]com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail...

If I find the legal podcast link then I will link it here.

Roflmao... Okay, I've only been here a wee bit but even I recognized the username despite having memory issues (ironically here, caused by being hit no less than 5 times as a pedestrian and cyclist)....

Not at all. I've read multiple stories about how pedestrian deaths, even when warranted, rarely result in prosecution. Freakonomics even did an ep called "how to get away with murder" which was all about the statistics of pedestrian deaths.

GP had a VERY good hot take.

I don't see this has a hot take. A couple weeks ago a car intentionally rammed into me from behind.

I called 911 and the police took 30 minutes to arrive on the scene. The officer talked to me for about 3 minutes and then threw up their hands and said they wouldn't do anything because I didn't have a plate number and couldn't identify the driver.

The police didn't even want to bother trying to get footage from nearby cameras when I called back and noted the location of several nearby security cameras that might have picked up the vehicle.

By some miracle, I wasn't seriously injured.

More and more people have dashcams now for this reason. Of course those can be used against you as well.

Honestly if there's no injury, the police aren't going to care too much about damage to your car. They figure you're insured, so you'll be taken care of.

In most cities they have bigger fish to fry and a car accident with no injuries is just not that important. I don't think they're entirely wrong.

I had a situation a few years ago driving down a highway at night when all of a sudden I noticed a weird "thing" in the sky in front of me. It got closer and I swerved, but not enough to avoid it hitting the side of my car, taking off the side mirror and gouging up the front half of the drivers' side. Then I realized it was the plastic bed liner of the pickup truck in front of me that became unattached at highway speeds and flew into the air like a kite. My car was still operable, and I had a (poor quality, especially at night, but operable) dash cam, and the truck ahead of me didn't stop, so I sped closer to close the distance to the truck and for assurance, read out the license plate number aloud so the dash cam's microphone could pick it up before pulling over.

Contacted the police, took them about an hour to respond, and the officer gave me his email so I could send him the video. It was hard to make out but you could definitely see the object leave the truck, and a few seconds later appearing in my view, and me swerving.

Contacted insurance, they arranged the repairs, and I was out the deductible. About a week later I got a call from the police saying they looked up the plate and lo and behold, it wasn't even registered to a white pickup truck, but a blue sedan, so the plate was either stolen or swapped from another vehicle, at which point there really was no recourse.

Long story short, even if you have a dash cam, sometimes you're SOL. I _did_ use that as an excuse to upgrade my dash cam to one with better quality and night vision, but yeah, shit happens, and if nobody got hurt sometimes you gotta just accept it.

The police in your area doesn't do anything about swapped or stolen plates? It's odd since they seem to be the group that would care most about the accuracy of plates matching the car.

Maybe they do, or did in this case, but I wouldn't expect them to keep me informed on what happened.

I don't know what you expected the cam to do, lol. It seems your insurance paid out? If so, how does getting a good picture help at all? The guys a deadbeat with no insurance either way (assuming the apposing driver can be held responsible for damages, not the case in all states).

Assuming you have fault based accidents and can sue for the full cost, again the guys a deadbeat. I don't think this is the money saving idea that it seems. I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish, honestly.

I don't know what you expect this comment to do, lol.

> Long story short, even if you have a dash cam, sometimes you're SOL

Quite simple: Explain how you would have benefited at all, or why you were SOL. It sounds like the outcome could not have been improved... I guess maybe you think that there's a better chance of the person getting caught.

Are you just sad they weren't able to put someone in a cage, even though there's no financial impact on you whatsoever.

> More and more people have dashcams now for this reason. Of course those can be used against you as well.

Most dashcams can track speed too. When I was shopping for a dashcam, many of the reviews/comments said that the first thing they do when configuring their new dashcam is turn off the speed caption (sure it can still be calculated from the visuals if needed, but that's a lot more work). Last thing you want when you're using dashcam video to show someone else was at fault in an accident is their insurer to say that you were 2mph over the speed limit and therefore partially liable.

Deliberately running someone over is not a car accident.

> The police didn't even want to bother trying to get footage from nearby cameras when I called back and noted the location of several nearby security cameras that might have picked up the vehicle.

If it's any consolation, this is, IME, normal. Unless they stumble on a crime in progress, the cops won't do anything at all to actively attempt to catch the culprit, even when you have things like video of the car with license plates legible and it's the same car involved in a string of crimes. Maybe it's different for murder or something, but with other crimes they're basically useless, and that long predates the "defund" movement and all that.

Even for murders, this is the case. The US significantly underperforms other developed countries in the "clearance" rate for murder cases, i.e. the number of murder cases resulting in at least one arrest. In 2020 the clearance rate reached a record low of slightly less than 50% nationally, and much worse in some cities.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

Not a fan of the police from either a performance or ethics standpoint, but it's harder to make a case in the USA. There are a ton of cases where there's no arrest, despite some evidence.

My home was straight up robbed while I slept three years ago. The convenience store on the corner has cameras facing our property that the suspects walked directly beneath. Despite having been told this, the "detectives" never followed up to see if they could get the footage.

I get it, but it doesn't make it any less disappointing. And around here, a combination of defund the police and other factors have reduced the size of the police force.

Patrols are down 40% since 2020. Hit and runs and other traffic incidents are up. None of the alternate solutions to law enforcement intervention have been implemented so we're just stuck with crime increases. Like a lot of places, we're dealing with an epidemic of people stealing cars for the lulz or using the cars to commit more serious crimes.

I know there are plans to fix some of these issues and I hope our local government can stop arguing about how to do it and start getting stuff done.

100% of cases I'm aware of the police acting like someone's being ridiculous for thinking they'd bother to even run some plates captured in a video of a crime predate "defund", which I'm actually tepidly in favor of, since I'm pretty sure we could come up with programs to issue traffic tickets and hassle the homeless for a lot less than what we pay for the police. I've never once known them to lift a finger in the case of an actual crime, regardless of how much evidence you can hand them on a platter.

And I'm not in one of those supposedly-hellhole liberal cities that people claim have legalized all crime or whatever. Direct and second-hand experience with this stuff dates back to the 80s, for me. Zero times have I known the cops to help when a crime's been committed, beyond issuing a report for insurance (and sometimes charging money for that "service") and possibly snooping around to see if they can charge the person reporting the crime with something (hey, they're already right there, so that's a much easier arrest to make!)

Stepdaughter was just in an accident at an intersection. Officer, when they did show up: "Did you have a green light?" "I believe so." "Okay." Walks over to the other driver, then walks back to her with a citation in hand. "He says he definitely had a green light, so you're being cited for failure to obey a traffic control device."

The conversations with both parties amounted to less than 30 seconds, each.

> Of course the data collected is going to say that as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money.

Isn't that what they did in paragraph 1?

My reading is the lower initial price is a incentive to allow the company to collect data. The data can then be used as evidence of poor driving, which then allows the company to raise prices. Although I've never used such a tracker, my understanding is they use proxy metrics for safety (accelerometer thresholds vs. accident record) that can facilitate this.

If your theory is that they can raise prices arbitrarily for profit, then you have to explain why they have not already done so.

Insurance companies complete on actuarial accuracy. I'd rather bad drivers pay more, and be in incentivized to drive better, than young drivers and all drivers pay more.

> then you have to explain why they have not already done so

That may be easy: there is a lot of competition in the market. If one company raises their rates too high above others, it is very easy to switch. Lots of people switch every few renewals, chasing a cheaper price.

With the individualized data, they can selectively raise their rates and either take more in from those customers, or get them (and just them) to flee. All without having to wait until _after_ an accident.

I know someone who's an actuary, and the reality is much simpler: people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits.

It gives the insurance company a way to identify a lower risk group of drivers so they can charge that group lower prices.

> people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits

Is that true? The handful people I know who have/had these devices are definitely wouldn’t fit that category. And most removed it after a while because their premiums went back up (because of their driving). They just chose it because it offered cheaper rates and they all said the companies promised it would not raise rates above what they were already paying. So it was a “what do I have to lose” decision.

Obviously anecdotes aren’t data. I think it makes sense that the drivers that are egregiously unsafe (and know it) will avoid them. But it would take seeing actual data to make it clear to me that the majority of people who consent are safer drivers.

The problem with this tracking nonsense is that it doesn't change anything. The business model is still the same. Unless the insurance company pays out less claims there won't be any savings.

For the members, probably not. But if the insurance companies can more accurate determine who not to cover, they can see huge savings in payouts. That’s why they already have teams of actuaries determine rates based on the data they do have. They just want more specific data.

That seems to support the point you replied to. You point to a group of people who opted out of monitoring and exhibited risky driving behavior, leaving leaving lower risk people in the monitored group

They all consented, initially. The insurance companies got the data they need.

The people who stay in the plan are the low risk group, obviously there will be some percentage of churn in the first year.

IDK. I've declined the tracking with State Farm, and I drive pretty conservatively. I might speed by 5mph or so but I really try to watch traffic and minimize my need to accelerate/brake as it does result in better fuel economy (and saves wear on the brakes). The MPG on my cars absolutely drops by 2-3 MPG when my kids are driving. I just reject the tracking on principle. There's too much incentive for the companies to monitize this data once they have it, and most of us know that really anonymizing data can be quite difficult.

I'm the same.

But it's not hard to see how nearly 100% of people who drive recklessly would avoid such programs, but less than 100% of good drivers would.

The statistical skew makes sense to me. I doubt that insurance companies are assuming that every driver who doesn't take part in such program are bad drivers, but insurance is purely a game of statistics.

Having worked in the insurance industry, and spent a fair amount of time chatting to the underwriting team about what goes into their models, they do on the whole use this data in a straight forward way - if you drive well, you'll get a lower rate. If you drive badly they're going to charge you for the privilege.

Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a bit of "but we can charge more" baked into the pricing models, but that tends to go in as a completely separate "we can charge more" line item within the internal model. This if nothing else is because in the UK the Financial Conduct Authority have an extensive list of things you can not price on, regardless of whether your models show they're indicative of a greater risk. The FCA don't care if you're charging more than you have to, but they will tear you a new one if you're shown to be breaking the rules.

It's what they insinuated might be possible. You COULD save $X with this shiny new surveillance device! Im sure the executive who proposed this scheme didn't pitch it to the rest of the staff as "Ive found a way we can cut our revenues by 30%".

"I've found a way to reduce payouts with data collected by this device that our payers don't get to directly see except through our filtered interface"

"I've found a way to reduce payouts and reducing adjuster staffing, by helping drivers avoid crashes"

"that if it ever got out we were doing that would turn out to be majorly illegal and also would probably cause us to bleed customers fairly quick!"

I’ve got the phone driving app from Allstate that monitors my driving via an iPhone app. I’ve seen my insurance go down as a result.

"likelihood" is only if you are more likely to be a perpetrator than a victim.

Your insurance company pays more if you are at fault, so they'd prefer to prove you innocent.

Or they throw you under the bus. To be liable for all damages. Because they find reason to do so with exclusions they have on policy.

I believe any box or anything that monitors car will be used by insurance company to simply not pay up.

There are very few exclusions for auto insurance. Unless you're using your car for a business without telling them or committing fraud, you're almost guaranteed to be covered. The whole point of car insurance is to insure your negligence.

This makes sense for high-stakes cases that will definitely go to court. Otherwise it is cheaper for both companies to settle out of court and say both drivers are at fault and will be each paying their deductibles, and companies split the repair bill.

> as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money.

But the law is, auto insurance companies can only make money on scale. If they charge premiums that are out of line for the risk being covered they have to refund them. This happened when people drove significantly less during covid.

I don't know what specific program he's talking about but some of these optional programs only save you money. That's part of the sales pitch for getting people to use them. If you're afraid it'll charge you more, you wouldn't sign up. If you can demonstrate that you are a safer driver to their model, they can save you money. Whether you value that money more than your privacy is ultimately up to you.

Some state they may charge you more, however. I just looked up a few:

State Farm: "Drive Safe & Save is always a discount and does not surcharge your policy. The Drive Safe & Save discount is based on your annual mileage and basic driving characteristics."

Nationwide: "Can SmartRide increase my premium? No. This is a discount program. SmartRide measures driving behavior to reward you with a discount, not raise your rates."

Allstate: "Customers will receive a policy discount for participating in Drivewise and those who sign up and avoid risky behaviors can save on their premium. If customers stay active in Drivewise (active participation means at least one driver takes 50 trips or drives prior to renewal processing), their participation discount will not decline, but overall premium savings from Drivewise will depend on the customer's driving behaviors. Drivers who have riskier driving behaviors are expected to see a higher price from participating in Drivewise."

GEICO: "DriveEasy is a new program that promotes safe driving by providing both GEICO and the customer valuable information about individual driving patterns. This is designed to help you become a safer driver. Most customers will be able to save based on their safe driving habits, however riskier drivers may see a higher rate – depending on the state you live in."

All new cars have a blackbox that records what happened before a crash. So it would just stop the constant monitoring point.

Is there a known date before which this wasn’t the case?

If you want to buy a car that doesn’t have such a device, do you need a 2010? A 2019? Country dependent?

I honestly have no idea the exacts. But I know some cars have it even since 2003.

90s cars are the sweet spot where electronic fuel injection and emissions controls were mature enough to be reliable and having minimal complexity. It's mostly downhill from there.

You're more likely to be maimed or killed in a crash though

https://jalopnik.com/let-s-watch-cars-from-the-90s-crash-184...

I'm less likely to get into one in the first place, because I can actually see out of the damn car.

I was fooled into using one from Progressive once. For the record I'm an extremely cautious driver of a 99 horsepower Prius C, exactly the type an insurance company should love to insure. Any breaking of even moderate intensity causes the box to beep and your "safe driving score" goes down. Yellow light, run it or your insurance goes up. Someone cuts you off and you avoid an accident, your insurance goes up.

The final straw for me after a few months was another driver running a stop sign and feeling my brain waste milliseconds deciding if I should hit the brakes as hard as I should or juuuust hard enough to avoid hitting them in hopes I don't get a beep. I did the latter and it beeped anyway so I ripped it off the ODBII port and threw it on the floor. I changed insurance companies the moment I got home from work.

My final score was really poor and I was pissed since I'm the slowest and safest driver I know.

That's my understanding, also--they're hypersensitive to the realities of the road. They really need to refine their models a bit rather than simply rewarding what they consider "safe" behavior.

Yes, aggressive driving is a bad thing--but it's not something easily detected by a sensor.

Trying to think of all the shitty driving I could do without triggering this device...

I could easily fly up the shoulder at 40mph in a 60 zone bypassing all the stopped traffic.

Could drive down the sidewalk at a 20mph pace.

I can still weave though traffic as long as I don't go too far over the speed limit (assuming this device tracks location and speed).

I can still tailgate the fuck out of anybody.

I can still use my phone while driving.

I can be completely wasted and probably not set the thing off.

But don't you dare hit your brakes too hard!!!

Practice braking at a stop sign with no one around? Bad driver!

While all those incidents you described weren't your fault, surely you have to agree that there's a correlation between driving in situations like that and being more likely to get in an accident? It isn't just about your driving performance, if you're driving in places or intersections where people tend to cut you off or run red lights - or hell, just places with lots of traffic and intersections in general - that's hugely predictive of the chance you'll get in an accident relative to someone that drives a less travelled route.

It's a failure of the industry that they tend to market this monitoring as all about the driver. It's really not, it's just conditional probability.

I don't disagree, but they already know where I live and how far my commute to work is (was, yay WFH) as those are standard questions I've answered with every company I've used.

> It isn't just about your driving performance, if you're driving in places or intersections

To underline this, I had an enlightening moment with my auto insurance company years ago. I worked a handful of miles from where I lived, but the only way to get between the two was a freeway that is infamous for not only being highly congested (my average commute was a 45 minute drive each way), but for the numerous accidents that happened on it.

I moved much closer to my work, and when I updated my insurance policy with my new address, my premium was cut to nearly 1/3rd what it was before.

If it's not about the drivers performance perhaps the box shouldn't consistently beep at them to let them know about how they are driving, to the point of distraction.

> This whole thing seems like a way to possibly save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you.

Historically, as a XXI century society, we tend to adopt solutions like this (AirBnB, Uber, “you are the product” platforms, blindly accepting ToS, etc).

I don’t mean to be a nihilist, I just wanted to point out that this nothing new and that this is a trend. Hopefully there will be a way to balance this like the other examples, even if a little.

>>> save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you

Nowadays, everything they come up with is like this.

I've both worked on systems like that professionally and built some myself just for fun to play with GPS/geospatial data/streaming etc (fun tech). I'd _never_ want something like that installed in my vehicle.

First off, you're usually relying on ODB-2 + GPS + usually some type of streaming backend, which means you're looking at 2 unreliable (or, at least, hard to _interpret_) sources of data delivered and presumably analyzed by a notoriously tricky delivery mechanism (near-real time streaming), which has a tendency to be too much to handle for the notoriously non-"tech" insurance world. The chances that data is being interpreted quite differently to what's happening on the road, but yet is treated as a source of truth for your premium model!, is certainly not zero.

Even if you assume these companies handle all that properly (or outsource it), these data sets are some of the creepiest by their very nature - not only can you trivially determine somebody's home address by analyzing frequency of the reverse-geocoded data points (or any other geospatial features you derive), you can also determine any other patterns within a person's life - schedules, work location & employer, health habits (do they go to the gym or a bar? do they only ever leave to go to the grocery store?) etc., not to mention all the data ODB-2 gives you about actual driving behavior. And guess what, you can't use synthetic data for testing for much of this (I tried), so we would up testing these systems with real data, albeit with employees who volunteered.

A home address is arguably not that sensitive, given that that is public record if you own your home and your insurance company has that data anyways, but the patterns + all the other metadata + all the "public" data that is out there ready for purchase about the average American, now you have something close to a personality profile that would make your average marketing exec (or, potentially, bad government actor) squeal in delight.

How is this different from the phone in your pocket?

The biggest difference is that using something non-privacy-conscious (like Google Maps) doesn't have an immediate impact on my insurance bills. It also doesn't have access to my ODB-2 data and I can turn it off.

iOS allows me to set relatively fine-grained permissions and privacy settings. Unless I actively use Google Maps (or any other GPS enabled app), it won't be able to report my location data.

Value proposition. What are you going to do, _not_ walk around with a phone in your pocket?

Why not?

What are you going to do, _not_ walk around with a phone in your pocket?

Sounds like me three days a week.

I walk out of my home carrying nothing more than a $20 bill and a newspaper. I go to the French cafe a couple of blocks away and have a leisurely lunch while reading the news without any tech or financial company following me around tracing, tallying, tabulating, and selling my life.

I call it "normal."

That was normal 25 years ago.

These days that puts you in a "suspicious person without phone on them at all times" category.

Well we can build a startup that offer cheaper health/life insurance based on phone data tracking and see how people would react.

Well we can build a startup that offer cheaper health/life insurance based on phone data tracking and see how people would react.

This exists. I saw a commercial for it on late-night TV.

At the bottom it noted that it was not available in California or Massachusetts, which is what made me curious to look into it and see why it's so bad that it's been banned in certain states.

I can, and do, leave it at home

is it worse to be burgled 1-se or twice?

There is no reasonable scenario whereby your insurance company gets access to your geolocation trace information from your phone.

It is possible that your phone provider does not have more than 24 hours of records of which phone towers you connected to.

It is almost certain that the granularity of any information subpoenaed after the fact will not be sufficient to establish any specific behavior at the time of the accident.

Your phone provider is probably not using some off-the-shelf ML modeling to slap together a risk profile that you will be unable to appeal and yet is years ahead of any government regulation. (E.g., in the US if your credit rating causes you to get a worse rate, you must be notified. I have not looked, but I'm very dubious that your "Driver Risk Profile (TM)" will have any such obligations - now or in the imaginable future. See below.)

Biden's proposed AI Bill of Rights [1] is (surprisingly) a pretty interesting read:

> You should know that an automated system is being used and understand how and why it contributes to outcomes that impact you.

If this were a law, this part would be useful.

> You and your communities should be free from unchecked surveillance

I suppose watching your every move in the car isn't going to be considered "unchecked". Since people are all carrying cell phones, I'm not as hopeful this point goes anywhere useful.

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights/#privacy

> It is possible that your phone provider does not have more than 24 hours of records of which phone towers you connected to.

It is much longer than that (they have exabytes of data and DO keep it). They have retention periods in years not days. They also bake stuff right into the OS. As they usually have final say on what can and can not be installed on your phone.

Back when I worked this sort of thing they were looking into gathering that exact data and selling it. As being a cell phone is title II device they have a lot of wiggle room on doing exactly that as they are considered like an ISP. It is probably burred in that fine print you sign when you sign up.

My sister had an insurance tracker fitted in her car, and it was awful - it kept sending her emails saying "we detected you going 70mph on a 20mph road, if this keeps happening we'll cancel your insurance altogether" - we'd contact them asking for proof, they would send us a GPS trace and of course she was driving on the motorway going legal 70mph going ABOVE a 20mph street but the system was dumb enough to just check "what's the speed limit at those exact coordinates" and issued automatic warning letter. It would also frequently show her negative driver scores for "smoothness" of driving every time she would go over a speedbump. Absolute travesty of a system.

What in the actual FUCK am I reading

1984 aint got nothing on that insurance company. Do you remember the name so we can all collectively try to avoid it?

It was just Volkswagen insurance(I think it was really underwritten by AXA?). She got a deal where any new VW got a year of free insurance, but because she was under 25 the tracker was mandatory, and getting insurance elsewhere would have been super expensive at her age, so financially it made a lot of sense, but after the first year we paid extra specifically so she could have insurance without the tracker.

That's called extortion....

Welcome to driving in 2023.

No it isn't. They were not forced to buy that car or avail themselves of that insurance offer.

Often "legacy" institutions appeal to their age to tell us how they should be trusted with data. Ironically, they are the people I least want to have my data, since they seem completely incompetent in using it for anything valuable and instead just try to use it to grasp more power.

I'd rather some scrappy startup have all my data than my bank or my insurance provider. At least the startup has limited power. My bank can ruin my life by giving my a shit credit score because their model told them to, and by appealing to their trusted societal position, they'll convince themselves that it was the right thing to do.

>I'd rather some scrappy startup have all my data than my bank or my insurance provider

Facebook was once a scrappy startup.

As was Google.

I'll extend that then. I'd rather Google and Facebook have my information than my bank or insurance provider.

Do you not have an privacy laws to prevent the selling your data? should get some of those.

I'm pretty sure your insurance company knows where you live.

Why'd you build it then?

Why not? I've worked on systems like this as there is a demand. We offer it on personal lines and people like the discount, but business lines? They actually want these devices on their vehicles.

So they can weasel out of worker's comp payments, of course they want them.

OP was describing a thing they obviously dislike, don't want in their life, don't seem to want to exist anywhere. "Because someone paid me to" is such weak justification for it.

The idea that remunerative & interesting work is at worst morally neutral is one of the foulest norms of this site.

> can you trivially determine somebody's home address

Well, your phone has already done that - Waze "helpfully" auto-populated my home and work address for me.

But people think it's creepy when they realize how much metadata they're feeding to the multinational conglomorates (to then be bought or commandeered by their government agencies).

I suspect that you're probably not going to have a choice. At some point these things are getting installed into your car...Reminds me of AIS transponders on boats.

It feels to me more and more like you need to be rich to afford living without bartering away your personal information.

I'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth."

And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.

Frankly, it's exhausting to try keep your life private. The sheer number of different ways your privacy can be violated via modern cars, phones, computers, social media, surveillance/facial recognition, IoT devices (including 'smart' TVs), etc. is quite staggering.

Definitely seems like a losing battle. My retirement plan is a remote cabin in the woods.

Not only exhausting, it's also damaging one's social life, since preserving privacy is often making one the odd one out.

It may appear that way, but even privacy-for-profit schemes are illusory. The devices still send the data, it is still collated. Eventually this will effect the elites personally and negatively, someone will slip up with their parallel construction, and then we'll see real change in the US. Sadly, not before then.

No you can just get a cheaper car. You can get one for like $5k and the insurance won't be a lot. Just get minimums.

Do cheaper cars really lead to lower liability premiums?

No, you have to pay those anyway. But it will lower the total spend and so you'll have money available to pay them. You don't have to be rich or anything. I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage.

So if someone were to buy a $10k car and instead chose a $5k car, it'll be as if insurance were cut to $700/year for the next 10 years!

If you value your privacy, that's a solution.

> I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage

Wow, that’s crazy high. In the UK my Porsche 911 (992) is cheaper to insure than that! (Without an insurance tracker)

Anyone know if US insurance generally much higher (than other comparative nations)? Or is SF an anomaly?

I have comprehensive insurance for my car and it's about $850/yr. I'm also in California, but not near SF.

About $868 of that is for "Comprehensive" and "Collision" coverage, if it helps. It's possible it's just me, though. I've crashed my car once, and been hit on my motorcycle. In general, given that, I would assume it's more because of that than in general since I'm obviously a high risk driver. When I set my address from San Jose to San Francisco (I used to store the car at my friend's) it went up $200/yr so that's the SF premium for Geico at least.

How much do you pay?

> How much do you pay?

About $1100 (comprehensive). I’ve never made a claim and have no speeding points, so I guess I get a good rate; but the OP rate still seemed pretty high for the model.

I got Geico to make me a quote for this Porsche 911 https://www.carfax.com/vehicle/WP0AC2A90KS149357 and it comes to about $4.4k where I am.

And if I added this Porsche 911 https://www.carfax.com/vehicle/WP0CA29984S653662 it goes to $1.8k.

So I suppose it comes down to driver risk in the end since my car is only $32k, not $200k like yours.

The majority of cost risk in insurance is that of third parties, not the value of your own vehicle.

People often say "the insurance costs more than my car is worth!" as if it's scandalous. But what it's insuring you against, primarily, is the risk of paying millions of $CURRENCY in medical fees to the third party. Your car's value is peanuts in comparison.

I have always maxed out my liability insurance (what my insurance company would have to pay others in case it was my fault), and I have a spotless driving record, and it has always been $40 to $50 per month for 5k miles per year.

Comprehensive and collision, what your insurance company pays you regardless of who is at fault, is what cases insurance to be expensive in my experience.

Car insurance is partly based on the distances you travel with the car, and the area. The US is bigger than the UK, so on average, that component of the insurance price should be higher in the US.

Even if you're rich it's difficult.

It's true, and it's not great, but I think the flip side of this is that as I get older I find myself increasingly paying for the anti-social behavior of others.

There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,000 TV for a single super bowl party and then return it.

I actually desperately want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts" - all solutions I can think of violate my privacy but we'll find out what's worse...

Is respect for social contracts really all that's necessary? I don't see it as adversarial, so much as I see it as "normal _and_..." for many vendors.

For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?

Because they really don't like the TV for some reason/ Or an expensive purchase that should last for years falls apart after 9 months? Leaches who have made many companies cut back on generous return policies with "my ten year old coat is worn out, replace it" are basically turds who make life worse for other people.

ADDED: Furthermore, research has has shown (e.g late pickups at daycare) that when you add a fee to an anti-social behavior it can actually make the behavior more likely because it's now a transactional activity.

> (e.g late pickups at daycare)

I've often wondered how well it would work if you went "right well, if you pick them up 15 minutes late today, you've got to pick them up 15 minutes early tomorrow", or "... drop them off 15 minutes late tomorrow".

It still turns transactional. Maybe the parent has a job that is usually flexible but they have to put out fires every now and then, they'd happily sign up for this deal. Meanwhile it solves none of the daycare's problems and only adds new ones.

> why not return it and charge a fee?

Your suggestion proves my point! With social contracts I don't need to pay this fee, but by getting rid of them I do; I'd be getting charged for other people's anti-social behavior!

Stepping back, social contracts are forms of trust at the societal level. Any economist or business person will tell you that being able trust others dramatically lowers transactional and operational costs. I want to be trusted so that I can take advantage of those lower costs.

Like a social credit score!

The more time goes on, the less opposed to this I am. There are too many bad actors in society who fuck things up for the rest of us.

Behaving is too hard for some people and I'm fine with punishing via a social credit score.

The problem with that is that it assumes both that the people giving the score are good, unbiased actors who agree with your assessment of what is appropriate, and that bad actors will be unable to game the system.

Even in a well-designed system, both of those will be suspect.

> There are too many bad actors in society

Yet you are arguing for giving some of them way more power to fuck things up.

> want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts"

Cultural background + class would be the strongest indicator of this behavior. It describes the norms and expectations to which you are accustomed. Unfortunately it's illegal to discriminate based on most signifiers of this trait.

The alternative to shared trust is costly and intrusive enforcement mechanisms.

How about just asking "Have you ever returned any item to a store for any reason except that it is faulty?"

If they say no, and you don't find their name on a few big stores lists of frequent item-returners, then you trust them. Everyone else, you consider shady and don't offer good deals to.

Remember lying to gain a benefit is wire fraud - so anyone who falsely answers this question has committed a crime - and a store is totally allowed to treat a customer they suspect has a committed a crime differently.

> and a store is totally allowed to treat a customer they suspect has a committed a crime differently.

That's not true either. There are vastly different standards of enforcement.

This issue is a lot bigger than returning items at the store. Every social system we have was built with assumptions about how people would behave. For example: the Seniors who are easily scammable are those who grew up around people who didn't scam each other.

I think for the most part, you can't really monetize your own data. You can just trade it away for "free" services.

Unless I've missed something...

Sidebar: The government is buying all your data from data brokers. We should all collectively submit FOIA requests to get copies of it, to create an undue burden on them doing so. Maybe they'll scale it back.

think of it more like the Hunger Games and all behaviors are explained

I’m reasonably rich and would pay good money not to be tracked. It’s not really an option.

I’ve started seeing ads for companies that try to get your data removed from sites and data broker.[1] I don’t know how effective they are but we’ve reached an age where there is a clear market for privacy. That feels very dystopian.

[1] https://incogni.com/

I’ve heard of this one too. I’m too cynical to believe it’s legit though.

... which on its home page tracks to google analytics, tag manager, and the payment services provider paddle.

I hate how true this is! A case in point is also apps like Ibotta or Fetch which reward you based on your shopping data. Sell your shopping patterns, earn money! Rich can protect their privacy.

You are also describing credit cards. That's the trade you made to get a 1-2% reward.

It makes sense that one's privacy is a valuable asset one can sell.

Even if you were to pay the fee or drive a gas car, or you pay for the 'better' insurance to not be tracked, your movements are still recorded everywhere with ALPR cameras.

If not your car itself.

But at the same time, I feel like this creates opportunities for enterprising individuals. How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?

Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.

> How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?

Wouldn't that be fraud?

> How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?

A lot of the monitors for older cars (that don't have 'tracking' built in) just plug into the cars OBD2 port and the CAN bus data - and is extremely hackable by anyone thats used an Arduino. It would be much harder to interfere if the monitor is wired in or using its own GPS to monitor speed and distance travelled though.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/resea...

Insurance fraud is a crime.

Not only that, but insurance companies don't cover claims when the policy was obtained by fraud.

I think the people who say “the public doesn’t care about privacy” are either completely ignoring the fact that most people will give it up if it means the product is cheaper (because, financial survival) or they are deliberately pushing the agenda.

My auto insurance provider (in the US) has never even offered such a tracking program to me (and I know my current rates are pretty reasonable/in line with other companies). Maybe it's because of my history with the provider (I'm 50 and they've been covering me since I was 16)?

And if you are rich, you don't actually get privacy, just the illusion of it.

I have dumb electronics that are way less intrusive than their luxury versions.

When I tried this a few years ago, the unit beeped when it sensed braking or lane changes it didn’t like. It beeped constantly in the course of normal New York City defensive driving. I found myself running more than one red light to avoid the “hard braking” beep.

It completely eliminated any enjoyment of the new car I sacrificed to save up for.

After 3 months I was horrified to get an email with a list of time stamped infractions and an offer for a 15% reduction in my premium.

Yeah, no. I switched to Geico, cut my premium in half, and vowed never to willingly trade surveillance for an insurance discount.

I had the same experience. The beeline that Progressive's snapshot device did actively encouraged worse driving behavior in a city.

I could see it being more beneficial in rural communities where there's less erratic driver behavior, but in a major US city it was doing me no favors.

We have similar devices on our vehicles at work.

I can tell you that they don't work on Landrover Defenders, because they are reading about half way to "OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING" just sitting in the car park with the engine idling.

They have a point. There is probably an expensive repaid coming on from sitting sitting in the car park idling.

I'm not sure how you'd get them from the car park to moving down the road without switching the ignition on. Is there some trick to going from a switched-off stationary vehicle to 30mph without some ramping up in between?

I cannot find the source but I recall reading that telematics insurance causes more incidents as it makes drivers afraid of braking hard, knowing that any maneuver by you to avoid a deranged driver is counted against you.

I can only find anecdotal references https://www.quora.com/Does-Progressive-Auto-insurance-actual...

This has been extremely common in the UK for about 10 years - especially for young drivers.

I warned my nephew off it but sure enough, he took the £200 (£1400 to £1200) discount on insurance. His insurance was cancelled because they say he did over 35mph in a 30 zone, so now his insurance premiums are £2000+ because he has to declare he has a history of having an insurance policy cancelled.

Damn that is shady as hell. Enticing with a small discount then boom, guaranteed increased premiums for years.

The big comparison websites are complicit too as they list those policies along the others in a table sorted by price, not making much of a deal about the risks etc and how different the policy is

This reads like an article from /r/ABoringDystopia that showcases, among other things, technology that was suppose to improve people’s lives is actively weaponized against them.

What worries about this from a consumer level is that the insurance companies are not required to disregard old data. If you got a speeding ticket or other minor infraction, it will eventually drop off of your driving record as far as your insurance is concerned. Which makes sense and seems more fair because you are not necessarily the same driver you were two years ago. My concern is that they will keep this data in the aggregate and indefinitely penalize drivers with insurance rates that don’t actually reflect their present risk during a policy term.

Massachusetts has a concept of "managed competition" to avoid exactly this: http://www.mass.gov/doc/autoinsuranceexecsummarypdf/download

This is one of the least bad invasions of privacy I've seen. It shifts the burden of insurance premiums more towards those likely to cause accidents, and incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel. There are actual benefits to responsible people, and to society at large, which is not something you frequently see with invasion of privacy.

Assuming the data is only ever used for its stated purpose and not anything else…

The data collected here is just as likely to be misused as data that's collected that doesn't lead to any societal benefits.

The data doesn't need to be used now, today, for this purpose. What happens when an insurance company foists a new privacy policy on you, the insured, saying that it'll be using back data that it's collected for new purposes? To my knowledge, there are no laws on the books in the US that prevent that kind of behavior (ex-post-facto only applies to the legal system), and I'd imagine few would change insurance providers because of a privacy policy change.

> incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel.

Think very carefully about whether you want to be behind a person who is scrupulously obeying every single traffic law. Especially if you get 3 of them abreast.

That seems like... a good outcome? The privacy implications troubling enough to give me pause but the idea of more people actually driving at safe and legal speeds seems like a net positive, but perhaps there's some disaster scenario I'm not considering?

Traffic flow relies on people mostly obeying the rules but being slightly flexible about breaking them to be courteous.

A car passing another at exactly 55mph while another car is going the same speed will take forever. We expect people to pull out, accelerate slightly, and then pull back in to get out of the way after passing even if that means you go above the speed limit for a bit.

Two lane roads often clog with truck traffic up hills. People pass these trucks on lanes in areas that allow it. The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.

We call scrupulous adherence to rules "malicious compliance" for a reason.

> A car passing another at exactly 55mph while another car is going the same speed will take forever.

Why would either driver would try to pass the other if they are going the same speed? If they're not passing then they should move to the right out of courtesy. (And they're legally required to in some states.)

> The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.

If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely. Whereas if the truck driver is traveling near the speed limit then the line of people "trapped for hours" are also moving near speed limit which seems fine. Plus, drivers of slower vehicles (trucks, RVs, farm equipment) are often courteous and pull over occasionally to let other drivers pass.

So that leaves cases where someone is driving a bit under the speed limit and is unwilling or unable to move to the side to let others pass. I don't begrudge someone breaking the limit by ~5mph to pass in such a case, but I also don't mind being "trapped" behind someone who scrupulously obeys every single traffic law even if it slows my journey by a few minutes. That would certainly be preferable to the unsafe behavior I see out on the roadways on a daily basis.

> Why would either driver would try to pass the other if they are going the same speed? If they're not passing then they should move to the right out of courtesy. (And they're legally required to in some states.)

And, yet, I deal with this all the time in Texas and California. I shudder at the thought of more of these kinds of people on the roads.

> If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely.

I think you don't have much driving experience with idiots on two-lane roads. I have experienced this failure mode in California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania--I have no reason to believe it doesn't also fail elsewhere. It doesn't take very many cars piled up behind a truck before you do not have the ability to overtake them all while your passing zone exists. See this video for what kind of zone I am talking about (sorry that it's an annoying comedy defensive driving video): https://youtu.be/Duw-c8O8Y9Y?t=104

These kinds of tracking devices will make these failure modes worse, not better.

Probably safe to assume that this feed will be sold to Lexis Nexis or Acxiom, etc. From there, who know how it will be used for or against you in whatever sphere of life, at whatever time.

That would be problematic when the system is linked to a car and not the driver.

Just like tracking is linked to a phone and not its owner.

I find it dubious that people who get good scores on these telematics are actually better drivers or less likely to cause accidents.

I've been stuck behind people doing 40 mph on the entrance ramp trying to merge into a 70 mph interstate. It's terrifying. They get a great rating for their leisurely acceleration, while vehicles on the interstate have to slam on their brakes and swerve to avoid them.

I am also skeptical of the accuracy of the initial rules but this seems like a domain that should be fairly easy to refine with a large enough corpus of data. Once an insurance company has a sufficient number of claims from telematics users I would wager that they will be able to find strong signals in the telematics data to identify customers who are likely to be expensive.

It's impossible to tell if someone is driving properly based on just sensor data because if it were, we would have full self driving.

It's ok we'll just feed your speeds, GPS locations, braking data, and acceleration data into a black box AI model and have it spit out a bill multiplier.

All hail AI.

Determining whether a particular driver is driving properly seems overkill. Any correlation between driving behavior and insurance payouts seems like it would be sufficient to improve the accuracy of your risk scores.

Let's say you only analyze vehicle speed data. That is clearly insufficient for training self-driving.

But it is very likely there is some correlation between speed and insurance payouts. For example, say you are able to segment your customer base including one subset with drivers who typically drive >80 miles an hour and another subset with drivers who typically drive <55 miles per hour. Are you saying that you would predict that the two populations have identical risk profiles? That speed data has no correlation with risk?

Someone can be a “safe” driver on paper, never get into an accident, but their actions regularly put other people in harm’s way. For example someone who’s driving well below the flow of traffic will provoke other drivers to have to pass them, but then eventually it results in someone getting into a head on collision.

Sure the passing driver is ultimately at fault, but the slow driver has blood on their hands despite no accountability. If they were driving the legal speed limit it may have prevented a serious accident and loss of life. of course, the insurance company would be none the wiser.

> Sure the passing driver is ultimately at fault, but the slow driver has blood on their hands despite no accountability.

If the slow driver is on a highway with a minimum speed limit or they're performing other unsafe maneuvers like weaving between lanes or stopping abruptly then they're clearly not a safe driver, so I agree that slow does not always equal safe.

But otherwise the collision is both morally and legally 100% the fault of the passing driver. Drivers have no moral or legal right to always operate at the speed limit if it's not safe to do so.

My semi-rural town has very narrow roads and I regularly encounter utility vehicles, school busses, farm vehicles, and cyclists on the roadway, not to mention turkeys, deer, and turtles. If a passing driver caused an accident or was pulled over and they tried to argue to the police officer that the slower vehicle "provoked them" into passing dangerously I can't imagine anyone finding that a compelling argument.

> and incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel.

Going 55 mph when everyone else is going 70 mph is extremely dangerous but the insurance company will give you good marks for obeying the speed limit.

I refuse to use one of these monitoring devices, it’s extremely intrusive and patronizing. Insurance companies are not going bankrupt due to pricing risk incorrectly.

It's not. Going 70 in close proximity is extremely dangerous.

The problem is that the data is interpreted without context. At worst, it incentivizes bad behaviour.

The box knows I slammed on the brakes. Does it know the schmuck in the next lane dove in front of me?

If the user figures out the way to minimize beeping/penalties is to drive 45 in a 50 zone, does he now become a hazard for other drivers?

Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?

> The box knows I slammed on the brakes. Does it know the schmuck in the next lane dove in front of me?

It doesn't really matter. You are still incentivized financially by the insurance company to slam on the brakes to avoid accidents.

> Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?

The way this is being interpreted is as if people will respond to an extreme degree to any incentive whatsoever, and they will choose the worst response to that incentive automatically. Your insurance rates will not double because you slammed on the brakes once. And people are probably more likely to learn to drive with better spacing so they don't have to frequently slam on the brakes, as opposed to playing a game of chicken trying to avoid having the insurance system know they once had to press the brake pedal hard once.

> The way this is being interpreted is as if people will respond to an extreme degree to any incentive whatsoever, and they will choose the worst response to that incentive automatically.

The interpretation is that (for most people) regular and consistent incentives/punishments at frequent intervals are more habit forming than irregular incentives/punishments that occur rarely and randomly.

If people were capable of internalizing that they had to drive safely to avoid having their insurance go up, then what would be the point of these boxes? Why introduce the reward/punishment structure at all if insurance premiums on their own are enough to influence behavior?

Frequency/predictability are hugely important for habit forming. A box that beeps at you every single time you brake too hard is a more effective punishment than a random insurance premium increase. Honestly, the premium risks are kind of irrelevant in both cases -- getting immediate negative feedback every time you brake is the problem.

These devices disincentivise hard braking when a pedestrian steps into the road in front of your car.

The idea that these devices can measure safe driving technique comes from the same school of thought as:

- More productive programmers write more lines of code per unit time; - Democracy puts the best people in positions of power; and - Telling the teacher is the best way to deal with bullying.

Road rules are simply the first order effectors of driving style; the exact conditions of the road are second-order effectors; the intentions and behaviour of other drivers are third-order effectors. All must be taken into account to drive safely.

> These devices disincentivise hard braking when a pedestrian steps into the road in front of your car.

The monetary incentive is still wildly in favor of hard braking as opposed to hitting a pedestrian. I don't understand this criticism.

That is not even remotely how people in the real world think; most people who are even consciously trying to think about long-term consequences struggle to prioritize safety measures while they're being actively discouraged against prioritizing them.

Consider that if people were capable of internalizing that hitting a pedestrian was more costly than being 5 minutes late to work -- and were capable of consistently applying that cost-benefit analysis in their everyday life, we wouldn't need laws like speed limits in the first place.

The human brain is not wired to think about risk in that way. It is wired to respond to regular consistent punishments for braking by braking less often. It is wired to respond to irregular novel punishments for rare events like hitting a pedestrian by ignoring that risk.

First it's a discount. Then it's a penalty for not playing. Then it's just everyone.

Recently were shopping insurance providers for our brick and mortar business that has a few delivery vehicles, and MANY of the commercial insurers are requiring that their apps be used to monitor employee driving behavior. I hadn't shopped for insurance in quite awhile and was shocked at how prevalent this requirement seemed to be.

I'm kind of torn on this.

On the one hand, I hate the intrusiveness, that's a huge minus.

On the other hand, commercial drivers are subject to all kinds of perverse business incentives--too many hours driving, poorly maintained fleets, etc.--and if the insurance companies can stamp those out, that's a plus.

Nearly all CDLs in the US are operating with an ELB of some sort and have been for a while now. Trucking is a different world.

In NC we have mandatory yearly safety inspections. To renew your registration you must pass inspection. It would be easy for them to use the odometer reading at the inspection to assess a road use tax.

We do already pay a gas tax and a yearly property tax at the state and local level for cars plus a sales tax on new cars.

My relative in the UK got a black box because insurance for beginner drivers is pretty high. Her summary is that punishing hard braking is counterproductive.

Her relative also had it for three months, but after that the insurance company said he would be better off without it.

hypothetically it’s pretty easy to fake the odb reader versions of these. Just buy a male to 2 female odb splitter, strip one and hook a 9 volt battery and usb charger to the power wires.

Plug your device into your car and turn it on, wait for device to blink green, attach 9 volt and unplug, carry inside and plug in usb charger to the wall.

Might want to rethink posting about committing insurance fraud.

They said "hypothetically" so they're good /s

Ah, they edited it. Must be why I'm eating downvotes now :)

Imagine a society where insurance fraud was so rampant that it regularly got jury nullified as normal behavior.

How do these apps work, in practice? The article states:

> If you’re at the wheel focused on the road, but someone in the passenger seat is changing the music on your phone, the app may think it’s observing distracted driving and count it against you.

Is the app running on the car, or on the user's phone, which somehow detects that the user is driving a car? Is there some way that a paired phone (Bluetooth - or maybe this is a feature of CarPlay / Android Auto) can tell a car that it's being used?

State Farm sends a Bluetooth beacon that you pair with your phone. Each car gets a beacon. Whichever beacon is closest is the car you’re in. The app on the phone uses gps and accelerometer data to determine driving behavior. Presumably the stream of data is sent to the insurance company at some point.

And if you don't have a phone?

I don't think this works anymore, COVID tracking apps basically said fyou if you don't have a smartphone, or even when your phone is old enough that the app doesn't work.

I got this from Liberty Mutual and it was an awesome mutually beneficial agreement.

Liberty Mutual only records your behavior for one quarter, and then gives you a discount for as long as you hold your policy. I ended up with a permanent 28% discount!

It analyzes your driving based on four factors: total miles drive, how fast you accelerate and decelerate, and whether you drive in the wee hours.

I found the temporary loss of privacy to be totally reasonable and an excellent tradeoff.

Considerate driving should be rewarded. Great to see in action.

I tried this with an app. They offered 2% off after a month of data collection.

I called and turns out my insurance was already so “low” that 2% is the most it would have ever offered.

I dunno about elsewhere but in Canada, insurance is like tech job salaries, the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years.

> the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years.

I had Farmers for about 5 years in a row. It started off at $440/6months and ended up at $900/6months -- on the same two cars (comprehensive on only one of them). I tried calling them up and asking why my insurance was going up when the amount they were actually covering was going down due to depreciation. They avoided my calls and lost my business.

Now I'm trying to deal with the legalities of having a child in college in another state, but no car.

It is the same in USA as well. After about 2-3 years one needs to yearly check out competitive rates.

I have a hunch that the risk is the longer they keep you the more likely to have an accident they have to pay out. So if you are a good customer, no claims for 3 years your engagement with them has been very profitable. If they keep you for another year and you have an claim then that engagement is unprofitable. Just a hunch as insurance math is complicated.

I'm a holdout on this tech for privacy reasons.

Wonder how self-incriminating that is - at some tipping point of adoption, not opting in becomes THE negative signal.

Outside regulation to limit retention and prevent misuse of data is there even a longer term option here?

Perhaps I should capitulate early and save more money.

> Insurance companies may think you’re a higher-risk driver if you’re accelerating fast, braking aggressively, making sharp turns, using your phone while you drive, coming home at 3 a.m., taking dangerous roads or simply driving a lot.

Is there any proof that any of these behaviors actually correlate with tangible risk? (I mean, I can understand that "simply driving a lot" increases risk.)

Personally, I'd be more interested in cars with cameras using machine learning to build a risk profile of other cars. I'm not the only person who sees dangerous behavior all the time. It would be interesting if I could sell a stream from my cameras to a company that builds risk profiles based on observed behavior.

Anecdotally, when Tesla implemented safety score as a voluntary activity to unlock FSD, my gamer brain kicked in and couldn't not pursue a high score. The result is that I went from an extremely anxious and aggressive driver (which is 90% of american drivers) to completely ambivalent to my arrival time and obsessively approaching intersections cautiously and giving time for drivers that cut me off.

I do think that a key component for success is near real-time feedback so it feels like a game and not a speeding ticket in the mail.

I have no idea whether the current telematics algorithms are any good at assessing risk.

However, with a large enough corpus of training data including years of telematics on drivers with and without insurance claims it certainly seems like it should be possible to build models that can make much more accurate risk assessments than they can with the data they currently collect such as age, zipcode, and past accidents.

Put another way, I would be surprised if there was zero correlation between driving behavior and insurance claims.

Casualty insurance companies just want the numbers, then to set the markup, then profit. They've filled out that elusive intermediate step. If it means finding a way to get a customer a discount then that's ok, as long as they have the customer.

The biggest factor they can monitor is verifying miles driven. Miles driven, unsurprisingly, has a bigger impact than virtually anything else someone signing up to be monitored would be guilty of.

> The biggest factor they can monitor is verifying miles driven. Miles driven, unsurprisingly, has a bigger impact than virtually anything else someone signing up to be monitored would be guilty of.

In general, no surprises.

What really surprises me is that my insurance company never asks for an odometer reading. I haven't changed insurance in years. It's also hard to estimate how many miles I will drive in a year because my life situation changes every few years.

They may have it from safety inspections or oil changes if you have those done at a mechanic.

Car drivers are used to constantly breaking the law, endangering pedestrians and other road users and seeing zero consequences. Even in cases of hit and run homicides, the driver rarely faces jail time. https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...

Technology could play a big role in ensuring people actually follow the rules and are held accountable for criminal negligence causing injury or death.

I hate this but man am I tempted. I take my old car out for like 2k miles a year.

I think of getting rid of it but it takes so little time & money to keep around, and it's great being able to do occasional road trips. Otherwise I'd totally get rid of it. Insurance is the biggest cost, but pretty cheap all-in-all.

Given how little it's used, and given what a generally chill driver I am, I do think I deserve a better deal. Then again, it's old & I don't think it has OBD, so I'm probably not eligible anyways.

A few years ago our insurance would give us a discount if we added a small monitoring device to the car for 2 months. We agreed and at the end of the time we mailed it back to them. Now we have switched companies and the new one doesn’t have a discreet device, but instead want me to install an app that has 24 hour access to my location on my phone. That was too much for me. So instead a bought the cheapest android phone I could find, and installed the app on that and left it in the car.

Did it give you any significant discount? A few people I know that did something similar ended up saving $2 per year. If you bought a phone I'm guessing your discount was much higher.

it saved me about $30 a month.

I like to joke that as usage based insurance goes to infinity, we all become uninsured drivers...

Each insurance company uses the telematics differently. While the pricing model is regulated, it is not public. There is a substantial difference company-to-company

I think this is an instance of HN-confirmation bias. We all hate monitoring, so a study or article that says UBI and behavioral modification is harmful appeals to us.

Yup, I saw that offer with my auto-insurance provider and despite knowing how much data they’d be harvesting, I was still tempted to do it. Insurance just costs so much. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect driving record for almost 2 decades. Costs just slowly creep up just like everything else. It feels like we’re in a world where privacy and data ownership is a luxury reserved for the wealthy.

When I got my UK driving insurance, I was in my 30s. By that time, I had been driving for many years elsewhere. Even then, I remember the first year's rather eye-watering. IIRC, it was just under GBP 1000 - the price of a rickety used car in UK.

Soon, I discovered that Aviva had a plan for which you can signup: you download the app, and leave that active (data and location) while driving. The app monitors your driving pattern for aound 200 miles. Then it scores you out of 10. I felt smug that I scored 9.7 (IIRC). And, as promised, I got a rather neat discount on my insurance. IIRC, it came under GBP 300.

I just wanted to say that alternatives like the above exists.

Aviva continued to quote me lowest, until this year. I had to move away because, it happend to me, too, what happens to every loyal customer in the UK: deals popup elsewhere that are available only to new customers. So, exploring switching providers every now and then, is worthwhile.

I wouldn't agree to these kinds of devices simply because they are cheap junk that can damage your car. https://www.kiro7.com/news/insurance-tracking-device-blamed-...

My experience with telematics-enabled driving is quite positive. I'm saving 30% easily, simply by driving relaxed.

I don't think I'm giving away much personal data: The insurance set up a separate legal entity that performs the ranking, with a easy-to-read EULA that rules out selling data.

My insurance is using the Cambridge Mobile Telematics modules.

There's no such thing as a device that only "saves you money" - insurers are going to use the data to give you a discount one minute, and take it away the next. My insurance already shows a line item for a "safe driver discount" - I'm sure it's only a matter of time until I have to fork over my data to "keep" the "discount" they've already built into their list price.

Great case in point, Tesla insurance dings people for "late night driving" -

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/10xaj74/do_not...

The only way I would even consider to have one of these things is if the insurance premium would be reduced proportionally to how much I (don't) drive. Only use the car on Sundays? Pay 1/7 of the price.

But of course prices can only go up.

I think you can get something similar to this nowadays even from the big insurance companies. I thought I remembered some startups doing micro-transaction insurance policies that started and ended with each new trip -- did some searching and found that Allstate has something similar: https://www.allstate.com/auto-insurance/milewise

You pay a small retainer fee ($1.50/day) and then a per mileage fee. This requires the use of a logging device which also impacts your per-mile rate depending on your driving.

I haven't dug into the nuts and bolts of this, but I wonder how well you are covered when the vehicle is not in motion - parked in garage, on the street, etc. At least in my area parking in public can be a risky option between the hit and runs, catalytic converter theft, break-in, etc.

Is this considered new? In Canada I had an app on my phone for 100 days which tracked accelerations/break/speed. Sure it felt intrusive-ish, but the program was not mandatory so seems like a win-win. I got a 22% discount (got 96/100!) and now the app is off my phone.

I would not recommend it if you don't live in the suburbs though. Slow and steady is the name of the game, ideally you want light traffic and mostly empty roads.

Thanks for contributing to the dystopia for your own minor financial gain.

The headline seems quite disingenuous when the article is based on a study that puts the adoption rate of these surveillance technologies at around 14%.

Waiting for insurance companies to 'team up' and 'exploit synergies' with car companies to 'enhance revenue', so that this stuff it built in, and you don't get to turn it off.

Privacy to the weak and transparency to the powerful cannot be achieved while companies put the poorer in these positions of lower price if you agree to be surveilled. How do we fix this?

Sounds good to me. Maybe they will see that highway speeds are too low and I get to save money.

Although its going to be really awkward when they find out my home address and kid's daycare.

Ever since covid and working remotely I drive about 20% of what I used to. I'm guessing this device wont recognize that and reduce my bill to 20% the original amount.

My insurer's app sometimes complains I drive too few to determine my driving style, hence, cannot grant a discount. However the system averages the whole year, taking months into account where this actually did work.

For 200km / Month it's working just fine. Below that sometimes fails.

(x) Doubt

We should start calling this stuff what it is, meatspace spyware.

A far better solution than historical GPS tracking by insurance companies (backed by bad/noisy) would be for cars to impose a hard +10% cap on speeding.

"Among other things..." Like speeding? Like traffic-light cameras, this will result in unintended consequences at scale. But hey, more data!

This isn't new . We all agreed to be the product and give our data away for free product access .

"For a small convenience, or a few pennies saved ... we'll give up our entire world".

It's starting to feel like Europe.

In Belgium you couldn't drive a miles without being recorded on some ALPR camera.

Speed cameras everywhere. And the current rage is average speed cameras. So they take your photo on an on-ramp and when you take the exit they'll calculate the average. Above the speed limit: ticket. With no way of facing your accuser in court. The machine said so...

That’s a dystopia right there. Would quit my job before participating in that.

Why is this comment downvoted? I think is pretty fair to say "I would quit my job before participating in that". More tech workers should say "NO" to so much BS today. Tech does give us so much good things, but we drive full speed into a new kind of slavery.

I've heard about that for tunnels. Do you have a source for three on-ramp/off-ramp version?

So you're claiming these are inaccurate? Do you have any other solutions for speeding? I think these are still much better solution than a device that tracks your location all the time.

Speed limiters on cars. Limiters on acceleration would be good too.

What is the problem? That you cannot break the law without consequence?

Car-drivers have a strong sense of entitlement that i never have seen in other non-radical groups.

Uh I know right. Then there’s those other radicals called homeowners who don’t want government cameras in their house checking they aren’t doing anything illegal.

Homeowners have such a strong sense of entitlement

This is not an honest comparison.

Cars are inherently dangerous; to the people inside, people outside, and to infrastructure and buildings around them. The faster they go the more dangerous they are. They drive on publically funded infrastructure in a public setting.

No actually. Speed kills.

I am against mass surveillance. Remember when Snowden released all those documents? How we were all angry about the NSA spying on its own citizens?

Systems like this do the same, although they justify it as a means to stop speeding, which, to be fair, they do very well.

But we go from one month of data retention to multiple months, and then someone finds old data that was not deleted and the government allows its use, and now its acceptable to store this data for 2 years etc etc.

All you people worried about privacy should consider the fact that every thought you have and dream you dream is recorded in your DNA and will be read out before the world when you stand in judgment before God.

To make money, people agree to sit at a desk nine hours a day.

Water wet.

Some people were born to be serfs

Old news tbh

Yes. 5-7 years ago I used to work for a vehicle telemetry SaaS company. It was explained to me that most of the Brazil market was for govt mandated tracking.

no we dont. How about insurance figures out their own stuff

I read a comment here saying that they didn't like Progressive Snapshot, so they switched to Geico and cut their rate in half. This is my most recent anecdote as a different experience.

I was paying $620 (for 6 months) with Geico while letting them monitor my driving via my cell phone. The premium never went down although I had 110 scores in their EasyDrive app (In driving for over 11 years in the US, I never had an accident and never filed any claim car insurers; I always drive defensively and never got any ticket either). What I found was EasyDrive app is always punishing me for bad driving practices like running red light (again, the same experience some has mentioned here with Progressive) in fear of registering a hard-brake event; and worse, slowing down excessively to turn the corners (basically, surprising the cars behind me and risking them bumping into my car) because EasyDrive thinks ONLY IF you go below 15 mph then you are doing the cornering right. I guess these EasyDrive developers (or rule makers) never drove on a real road, and found that usually 20mph is the safe way to go about turning on the right corner.

Regardless, I got 15% premium bump in the renewal despite having 110 EasyDrive score (I think Geico raised their premiums by a very high percentage in CA as well; I live in FL and have been using Geico for all the years I've been driving in the US). That pissed me off and I explored other options, and finally got Progressive for $570 for six months. The sacrifice I have to do for this lower rate is to subscribe to their Snapshot program. I used my phone and have been driving for over a month. The relief (good thing) about using Snapshot app is that it doesn't monitor your cornering score. However, like some mentioned here, it still promotes bad driving behavior like running yellow/red light in fear of hard-brakes. It also seems to be a bit proactive in determining what a hard-brake is (again, I'm using their phone app) because I registered 2 hard-brakes (the only two hard brakes that I have recorded so far in about 1.5 months of driving) on my grocery trip. I swear I didn't do any hard brakes (or maybe at most once) because I know the road pretty well and I usually do grocery runs in early mornings on weekends when there are very few cars on the road.

I know I got much cheaper ($570 vs. $710) rate from Progressive now just because I am a new customer. I am pretty sure come next or next, next renewal, they'll jack up my premiums like what Geico did, and then I'll have to switch to yet another insurer like musical chair game. I wish that the car insurers actually have a more accurate, realistic, non-intrusive tech to monitor the driving habits (e.g., the ones who don't use turn signals when turning right/left or changing lanes, which really could cause accidents) and ACTUALLY give discounts to drivers like me who are very careful with their driving (plus, my wife and I drove a total of 6050 miles in the last year). This is all to say that the risk-reward distribution system with car insurance companies is still inefficient.

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