Bad drivers should pay more for car insurance.
The things that actually make people bad drivers are things like driving unpredictability, failing to signal, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and not paying attention / distracted driving. These are the things that cause most crashes. They also can’t be directly measured with telematics and none of the measurements we have is a good proxy.
So most folks would agree that bad drivers should pay more for insurance, but it doesn’t follow that sending telematics to insurance companies is a useful or accurate way to do that. It’s certainly not worth the privacy trade off.
The sensors themselves are imperfect, the thing you actually measure is probably the thing easiest to measure rather than actually pushing the tire grip toward its limits, even if you actually measure the right thing (hard acceleration/deceleration) you miss the fact that even an ordinary trip around town is often safer with more acceleration than a naive model would predict (e.g., short on ramps, or just that your speed when close to merging should probably be a bit higher than your intended merge speed in most cars), and actions like hard braking can rightly indicate appropriately slowing down for unexpected construction.
Misaligned incentives aren't something to be trifled with (something something Goodhart's Law). Maybe cutting all the hard-braking at every stop sign would be worth it, but if even a few people chose to merge more slowly onto the freeway that would greatly increase accidents and have ripple effects in rush hours and traffic patterns.
On what basis? You probably have something different in your mind than what I am actually referring to. I'm not talking about people skidding to a stop or laying a stripe of rubber when they take off, and short of that, there is basically no increase in risk from accelerating or decelerating more rapidly than a grandmother hypermiling a prius, which is how the insurance companies want you to drive.
Regarding speeding, in most cases speeding is required to /not/ cause accidents. The correct and safest behavior is to observe the road conditions and your surroundings and drive predictably within the limits of those conditions. That means driving the speed of traffic, not what it says on the sign. Sometimes that speed is lower, sometimes that speed is higher. Sometimes the speed is different in different parts of the country or city. What's most important is that other drivers can understand and predict your behavior on the roadway, and that you can do the same for others. It's /far/ more dangerous to do 65 in a 65 when the prevailing speed is 80 than it is to do 80, but combining speed data with GPS data will still get you penalized by the insurance company for doing 80.
Higher speed generally means less margin for error in unexpected circumstances and more serious consequences when an accident does happen.
And if you frequently have to brake hard that's a pretty good indication that you're driving recklessly - following too close, driving too fast, not being ready for predictable events such as a pedestrian crossing the road etc.
Some times it's necessary. But if it's necessary every time you get in your car you're not a safe driver - practically every one of those hard decelerations occur because you are trying to avoid an accident. It follows that if you were to have a small lapse of attention or judgement, you wouldn't have been able to avoid the accident.
If you give yourself more margin for error you rarely have to brake hard. Keep a good distance to cars in front, slow down in unpredictable situations, respect the speed limit because it was set for a reason.
This could only be said by someone that isn’t experienced driving on US Interstates.
If what you say is true, why don’t we do 20mph everywhere? Could it be that the safe speed to drive is conditional, like I stated? Could it be that what I wrote is no bullshit after all?
Here in Norway most roads are max 80 kph which I think is roughly 45mph. Many roads have been downgraded from 80kph to 70kph because accidents at 70kph are significantly less fatal than at 80. They have also added separators between oncoming lanes in highways to minimize head on collisions.
Some year recently we had 0 fatalities in children. This is because we have improved problematic road segments and improved road safety.
I have had some discussions with US citizens presenting the same viewpoints you are. Generally on videos on Reddit showing exactly why they are wrong. My experience watching a lot of traffic accidents in reddit subs like r/idiotsincars is that the vast majority of accidents are because both parties made a mistake. One party may have been more at fault, but both were indisputably at fault.
In these comment threads I've seen a lot of comments presenting that American viewpoint that you have to break the law to be safe. I just don't buy it. I've driven for a lot of years, following the law and driving defensively has kept me safe.
I'm 100% convinced they have both the math skills and the greed to know this is profitable for them.
I'm less sure it's actually happening. Only proof I've seen is the internet comment a few levels up claiming it.
It's also definitely happening, not only do insurance companies buy telematics data from automotive companies, they also provide discounts (sometimes) for customers that voluntarily provide telematics data using devices which connect to the vehicle OBD2 port. One example: https://www.progressive.com/auto/discounts/snapshot/
To me those are functionally the same thing.
This stuff isn’t exactly peer reviewed data, and insurance companies don’t publish the telematics data they produce or how they make decisions.
They are funny with how they evaluate certain things. If you have 3 accidents in a certain period, they’ll drop you regardless of fault because you’re unlucky. But they’ll also penalize you if brake heavily and avoid accidents.
I'm half serious. All else equal, if you drive less you'll have fewer problems that lead to insurance penalties.
I'm kind of on your side. Not being a dope decreases the crash rate by 90% or so per mile last I checked ("crashes caused by driver error"). Drive enough and you'll still become a statistic though.
But, for sure, my prior is that someone who frequently brakes hard on the road is someone who gets themselves into jams they shouldn't have been in in the first place. Maybe it's a matter of failing to anticipate what's coming up ahead. Maybe it's a matter of where, when, and how often they drive.
Both indicate risk that, arguably, should be priced appropriately. Same for health behaviors.
Dropping you is a thing that happens when the expected value of your insurance payouts exceed the expected value of the premiums collected. With granular data from telematics, an insurer [*] could notify you to change your game long before they end up concluding, "Well, none of the data we have on this person differentiates them from the last 3 guys to cost us a million plus in settlements and claims, so sayonara"
[*] thinking of TFA here I mean a suitably regulated insurer, not one that is somehow sneakily accessing telematics data without any transparency
But what happens when your daily commute takes you through a former construction where the computer thinks the speed limit is still 45?