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I've avoided accidents by hard breaking twice in the last two years, once from deer bounding into the road, and once from a deaf old cat walking into the street.

I haven't been cited for anything in decades, and have never been in an at-fault accident. I drive the speed limit and have a dashcam. With the deer, I was actually 10 MPH under the limit.

So should my rates go up for these incidents where I successfully avoided hitting something? Insurers are unscrupulous and would use any excuse.

No, thanks. I'll share nothing.

Amen. It's their job to calculate risk. Not my job to be "transparent". The ratchet only goes in one direction.

I won't be an Amazon driver in my own car.

But they have the tech to collect the data and make extra cash by selling it and making you an Amazon driver in your own car. So if they can, they will. Unless there’s something to stop them. Which in the absence of their goodwill would be legislation.

Unfortunately legislation representing anything other than big money interests is difficult and rare to pass.

I did pest control for a while, and my truck was equipped with a monitoring device that would beep if it detected unsafe driving. The thing was inconsistent enough to be nearly indistinguishible from random. It sometimes nagged me while driving straight at normal speeds, or going over a pot hole, or just stopping like normal at a stop light. At other times, it wouldn't go off for what should have been obvious "offenses"—hard stops, last-second swerves to avoid road debris, etc.

All in all, I think it was useless for actually policing driving behavior, but I did get identified (read: randomly selected) as the safest driver in the branch one month and got a bonus, so I guess that was nice?

I drove a newer Subaru for a couple days and it had a "feature" like this with a camera pointed at the driver that would beep if it thought you weren't paying enough attention. Just like the pest control truck it was innacurate to the point of being totally useless and very annoying. The stupidest part was that it couldn't be disabled. I was a happy Subaru owner for many years but the driver camera and a few other modern owner-hostile features totally turned me off to the company.

It seems that in at least some models it can be disabled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1xLD_UKUEY

Did your rates go up? Or is this a straw man argument?

They didn't, since my insurer was unaware of these events.

The insurance company would argue that you drive in an area with wildlife crossings. That makes you a higher risk even if you managed to avoid this deer. You are more likely than average to encounter another one in the future and may not be as fortunate.

Location can be relevant. There is both a quarter mile drag strip by me and a circuit lap by me that both allow you to drive your own car on them.

Both styles of driving would be... Alarming from a telemetry perspective.

Afaik neither is covered by regular auto insurance anyways so it really shouldn't factor into rates. There's specific racing insurance, but it's quite pricey.

Not that I want them sharing location data, but pure acceleration/velocity data won't show areas like that.

I'm also not sure how well regionalized the data is. Though neither is good, there's a very big difference between going 15 over on the highway and going 15 over on back country roads with blind turns. Or between going 15 over on the highway vs in a shopping center parking lot.

Speeding is contextual.

It’s also difficult to determine if someone is speeding from data.

For example the road I live off of according to the speed limit the car thinks goes from 40 to 65 to 25 to 65 to 40 in about a 4 mile span. Spoiler it does not. It is 40 the whole way. But according to the car I am either going 25 under, 15 over, or exactly the right speed.

(And the 65 section in the middle? Blind corner. Idk where it’s getting its data but it is very very wrong)

Indeed, the usual garbage in garbage out issue.

Iirc, though, I think I read something about this and they were more interested in average speed (regardless of posted speed), and the rate/frequency of acceleration/deceleration (especially deceleration).

The idea being that speed increases accident severity, regardless of posted speeds. Rapid deceleration is indicative of reacting late to something you should have seen and responded to earlier (eg following too closely and having to slam the brakes, not seeing someone merging, not slowing down for a yellow light, etc).

Basically that a safe driver would have a fairly smooth acceleration/deceleration profile because they're aware of what's happening around them and pre-plan accordingly. If someone wants to merge in, give them room and then back up enough that you can brake slowly if something happens.

I still don't want to be tracked, but their metrics seemed sane at first pass.

Maybe if the only thing you're reacting to is other vehicles or the road. The number of times I have to slam on my brakes on that particular road because of animals running into the road is way too high. And no, not always deer. I've come around curves and just had someone's dog sitting in the middle of the road on multiple occasions because for some reason people think it's totally safe to just let their dogs roam.

That indicates real increased risk, though, compared to someone who drives in places where animals are less likely to be in the road.

Insurers aren't trying to determine how good of a driver you are (conditional probability of you being in a collision given conditions). They're trying to determine how likely it is that you're going to be involved in a collision that results in a claim (unconditional probability of you being in a collision). If you frequently drive through deer infested forests, it seems reasonable that your insurer is going to expect more claims compared to someone who doesn't do that.

It's similar to how driving late at night results in higher premiums. You can be the same good driver at night and during the day, but if you're frequently driving at 3 a.m., you're a higher risk.

As someone in the Northeast US: Many of our highways were designed 80+ years ago, and do not have appropriate acceleration/deceleration lanes.

The terrible drivers are often those with the most timid inputs, especially with regards to acceleration. It is perfectly normal here to need to merge into heavy, 60mph+ traffic from a dead stop, or to need to quickly match speed and identify an appropriate merge spot to not wind up stuck at the end of a ramp.

And it's not like they sit there for 15 minutes waiting for some exceptionally large gap to match their acceleration habits - that would be very annoying to other drivers, but theoretically "safe". They enter in the same length gap as someone that actually uses their gas pedal - but rely on oncoming traffic to hit their brakes/evade, as they fail to get up to speed quickly enough for the small gap they've entered in.

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Hard braking is something with fewer reasons it should happen regularly - but I'm still reminded of the usual adage about metrics. Do you really want people to be mentally reluctant to hit their brakes as hard because of the insurance hit? That seems like a recipe for increasing decision time and accidents.

Just like any other data collection and “tailored” to it service the only purpose is to justify a charge not to actually work. Targeted ads work better than traditional ones? Who knows but how can you say that your service is better if it has nothing innovative. Just like “feature-rich” devices is just a sales pitch.

>People should have some understanding of the agreements they make.

People do not engage in meetings of the minds on these types of things. Manufacturers/insurance companies enter into agreements (and leave stickers that are unlikely to be read) which is a clear violation (imo) of contract law.

It's one thing to be aware of agreements you make, it is another to navigate a corporate surveillance hellscape of on by default consentless surveillance a bunch of psychopayhic corporate types greenlit.

> it's clearly an attempt to price insurance against a person's actual driving habits.

I think it's a combination of two strategies.

1) searching for a reason to not pay a claim.

2) searching for a reason to increase your pricing, while hiding average driver behavior from you to increase their bargaining power

> It looks like the shared data at least tries to be anonymous

One of the main points of the article is that insurance companies are using the data to raise drivers' rates. How can they do that if the data is anonymous?

The car company can share the details based on the chassis VIN number rather than driver details.

Then the insurance company grabs the vehicle registration number when you ask for a quote and looks up the VIN on their side based on a security database to prevent resale of stolen cars or similar.

Anonymous data becomes identifiable data...

> The car company can share the details based on the chassis VIN number rather than driver details.

That's hardly anonymized data! It's more obscured.

Ah, anonymous was the wrong word. I meant instead that the shared data tries to restrict itself to information that doesn't obviously fall under a right to privacy. For example, trip times are shared, but locations are not.

The flow of traffic on the highways where I live is consistently 15-20 mph above the posted limit. I wish everyone would slow down, but that doesn't change the fact that the safest way to merge is to accelerate hard and match their speed. The last thing I need is a financial incentive to be oblivious to my surroundings.

The only speeding ticket I’ve gotten in the past 20 years was for speeding on the on-ramp to get up to the speed of the highway traffic. Holiday weekend, so it was stop, ticket, and release. Repeat. No warnings given.