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Comment by rozap | Hacker News Reader

The 20k price tag in the article is pretty clickbait-y. It talks about families with 4 kids, and, if you have 4 16-20 year olds all driving, the chance of a 20k bill is not far fetched. If someone wanted to make a bet with me that their 4 kids wouldn't cause >$20k of damage over a year, and I get $20k if they don't, I'm not sure I'd take that bet.

We gathered a ton of quotes, and yea there are crazy prices at the end of the tail (see: https://www.coveragecat.com/cheapest-car-insurance/texas#quo...) but otherwise the distribution skews to the left. When we trained a simple model on that data (https://www.coveragecat.com/calculator/carrier-comparison) it was pretty obvious that age is the primary variable in premium. You can fiddle with the variables and see what changes, spoiler alert, age has the highest correlation with premium.

Anyone who has met a teenager in 2024 would not be surprised by this.

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What about male/female? Are young men more likely to cause damage than young women?

There was less of a correlation than you'd think, almost none. But we also operate in states where it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender so it makes sense that this plays out in the data. So, important to note that we are gathering premium prices, which may not accurately reflect risk for particular subgroups due to regulation. So whether or not teenage boys are riskier than teenage girls would require a different set of data.

Yes, young men are twice as likely to get in an accident than young women. On top of that young men are 7 times more likely to get in an accident that all men. Unsurprisingly the data does support higher insurance premiums for young drivers.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8134...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has excellent data available on this and similar questions, start with Table 62: https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm

Should ban males from driving if I'm reading this correctly.

"Driver Involvement Rates per 100,000 Licensed Drivers by Age Group, Sex, and Crash Severity", per the linked article.

The metric is useless in the first place, this is "per licensed drivers", not "per driver-miles".

It's a certainty that men drive more miles than women, primarily for job purposes. The NHTSA doesn't give enough data to determine this. My guess is that it's split almost exactly evenly per-mile, but who knows, without the data?

I would wager (speculate) that if you account for miles driven that men would still cost a little bit more. Men seem to have a more impulsive nature on average. These days, the trick to being safe on the road is defensive driving. Minimize the number of risks and give extra padding to all actions to account for the potential of driver mistakes, including the mistakes of others.

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