Lower Your Car Insurance Bill, at the Price of Some Privacy

That is the correct conclusion though. The insurance company could care less whether you're a bad driver—what they really care is how much of an accident risk are you.

Even a good driver frequently caught in LA traffic is a higher risk than a good driver elsewhere. Hence the device is reporting exactly what the company needs.

Presumably they can stop offering the discounts if they don't actually reduce accidents.

No, their job is to collect as much money as they can from the best drivers possible while avoiding having to pay anything at all. That's how health insurance works, that's how auto insurance works, that's the nature of insurance. "Avoid paying out unless legally required to, and then pay out as little as you can legally get away with." and the best way to do that is to have a customer base comprised of people who you're unlikely to have to pay out for (good drivers, healthy people)

The point is, insurance company has a strong financial incentive make the measure be as much an accurate proxy for driving safely as possible. If people start ignoring red lights to avoid braking points, insurance companies will try to get to that data (by offering you discounts for providing it). This is a good scheme; the best way to "outsmart" insurance is to drive safely. This can be a textbook example of http://xkcd.com/810/.

Thinking about it, I'm starting to believe that speeding tickets should be sent to insurance companies directly. I.e. keep driving like a moron, and soon you won't be able to afford to drive. (also, it would be helpful to replace point&click speeding cameras with average-speed computing ALPRs)

> You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it.

No, if people don't cause accidents then insurance company gets free money.

Landowners are going to be more willing to allow access if there is a way to get paid for it.

Then they might as well take a page off the Finnish playbook of late 1990's. (The "financially molested" chapter, to be precise.)

Finland has long had a punitive annual tax for vehicles that use diesel. After all, for a very long time, diesel was way cheaper than gas. In 1990's, the tax was ~5k FIM/year. Professional drivers had calculated that the break-even point was about 30000 km a year, and if you drove more than that, diesel was still cheaper.

Then, a company came up with a fully electric van. It ran on batteries only. It was cumbersome, and it was suited for in-city travels only. Nonetheless the Finnish legislators freaked out. A car that ran on something that didn't produce tax revenue? An abomination!

So they did what any (in)sensible legislators would do anywhere in the world: they mandated an extra tax to be levied on all-electric cars. Namely, 20x annual diesel tax. (A good van cost about 100k FIM at the time.)

The net effect was that for the privilege of owning an all-electric vehicle you would have needed to fork out roughly the price of the new car every single year as taxes. This particular law was struck off the books a few years later, when the onslaught of hybrids and electric cars had become apparent.

But it did show exactly how car owners were viewed, and how even a prospect of missed tax revenue was a cause for extreme measures.

This was the land of the free. I'd rather control my own steering wheel, acceleration and brakes, thank you very much.

Welcome to the future.

If it is a "good signal" then it's an indicator pretty much by definition. The thing is, it doesn't matter what is the poetic mark of "good driving"; what counts are accident statistics going down. One constant about all humans is that you can't ask them to think, or care, or be nice, and expect them to change behaviour. You need to make them change, by changing their habits and/or incentive structures around them, of which, in the case of cars, the insurance bill is a very important part. People behave in a deterministic way, especially when you look at big groups (such as drivers). You don't yell at a river and expect it to change it's way, you force it to do it.

> A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance

That would most certainly help, but I wouldn't call it the number one thing (the number one thing would be banning human drivers and replacing them with self-driving cars). I'd love to see driving licenses requiring training comparable to pilot licenses.