Google Wants to Sell You Auto Insurance
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
It looks like just more of their credit card comparison thing: https://www.google.com/compare/creditcard
"We are compensated by some of these issuers. Card features, performance and user interest are used to sort these cards."
) I don't know that the current adsense price for query term on credit cards is
It looks like the commission is all they're after too, since it's not possible to sort by things like 'Sign Up Bonus', which would be useful to consumers.
If Google starts aggregating their data to sell insurance I can see people moving away from some of their services.
Imagine if your health insurance provider had access to your emails, search history and web queries before deciding if they wanted to provide you with insurance or not......
If they just aggregate quotes from brokers to show to people then I can't see a problem with it. The people who loose out on the adwords revenue, however, might disagree:)
Sure, Google could eventually decide to become an insurer itself, but that strikes me as quite a leap from offering vertical search for auto insurance policies, and one they have shown no interest in taking.
I'm fine with this. With the Affordable Care Act, insurers aren't able to decline you due to preexisting conditions. And previously, they would be able to cancel your policy for medical issues you hid from them. Its already illegal for insurers to discriminate against you based on your genetic profile.
What's the concern?
There's a lot more to discriminate against when you have total information awareness of a person. Most of it surprisingly legal. As a google search engine user, chrome user, android user, and web dev - I imagine google's picture of me is and highly invasive and creepily accurate. This is bothersome privacy violation and a major competitive advantage against other potential insurers.
Is it both simultaneously the Wrong Thing for an insurance company to use all available information to make an informed decision, and the Right Thing for a person to put on airs to appear less statistically risky than they actually are?
Bluntly, this quacks like an argument for deception for personal gain (via lower premiums).
Granted we can talk about insurance companies being shady, but even a completely honest one would, say, rightly raise your rates after an accident.
The fundamental problem is that the more information is brought to bear on the idea of "risk", the less shared it is. This is especially stark in health insurance: do you have family history of serious diseases? Do you carry a particular gene? Do you engage in risky behavior like smoking, adventure sports, promiscuous sex? It can price some people out of the insurance market altogether, and make it less of a "shared" pool. This is precisely the problem the ACA is trying (with debatable success) to tackle.
Auto insurance is arguably more directly tied to statistically risky behavior rather than factors beyond your control (like genetics), but the potential is still there. We as a society are not ready for total information awareness on the part of our insurer. If Google offered insurance directly, could they deny a claim based on an email you sent before or after an accident? Raise your rates if you search for fast cars online? What's the difference between actually risky behaviors, and behaviors that are merely correlated with higher risk? The insurance markets are opaque enough without adding black box algorithms working on nearly limitless data inputs.
Not so. ACA allows insurers to price their plans based on only three factors:
- Age
- Smoker/Nonsmoker
- A geographic "community rating", based only on the broad area in which you live
That's it. If they sell a plan to anyone who matches along those three axes, they have to sell it to everyone who matches.
And I'm not sure this info is harmless anyhow. It's a giant piece of legislation with probable loopholes. Plus it's not a static piece of law/regulation. And all of these companies share data.
Actually fine with that. My genome is public with the Personal Genome Project, associated with my full legal name.
Not to say that would be their goal if they started an insurance company, but once technology catches up and perfects what insurance companies do, the only differentiator at that point is monthly premiums.
The most successful participants in the car insurance leads marketplace (and any leads marketplace TBH) do things that are inherently consumer-unfriendly to achieve as high margins as they do. Will Google do those things? No.
So will Google see as much to gain from cutting out these players as they would from allowing these players to pay for AdWords? Eh, we’ll see.
Self-driving cars are far, far off, leaving billions of retail dollars on the table between now and then.
This will likely be good for consumers and only hurt middlemen who sell leads like Bankrate.com
5-7 years is far, far off?
It could be beneficial to the user if Google helps to use it's ranking and review algorithm to help choose the best items for complicated products with tons of variables. They have the algorithm brains, why not apply it to other markets?
Would I rather choose from the 3 attorneys who paid the most to be at the top of the paid search ads, or have Google show me 10 based on their ranking?
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/rode-500-miles-self-driving-car...
http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-on-the-future-of-dr...
http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/22/6828161/california-permits...
The idea of you driving your car is essentially dead. Vehicle miles driven per year is already stagnent due to boomers retiring and millennials not having the same inclination for cars as generations past have.
Passenger cars sit idle 95% of the time. Its not going to take many autonomous vehicles to replace the current fleet with existing utilization so low.
Most people want/have to arrive at work in a relatively short timeframe (7-9 or thereabouts)
Combining that with a 30 minute commute, the average autonomous car will be able to drive 2-3 people to and from work each day. It also will have to drive 1.5-2.5 times the distance per passenger (into town, back to pick up the second passenger, into town again for two passengers, another round trip for the third)
I think that will be a net win, but it will be less than that 95% idle figure hints at.
That net win will decrease traffic jams tremendously, though. It is anybody's guess what that will mean. On the one hand, ride times could go down, and automated cars could be able to make another round trip during peak hours.
On the other hand, people could move farther out into the suburbs, offsetting that. That is a serious possibility, as you could start working/shaving/brushing your teeth/reading/playing on your Xbox during your commute. If that happens, chances are that those who can afford it will want to own their own self-driving car, so that they can stock it with things they may want to use during their commute.
I think the latter is a serious possibility. Because of that, I am not sure we will see a decrease in the number of cars.
On the face of it, it sounds like you are steering the conversation towards what you'd rather talk about, which is fine. Just be forthright about it. There are bigger threats to the profitability of car insurance lead gen in the short and long term.
Here Google's insurance product will go far beyond Google Flights in terms of anti-trust issues. Moreover, it would be like Google Flights if Google: 1.) directly sold airline tickets on behalf of airlines (instead of linking you to where you can buy tickets); and 2.) if Google owned its own airline.
The other issue, which many have touched on, down the road is the potential conflict of interest, if simultaneously a driver owns a Google self-driving car and Google is the insurer. That said health insurance companies are acquiring hospitals and physician owned practices in record numbers, and while I see an inherit conflict of interest there is apparently no regulations in place prohibiting this practice. Do consumers really want the manufacturer of a self-driving car to be the same company who might be determining liability on an insurance claim?
Comparison sites are pretty big in the UK [2,3,4], more so than I have noticed since I've been here in the US. They are generally give the same sort of price; and all take the same sort of inputs. But I personally always found Google's lack of clutter, in-your-face branding and simplicity to make it my favorite.
Though it's not really advertised, and almost everybody I have mentioned it to has never heard of it.
[1] http://google.co.uk/compare
In fact, I would expect them to offer own insurance directly in the near future, for several reasons. First, insurance is one of the big practical hurdles facing their self-driving cars – in an accident, who is at fault? By offering their own product they can potentially circumvent this hurdle. Second, if they begin to offer homeowners insurance, they can tie their rates directly to Nest data, which should allow them to offer more competitive rates and more accurate pricing, similar to what Progressive has done with Snapshot [0]. And lastly, this obviously gives Google access to more, and potentially better, personal data.
Dear insurance companies. Don't flatter yourselves. Google is already light years ahead of you.
- There's a huge difference between quote aggregation / marketing / sales, and the actual underwriting / pricing. The prior is far less regulated than the latter.
- This has nothing to do with self-driving cars.