Cuvva – Car Insurance by the Hour | Hacker News Reader

Cuvva – Car Insurance by the Hour

cuvva.co

46 pointswrboyce54 comments

Hey. I built Cuvva. Exciting to see it posted on HN, causing a lot of traffic to our site!

Cuvva is currently UK-only. Here if you drive a friend's car, you're normally only covered for damage to third parties. With Cuvva, it's a full comprehensive policy.

This is not typically relevant for the US. However we are interested in the potential for other products which might work in the US.

I think coverage by the mile or the hour for primary drivers would be of interest to a lot of car owners in US urban areas. An existing player, Metro Mile, markets their product as pay-per-mile, but the majority of the cost actually comes from a fixed per-month fee. Of course that might be because what I want makes no actuarial sense...

Most US states require that a car be continuously insured as a condition of its registration, so I think a fixed per-month fee is inevitable.

Each US state also regulates insurance completely differently, so trying to break into "the US market" with an insurance company is really trying to break into 50 different legal areas. Very similar to the other article on the HN frontpage today about US "FinTech" / money transmittal companies.

> ...require that a car be continuously insured...

This doesn't seem like an issue, maybe I'm missing something. You just model it as continuous insurance based off mileage rather than insurance that's only active when driving. Metromile et al are conventional insurers except that they use actual rather than estimated mileage in their pricing.

I think the real reason that there's a monthly fee is that actuarial risk isn't linear with mileage.

Everything makes actuarial sense if they charge you enough...

Hey, this looks really fantastic, it solves a real problem for UK drivers and I think you'll be fantastically successful. However, I couldn't find any information about who's behind the site, and I wonder about the mechanism through which the insurance is provided, how is it backed?

We are authorized & regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority as an intermediary. We have built a partnership with a European underwriter to sell policies on their behalf.

To make Cuvva possible, we've had to build every part of the system from scratch. This is mostly in Node JS, with some RoR thrown in. We also have some open source code on our Github - https://github.com/cuvva

>> "However we are interested in the potential for other products which might work in the US."

I'm pretty sure there is a small but enthusiastic market in the US for sharing expensive sports cars, either through formal timesharing arrangements or by going in with a few friends. Formal timesharing clubs exist but the insurance is badly organized and stupidly expensive.

It would be great if I could go in on a Ferrari with 9 of my buddies and only pay for insurance when I'm driving it every tenth day.

"Here if you drive a friend's car, you're normally only covered for damage to third parties."

Even that assumes you have an insurance policy for your own car. If you don't, and you are not listed as a driver on your friend's policy, you would have no third party insurance coverage and therefore would be driving illegally.

Not sure if this makes sense in the US, but I actually wanted something like this when I was selling a car that we no longer used. As a substitute we had to buy a full day of insurance from our primary carrier when we were showing the car and letting potential buyers test drive it (we always met a good distance from our home). I know the rate varies per car and driver but for us it cost about $28 per day and it didn't feel convenient to get (website or calling customer service).

Congratulations! Awesome product, and I like your landing page and blurb a lot.

And I love the FAQs :)

https://support.cuvva.co/hc/en-gb/articles/202311812-Can-I-u...

Interesting idea. Do you think you'll have any issues with people trying to wait until they get into an accident to sign up for a Cuvva policy then filing a claim as if the accident happened after the policy went into effect?

Before you buy the policy, you snap a quick photo of the vehicle. This helps prevent fraudulent claims.

This is only really useful in the UK not the US.

In most states, comprehensive and collision coverage protects your vehicle regardless of who's driving it.

https://www.esurance.com/info/car/myth-car-insurance-follows...

Note: There are several edge cases, but it's generally not an issue especially if the person borrowing the car has their own insurance for their own car.

What stops someone who is cheap to insure (like a retired person) taking out the insurance policy, then someone who is very expensive to insure (like someone with drink driving convictions) actually using the car all the time?

Insurance (in NY and OH, at least, I can't speak for other states/countries) asks who the primary driver is. If they can demonstrate you lied about that, I'd imagine they could retroactively drop you.

Car insurance in the US is quite odd when you think about it. It's mandatory and if you don't live in a city so is a car so defacto you need to buy it. On top of that that doesn't actually cover your car! At the minimum level only cars you damage are covered so if you get hit by someone without insurance they are covered, you are not. Huge amounts of regulatory capture are involved and in my state (PA) it's almost impossible for someone to start their own car insurance company. I see plenty of room for disruption there.

"In America you can buy a car for hundred dollars, but it costs a thousand to insure it" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMHdGBz2AqI

What's odd about that? It would be weird if driving were a solitary activity, but when you drive you place significant risk on other people. You can easily use a car to cause damage that greatly exceeds what an average person can pay, so to ensure that you don't leave others in the lurch, they require you to carry liability insurance. They don't care one bit if you damage your own car beyond your ability to cover it, because that's your own problem.

There's nothing weird about a $100 car costing $1000 to insure, because the insurance isn't about the $100 car, it's about the $20,000 (or $100,000) car you might crash into.

I just always felt a more equitable distribution of funds (as PA is a no fault state) is to have the people who have $100,000 cars to buy the insurance as they are the ones with the disposable income to afford it. The guy making 8 dollars an hour at Walmart with his 900 dollar beater isn't getting much value from that set up.

What exactly would you propose should be done to place the burden on the guy with the $100,000 car? If you don't require that the guy with the beater buy insurance, all you're doing is setting him up to be bankrupted of whatever little he does have if he's at fault in an accident. And what if he crashes into another poor slob making $8 an hour at the Wal-Mart who managed to take out a loan to buy a slightly nicer car? Or what if he cripples that person for life, and they require constant medical care for decades? You're setting people up to be screwed a lot more than they need to be.

(Note that the no-fault status of PA doesn't really matter here, because it just means that if both drivers have no-fault insurance, they can't sue the other driver for minor injuries. Property damage and serious injuries are still fair game.)

If you do require insurance, but have the cost of the insurance scale neatly with the cost of the car it covers, then you'll either have a really low limit on liability which brings back all the problems above, or you'll need to subsidize the insurance somehow.

Overall, it seems unfair to say that a person is allowed to put other people at significant risk for property damage and injury without paying for what that risk actually costs. If you don't like that this is more burdensome to the poor than to the rich, I think that more general schemes to alleviate poverty, like government assistance, are the way to go, because car insurance is only one of many, many ways that life is disproportionately expensive when you're poor.

four issues:

1:the guy making 8 bucks an hour can only afford minimum coverage, the insurance provides no coverage his car.

2:if we require people get insurance anytime they may potentially put others at risk then why isn't it required when you purchase a firearm? or alcohol? or rat poison? or a pet dog? or a baseball bat? The list goes on forever.

3: The cost of providing the car insurance is far below the cost of providing it when you exclude a few bad actors. (to date for me I've paid in over 20 grand, 0 return) Why is the rest of society providing a subsidy to people who can't drive? it isn't an accident when you change lanes every 30 seconds, tailgate, and drive aggressively. Why is society providing a subsidy for people with expensive cars as well? I've never had a 'accident' and yet I'm expected to pay a company for a product that gives me little value until I die, and while someone who has a 'accident' pays slightly more monthly than me I feel I cover far to much of the burden for them.

4:I drive a datsun in vintage racing events, my skill is far above the average driver. I can tailgate at 90 miles an hour with drum breaks. Why aren't my rates lower? beacuse the free market isn't allowed to do it's work on insurance companies due to a regulatory structure that was put in by insurance companies. Why does my credit score count by my skill does not? regulatory capture.

Mandatory liability insurance has actually been proposed for firearms. I imagine the reason it's not actually law is because rabid NRA types see any such requirement as an unconstitutional infringement of their 2nd Amendment rights.

As for the rest, the risk is far lower. How many people are injured in baseball bat accidents each year? How much property damage is caused by dogs? How often does alcohol result in damage to a third party beyond the culprit's ability to pay, outside of alcohol-related car accidents?

Insurance costs vary enormously with your demonstrated risk, which includes your driving record. If you're a safe driver, and demonstrate it with a low accident and traffic citation rate, you pay much less than somebody who crashes and gets pulled over a lot.

Your statement that you can safely tailgate at 90MPH with drum brakes makes me think that you're actually one of those unsafe drivers who merely thinks he's safe because he's gotten lucky so far. No amount of skill is going to save you from human reaction times, or the guy in front of you having superior brakes. If you are in fact skilled, then your skill does count, to the extent that you can demonstrate it in a concrete manner.

Not a single accident or moving violation ever, I pay 120 a month for minimum coverage because I have shitty credit. What I do on a racetrack under controlled conditions is entirely different than what I do on the road. I keep my stopping distance between me and the car in front of me.

Your credit score counts because credit score is a good predictor of accident risk. Apparently nobody really understands why, but that's how it is.

Insurance is all about trying to predict the future, which is tough. The tools are imperfect. But they're decent, and the data supports using credit score as a factor.

2: You only need insurance to drive on public roads otherwise it's optional.

3: 20k is < 1 bad accident.

4: Drum breaks don't mean much human physical reaction speed is to slow to safely tailgate period.

Nothing, really, but if that person gets into an accident, the insurance will probably be canceled immediately.

When I was younger, my dad had my car on his insurance policy, but didn't tell me that it was cheaper because he said I lived at his address and only drove in the (rural) area he lived. When I had a minor collision in a parking lot, we both found ourselves without insurance.

That seems rather surprising they would drop you after one accident. I mean - if they were mad that you lied where you drove - how did they know that it wasn't a one time thing like visiting a friend? I would find it rather silly if you had to call your insurance company ahead and ask for their permission to drive outside of the area you said you would be driving in.

I imagine the troublesome bit was when the dad lied about where the kid lived. Residency can usually be proven or disproven, and where you live can affect your rates significantly.

I had to have proof of insurance to get plates. Not sure how this works around that...

:D https://support.cuvva.co/hc/en-gb/articles/201826632-Do-I-ne...

Huh?

Most car insurance policies already cover lending a car to a friend. Am I missing something here?

Not always in the UK, and if they do it's only liability and not comprehensive/collision.

Seems pretty unique to the UK (maybe Europe?). In North America it is standard to pretty much every insurance policy.

The difference, in essence, is that in the US, car insurance covers the vehicle, in the UK insurance covers the driver.

Could be useful.

But... I'm wondering why this is tech news. Is now every service, but done on a computer, suddenly tech news?

(If so, then I predict this will become a boring place, because there are a gazillion services out there that can be computerized.)

It's a startup, they built the stack from scratch which is probably a fair bit more complicated under the hood than it looks, it's a niche which is (probably) currently unserved and it's in a decidedly unglamorous industry.

Not to mention also a service which London-based developers are actually pretty likely to consider using on occasion.

It has a lot more reason to be on here than many other popular links.

Come on; just because it's not tech news, it doesn't belong here?

Some of the best links I've seen on HN have either little to do with tech or show tech implemented in an interesting way.

The argument could be made that if HN was strictly code, frameworks, dev, etc. it would be a more boring place.

Is now every service, but done on a computer, suddenly tech news?

If you look at the "tech" news media nowadays, basically yes. GroupOn launching a food delivery service or a fashion site launching an app is apparently "tech" news now.

It's not like this is new. Companies like Uber, Lyft, and AirBnB have been front-page favorites for ages.

UK only. This would never fly in the US, where insurance is fairly heavily regulated and on a state-by-state basis.

Europe in general has far more flexibility around insurance products and pricing.

Does anyone know a good alternative for rental cars? I figure Cuvva isn't ideal in those situations b/c you need something that lasts multiple days, not just hours.

Can I view the terms of the policy before purchasing?

Yes - they're available in the app before you pay.

This is amazing. Bring it to the US.

Great product can't wait to use it

Wow, this is a great idea. The fact that you can't drive a friend's car is a crazy aspect of US auto insurance.

Is this a new company? Would it apply to Zipcar / car rentals as well as owned cars? Does anyone know of a US equivalent?

> The fact that you can't drive a friend's car is a crazy aspect of US auto insurance.

That's not true at all. I have State Farm (IL and FL), and as long as my family member, friend, whatever has my permission to drive the vehicle, they're covered under my policy.

Indeed. It's apparently a little-known fact that this even applies to rental cars, even though the rental car companies do their best to not tell you this.

The wikipedia page even mentions this: "Although frequently not explicitly stated, US car rental companies are required by respective state law to provide minimal liability coverage, except in California, where the driver is solely responsible."

Of course, minimal liability is only good if you have no assets whatsoever...

In addition to that, most personal car insurance policies cover rentals, and every credit card I've ever seen provides insurance for cars rented with that credit card. The average renter is covered by three different policies (the rental company's policy, their personal auto policy, and their credit card, although they don't perfectly overlap and may not cover everything you'd want) before the rental company tries to get them to buy a fourth.

Please do your own research before relying on any of this, of course! Especially since individual insurance and credit cards may vary. But personally I've not seen any reason to purchase the insurance they offer.

Credit cards generally only cover the cost of the rental car, I've not seen one that provides liability coverage. So if you don't have a vehicle of your own, which would provide such coverage, the little-known rental car policy is what saves you from having to fork over extra cash for liability coverage.

> It's apparently a little-known fact that this even applies to rental cars, even though the rental car companies do their best to not tell you this.

True, but only up to ~30 days. To continue to be covered longer than that, you need a separate policy, or you need to return and re-rent a rental car every 30 days or so.

> Of course, minimal liability is only good if you have no assets whatsoever...

Having nothing to take is the oldest version of "judgement proof".

If you rent cars for > 30 days, you're probably better off buying one...

Depends on your situation. Sometimes you want the flexibility of a rental care rental scenario. Perhaps you're not ready to commit to a purchase or a 3+ year lease. You'll pay more for the rental, but once you're above a 30 day rental period, you can get a discount.

If I have a rental car, I can return it anywhere in the country whenever I want if its from a major brand, with the only transaction necessary being a charge on my credit card.

If you've read other comments here you'll find that is actually typically not the case in the US. You can drive a friend's car and be insured because the insurance is tied to the car regardless of who's driving it; granted it's not black and white.

https://www.esurance.com/info/car/myth-car-insurance-follows... http://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2014/06/05/249762...

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