Before I moved to Minnesota (from Europe)I was very skeptical about this. But my first trip to BWCA and North Shore, changed all that. Crystal clear lakes, beautiful forests and prairies changed me for ever. If you are into bicycling, Minnesota has one of the most robust biking trail systems.
Minnesota seems to be almost Scandinavian in some aspects and I do find it absolutely beautiful.
I cannot recommend enough Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano as a great thought provoking material on the UBI topic. It made me rethink its potential implications.
Theoretically it could be, but most fleets gather much more data about their vehicles than an average consumer. For example all repairs, parts and labor costs, maintenance, mileage, engine hours and much much more. In addition, majority now leverage telematics which greatly improves the resolution and depth of this data. This data is quite necessary to make our model work. From high level perspective though most consumers sell their vehicles way before that optimal time frame.
We leverage machine learning in the asset replacement modeling space. Basically there is an optimum time to sell your vehicle and purchase a new one based on our model. Our company works with large fleet organizations and provides analytics suite for vehicle replacement, mechanic staffing, benchmarking, telematics and other aspects of fleet management.
This might also be specific to the Metromile hardware (OBDII interpreter). I just checked on my vehicle with STN OBDII interpreter reversing is showing non zero value (I increased the reporting frequency to 1Hz).
Great article! The gear ratio data would be useful to potentially derive more granular driver behavior model (acceleration) that is less mass dependent than accelerometer sensor. However, I do wonder if there is a way to determine the usage of the reverse gear itself. This data is currently not universally available via OBDII. The reverse gear data would be very useful since large amount of accidents are backing accidents.
Really neat idea! In the office building use case - what happens when you approach the door? Is the door unlocked automatically or is the user prompted for some action? Basically what happens if your phone is stolen?
They are still used in the utility fleet space. However, they did not perform that well (range, reliability, high cost etc). It really was a natural fit for a Utility industry because of their access to the cheap electric power.
In the fleet space Smith Electric worked on this since 2005 and it seems like their trucks are in the perpetual prototype mode. The battery energy density vs cost still seem to be the major factor. Interestingly enough even regular gasoline engines are pretty reare and diesel dominates the field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Electric_Vehicles