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Pay-As-You-Drive Car Insurance
Sipos writes "The BBC has a story about pay-as-you-drive car insurance. There is not that much detail about how it would work but it seems that a black box in your car monitors your position using GPS. This information is then reported to a insurance company computer which then works out which roads you used and then bills you accordingly. The article seems to suggest that this will make insurance cheaper. Surely this will only happen for people who drive on dangerous roads less than average, after all there are no less accidents as a result? It also makes no mention of the potential for abuse of privacy this could involve. Are people really prepared to let insurance companies track their every move to save money on car insurance?"
So what happens when I make a wrong turn in LA and end up in watts or compton, does my insurance skyrocket?
A good thing about this...
Every one hates being charged for bad drivers (in the UK this is especially true, trust me, having the slowest car ever and having insurance that costs more than the car ever will).
It means that can basicly monitor your speed, they can then see the fast, and the slow drivers (and slow being dangerious on motorways (freeways?)).
This would mean that they would be able to see your REAL driving skill. Surely this is a good thing, but like always the public will throw it out due to "privicy". (Bit like the idea of IDcards? only people that complain are the criminals with something to hide).
Just my 2bits...
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
This puts the insurability of you and your vehicle in the hands of the insurance company and their computer systems.
At least under the current method, you can be pretty much assured that you and your vehicle are insured wherever you go and, for most purposes, for whatever happens.
Under a computer-based GPS method, what happens if the insurance company institutes no-insured zones - those areas of highest risk that if you choose to travel through them you do so at your own risk?
Or, what happens if you have an accident, and your black box communicaates with the others black box, and they both contact the insurance company and the police regardless of whether you wanted them to?
Or, what about when you submit your claim and the insurance company shows that there is no record on their computers of any report from your car or its GPS that you were even in that area, or involved in an accident - conveniently deleted, or otherwise?
Personally, I like the idea of just signing an insurance contract where I know the umbrella coverage will follow me no matter what. I like the freedom of submitting my claim or not. And I like the fact that they're obligated to pay once I do.
However, for some reason it seems highly unlikely that they would ever do it this way.
New Hampshire actually has no mandatory liability insurance law. Virginia has a "bond" option - you could deposit a certain amount of money with the state in lieu of insurance coverage.
That makes me think. I was in Kentucky last year and got a ticket for driving without proof of insurance (I'm from VA and plan on moving to NH in a few years). Now I have insurance, just didn't have proof on me at the time, so I'm all right, but what if I didn't have it but it was legal in my state for me not to? Would they still penalize me?
Also, when I move to NH, I'm going to make sure and get good uninsured motorist insurance. It's good not only for being hit by someone without insurance, but, as I found out a couple of years ago, for hit-and-run situations. Someone smacked into my rear bumper and then went right on going, and uninsured motorist covered it (minus my deductible).
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
A true pay as go or 'those who drive more pay more' concept would be to pay at the pump. The states should add .10 (or whatever) per gallon to go to Liability coverage for all that drive. No more uninsured motorists. No high fees for those that only drive 200 miles per month. It may sound a little socialist but you'd sure see those SUV sales give way to Hybrids.
I drive very little, however I drive on the most dangerous road in 100 miles of where I live every day. This road is so dangerous and yet if you go any less than 10 over the limit people honk at you and tailgait, that is until a drunk 18wheeler drives over them. So it's a horribly dangerous road with people doing in excess of 100 and weaving in and out it's stick.
You get used to it and I've never had an accident but my inssurance company would probably raise my rates if they knew where I was driving. However it's pretty much the only choice unless I want to drive an hour vs 20 minutes. I'm invincible right?
This is being done in London. Do a google search for "Congestion Charging" + London. While the congestion charge was successful in reducing the amount of traffic on the roads, this was only at the expense of moving about 10% of the car users away from London altogether rather than getting them out of their cars.
There was some talk about this in California a few years ago, they wanted to bake the car insurance into the price of gas, so that everyone would automatically be covered. This would have solved the problem with uninsured drivers, as well as promote energy efficient cars - drive a gas guzzler, and you pay more for insurance too. Personally, I thought it was a great idea, but of course the insurance industry lobby shot that idea down real fast.
A few accelerometers, and all the above (GPS, computer, etc) built into a bullet-proof tamper-proof plasma welded stainless steel, nitrogen pressurized case (so it can call home if it detects breech of the case), and you've created something that's pretty much tamper/hack resistant.
All depends on how much they want to spend, of course.
I went through this scenario years ago. My insurance got canceled (without my knowledge) 10 days before I got into a collision. Although I wasn't the cause of the collision, the court decided I was liable.
$6,700+ for the other vehicle
$6,200+ remaining to pay off on my now totaled car
I moved shortly afterward. The other insurance company sued me, served my previous address and some dimwit signed for it. Insurance company wins a default judgement because I never knew of the suit.
The state suspends my drivers license because I didn't pay a court judgement I knew nothing about, making me lose my job (currently I live in the middle of nowhere).
For 5 years, I lived leeching off my mother, with no money, no job and no ability to find a job. It wasn't until my web site started making money that I was able to pull myself out of this shit. My credit report still looks like shit but I'm working on that now.
Only on
whynot.net already came up with a very elegent and clever solution that gets around any sort of GPS, odometer, tracking measures.
Solution? Put it in the cost of gasoline.
Think about it. You need gas to drive the damn thing, you can't skirt around that issue. So the more you drive (and thus the more gas you use) the more you are paying for insurance. Now granted, this has a few flaws, namely that it is the lowest common denominator insurance. But perhaps that's a good thing. Additional coverage and plans above the standard could be purchased above and beyond what the baseline covers and would be strictly voluntary.
You can either read the book (which I found to be very interesting). Or just go to their website, here's the link for this topic
http://whynot.net/view_idea.php?id=499
enjoy
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
I disagree. Let's look at one example of prior art...Cell phones. I have a "standard" cell phone plan. It is X dollars a month, with several hundred minutes of free airtime per month. Let's give an arbitrary 400 minutes a month, for argument's sake. The plan is $50 per month.
My son wanted a particular phone with all the bells and whistles. So he gets one of these pay-as-you-go plans. This plan costs him $0.25 per minute for the first 10 minutes each day, and $0.15 after that. So to use up his $50 of airtime, he only has to use 326 minutes, or 5 hours of airtime total to spend $50 (assuming he uses it in the same day), and that is still less than the free airtime of the other plan.
Privacy issues notwithstanding (and I do not in any way minimize them, private industry should have absolutely as little personal information as humanly possible), they will most likely tend to lie about the total cost, like the retail industry tends to do. Car ads do not give the price of a car, but a monthly payment, which is an arbitrary number. Cell plans, you name it, retailers are trying to hide the fact that you are paying more and more and more.
I don't see insurance companies doing any differently.
--Storm
If you buy a second car (so as to have a big one when you need it and a small one when you don't) you cannot use your no claims bonus on both cars, even if you can't drive two cars at once! If you get a minibus, you cant use the no claims bonus from a van on the minibus, or vice versa, even if both are the same Ford Transit body.
You have to declare the value of the vehicle when you apply for a policy, but if you write off the vehicle, they value it half what you did. I could go on, but no need ... its pretty clear that these people are major league crooks. And they use the fact that insurance is compulsory to demand money with menaces. (Pay insurance or we send the boys in blue round to visit...)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Someday, insurance companies will implant GPS trackers in our heads at birth. Wouldn't that be funny if the tinfoil hat people turn out to be right after all?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
You can't accept only low-risk drivers as an insurer, because doing so breaks the risk-sharing concept that underlies the whole system
I call BS. I work in the life insurance industry. While it's true risk-sharing is a concept of insurance, it's not currently or ever will be the same blanket risk covering the whole industry. Everyone is underwritten based on their own personal risk to the insurance company and charged accordingly. If the insurance company does not offer a plan of coverage that meets your particular risk they can and do deny insurance to you. You're only sharing the risk with the people in your particular risk bracket. For example, a life insurance company may develop a plan for skinny non-smokers that have perfect cholesterol called the "Healthy Bastard" plan. Now, if this is the only plan of insurance the company offers this is perfectly legal, acceptable, and logical. Many companies may start off this way and then develop new plans for other types of risk. The company I work for started in the 50's with something called the "Fat Man's" policy. No lie, and it was marketed as such. The auto insurance industry would be doing the exact same thing with this based on where and how far you drive. It doesn't "break [any insurance] concept" in the least. Think about it this way: If you're a healthy person, do you want to pay the same premiums as someone that has had 2 bypasses with cholesterol of 500? Of course not, it's not fair to you. And if you buy life insurance you wouldn't. That would be breaking a concept, and might actually be illegal.
Yep, not only that but as we know (in the UK), the govt are pushing for country-wide road tolls (like we don't already pay fucking ridiculous amounts of tax to drive - tax when you buy the car, tax on petrol, then "value added tax" on the petrol+tax (hey, we now pay over £4.00 a gallon! Whoopee!), then road tax on top of that). So now, there's an incentive for people to black-box themselves, and won't that be convenient for the road toll idea? Oh, and as you mentioned, it'll also help the lazy fucking sods, erm I mean, hard working police officers to cut crime by sending us all nice little tickets the morning after we drift over 70mph on an empty motorway at night.
Thin end of the fucking wedge; the wedge being hammered up our asses by the grinning, pumpkin-headed Blair and his army of meddling control-freak cunt-monkeys.
And another thing, why is it I can be fined 200 quid and have 3 points added to my licence for eating an apple as I drive, but if I choose to drive along with a burning lump of paper and tobacco dangling out of my mouth, filling the car with smoke, that's ok? Answer me that?! Fucking interfering bollock-brained clock-punching misanthropes over in whitehall, that's fucking why.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
They had a blurb about this thing, and Progressive's plan to use it, on one of our local news radio stations. They were saying that the time you drive would be a major factor in your insurance premiums. I guess things like this are out of the question for anyone who works odd hours or is on call 24/7 for things that might require a drive to work.
"No, I can't come in and fix the server, it'll cost me a fortune on my car insurance."
German driver's licenses are notoriously hard to get, and are considered a rite of passage by many.
The school is expensive, and has a high failure rate, something like 40%. Generally your parents will pay for you to attend the school during summertime after your 18th birthday. Most Germans don't drive before they're 18 years old (unless they're on a tractor).
If you are driving drunk, and are pulled over by the Polizei (think 'pull-at-side'), you will lose your license FOR LIFE. You will never drive a car again. Thankfully the structure of most German towns relieve most of the residents from driving to and from the bars.
Germans are often considered hard-asses for their policies, but driving a vehicle capable of killing each time you get in and turn the key is serious business. I wouldn't mind if their policies were enacted here. I'm sure I would be alot happier with the reduction of idiots in SUV's not signaling all over the place or road raging on the news.