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TomTom Satnavs To Set Insurance Prices
nk497 writes "TomTom has signed a deal with an insurance firm that will see its satnavs used to monitor drivers. Fair Pay Insurance, part of Motaquote, will use monitoring systems built into the TomTom PRO 3100 to watch for sharp braking and badly managed turns, rewarding 'good' drivers with lower premiums and warning less skilled motorists when they aren't driving as they should. 'We've dispensed with generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."
For all those of us who keep saying that this sort of technology will be abused, and all the folks that keep saying it won't - I guess it is our turn to say "I told you so."
My prediction, sales of this SatNav will plummet if people know that they will be monitored constantly.
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And not to mention _speeding_! The Nav knows what's the speed limit at your location an instead of beeping when you overdo it, it will raise your premium each time, perhaps even rat you out to the cops.
All privacy questions aside, are sat nav devices reliable enough for this purpose?
I purchased a TomTom device new within the last year. On complex intersections - and sometimes just on parallel roads - it can "snap" the car back and forth between pieces of roadway on the display. Sometimes it seems to think you're starting a turn you're not actually making and then eventually snaps the car back onto the correct road later. When exiting a parking lot it sometimes isn't certain about which direction you're really moving in until you've drove a little. It has also tried to direct me down a variety of local roads that don't actually exist. I imagine at least some of these issues are somewhat common among sat navs, and this is only part of my anecdotal experience with one device.
The point is, when these things become a significant input into insurance rates, who can actually inspect them and certify them for such purposes?
From police statistics it is proven that people that speed have a higher risk of accidents. It's a simple as that.
Even if you pay better attention to the road, the higher speed means less reaction time, longer braking distance, and generally higher speed the moment you actually hit something making damage worse. Also if you're doing say 100 km/h on a road with an 80 km/h limit, other traffic may easily misjudge your speed, and try to make a turn in front of you when there is actually not enough time to do so. Or they simply see you coming around the corner too late, and with your too high speed you do not have enough time to stop to prevent an accident.
Generalising: lower speed makes roads safer. Taken to the extreme to make the point: at walking speed not much can happen, and if something happens the damage is minimal.
Is what will happen next, because faking good driver behaveor will give you lower insurance ratings.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I'm calling bullshit on your police stats, if you even care to provide them. The complete removal of speed limits has no effect on accident rates.
Similar insurance scheme was already tested in UK 7 years ago by Aviva. It was called PayAsYouDrive where GPS device would trace your route and your insurance will be paid based on your route and time of the day. This was designed for young drivers which insurance premiums are high. If they would drive during the daytime insurance would be lower compared to night time when most accident happen for young drivers.
There was a talk that government could use the same principle for charging us for using roads. In this case it would be compulsory for every vehicle in UK to have GPS. Different charge would be for different roads and different times. This would be used to stop people using main roads during rush hour and help road overcrowding. Obviously, the charge per mile of road during rush hours would be much more expensive and people would plan their trip after rush hour. Also they could use the same data for issuing speeding tickets too.
Would you like your country to start similar schemes or this is too much control?
The big problem motor insurers have always had is properly assigning risk - it's pretty obvious an 18yo male is more dangerous than a middle aged woman, but that's a statistic, not a cause. If you could find out what made the 18yo dangerous, you could charge for that instead and have fairer premiums for the rest of us.
[FUCK BETA]
Whether or not frequent sharp braking correlates to bad driving is irrelevant. All that matters is whether or not it correlates to a higher accident rate.
If the driver is bad, they'll brake sharply often. But even if the driver is good, if they are regularly surrounded by bad drivers, they'll probably brake sharply often. And guess what? In both cases they're more likely to be involved in an accident.
You're forgetting the most important part. Insurance companies don't have to tell you how much of a risk you are calculated to be. So as long as they can convince some customers to pay more, the companies can afford to let some customers pay less.
Insurance isn't about charging people exactly how much they will have to pay out. It's about spreading loss costs over a wide populace. Risk calculation is important to make sure you're collecting enough premiums to cover everyone and to avoid grossly-overcharging low-risk customers (since they would eventually wise up and leave).
Besides, insurance companies don't make money off the premiums they collect. They invest the premiums and turn profits on the returns. It's the actuaries' jobs to ensure insurance companies don't take on so many high-risk customers that they end up paying out more than they are making on their investments.
But the more narrowly the insurance company focuses on the exact risk I have, the closer they get to offering no value, because I might as well carry the risk myself.
On many "insurance" items, I would tend to agree, but in the case of medical insurance and auto insurance, often the amount you would have had to pay out is much higher because the insurance company adjudicates it down. In reality, what we should be doing is to tell the insurance company to give us a good rate because we will pay for all the damage and all they have to do is send their lawyers to fight for us.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Perfectly predictable auto insurance would mean it would cost really bad drivers too much to be able to afford to drive -- and that'd be a good thing, eliminating that risk from the road entirely.
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Jon, I've got a great deal of respect for your /. persona. You seem always reasonable even when I don't agree with you, and you've swayed me often. But here I think you've missed the general thrust. We're on a very subtle topic. The issue isn't "Insurance good/bad" or something that gross. It's about whether the pursuit of use of intelligence to understand the risks of a particular customer of insurance is a good thing, and the limits of that pursuit. That's a cloudy issue you seldom weigh in on, but I'm interested in your input if you will engage the question.
Help stamp out iliturcy.