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US Insurer Hikes Tesla Premiums Due To 'Higher-Than-Average' Claim Rates (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "National insurer AAA is raising its prices for Tesla's Model S and Model X, citing higher-than-average claim rates and repair costs for the two cars," reports The Verge. "According to a report from Automotive News, AAA said it could raise its premiums by as much as 30 percent for the vehicles. Other large insurers including State Farm and Geico told the publication they couldn't say whether or not they would also increase prices, but noted that data about claim frequency is always used to calculate insurance premiums." Musk claims that AAA doesn't know what they are doing, but fails to be specific as to what is incorrect about their data or its usage. [The company says the AAA has made its decision based on faulty information from the Highway Loss Data Institute.]
I've been following Tesla's stock price of late.
It's at an all-time high ($347) going into the shareholders meeting, and most of the news is filled with innuendo intended to cause panic selling.
Examples: "Tesla: Could confusion kill model 3?", "Is Tesla Inc Stock Worth All the Controversy?", "Tesla Cars: Easy To Total, Expensive To Repair", and so on.
It's impossible to research stocks by reading the financial news nowadays. Lots of manipulation-driven reporting.
it's good sense
that's a good first post lol
Maybe with all the safety tech insurers started too low with prices. And now find out the tech still doesn't replace stupidity and are raising to a normal price?
their smugish farts. Plus, they don't pay road tax, and that's not right.
US Insurer Hikes Tesla Premiums Due To Pressure From GM, Chrysler and Ford.
Create a high priced performance car and duh, people drive fast with it.
Have short production runs and, post-collision:
1) No used parts to pick, no clips to cut off of prior wrecks, etc
2) OEM parts are expensive!
3) Batteries aren't going to hold up well in a crash, not as well as an engine block at least.
So yeah, of course they cost a lot to repair. I expect that the crash guides for a Tesla aren't as complete as the ones for major automakers, either, so there probably is a lot of time spent on the phone calling Tesla to find the whatzit that connects part B35 with B37. This kind of thing is very common with truck body repairs, but not so common with cars nowadays. It definitely makes estimating and repairing harder. As with trucks, some custom fabrication may be required (?) just a guess. I question whether they have a SKU for every single part in their car.
Then again, I expect a lot of people buying a Tesla probably don't anticipate all of this because they don't know the business.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
FTFA
In this case, the Model S and Model X are categorized as “large luxury vehicles” — a class that also includes the BMW 5 series, Mercedes-Benz E class, Audi A6, and Volvo XC70. But, Tesla says, it’s “false and misleading” to compare the Model S and X to the likes of a Volvo station wagon
This is true. It is absolutely false and misleading to call a Model S or X a "luxury vehicle" or to compare them to cars that don't have dreadful panel gaps, poor build quality, shit interiors made out of the cheapest materials they can find, and a consistent beta approach to safety features like the Teslas.
Over the last decade I have become convinced that nearly all (a vast majority) of Americans don't understand anything about insurance, don't understand what insurance is and how it works as a business.
Lets say I start an insurance company and attract customers by offering car insurance that would have a high deductible and low monthly payments. Say 15,000USD deductible and maybe 50USD/month premium payments, so it makes no sense to approach me until your loss reaches 15,000USD but if it goes over that limit you would be covered. I am not an actuary but maybe this product would make sense and maybe there would be clients for it. Would anybody expect to be able to use this insurance product to buy gas at the gas station? To get oil chances through insurance? Tire rotation and alignment (and replacement)?
I think people would realize that insurance is not for those purposes, it is for cases where you destroy your car, maybe destroy somebody else's car, maybe you face a legal challenge and hospital bills and such. People would buy this insurance product as a lottery ticket, where winning would mean actually pulling a short straw.
So now try to extend this understanding to health insurance, why is it so difficult for people to take that mental leap?
If an insurance company offers health insurance that basically works the same way, maybe it covers 30-50 specific tough conditions, the premiums are low but the deductible is high, most people wouldn't need the payouts but the money would be there for those who pull that short straw.
Now imagine the government says: your high deductible, low monthly premium insurance is also going to cover something that is used daily by half of the population (say birth control pills that are needed regularly), what you are doing telling half of the insurance clients: this is no longer a lottery that has similar odds for all of the participants, this is a subsidy from one half of the participants to another half. If you are a man you are going to be paying for women's birth control under this plan.
How does this make any sense for the men to buy this product? It doesn't, it's a waste of money, a large portion of the bill for the half of the people in the insurance pool will go towards simply buying monthly birth control for another half of the pool participants.
So instead of maybe a 80USD/month high deductible, low premium plan you are now billed 110USD/month, where 30 bucks is simply a cost and can never be used to increase the pool, it's a stupid cost on you so that some other specific person can get their free birth control.
Yet a huge portion of Americans don't understand that this makes 0 sense not only for the insurance companies but for at least half of the insurance clients, after all it is the insurance clients who pay insurance premiums that are used to make payouts.
Except that now rather than having a payout based on some very low odds of very few people in the pool getting sick you are forced to pay something that is guaranteed to be used by half of the people in the pool (and not by you).
Lets take a look at the concept of 'pre-existing condition' from point of view of car insurance. You wreck your car and then you approach an insurer asking to cover your losses and you are offering a month worth of premium payments.... If the insurer cannot deny your demand then there is 0 reason to be a client of an insurance company until you wreck your car.
So the insurer has to get the money from *somewhere* but not from the actual insurance pool, there is no insurance pool.
Now take a look at what USA government did under Obama: it took an actual insurance industry where people actually got their insurance payments out of the insurance pool based on monthly premiums paid by the willing participants and said that you no longer have to participate in the pool prior to getting sick and prior to needing insurance money...
A vast majority of the Americans are looking at it, straight at it and somehow they be
You can't handle the truth.
Techno-Jebus forsaken by AAA?!
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
in electric cars, that I can't believe this wasn't foreseen. My roommate and three of my friends have lost batteries in minor crashes, and they're damn expensive to replace. It sucks when, for example, you have a Prius and get involved with a minor rear-end crash that shorts out the battery and causes a fire.
Oh, wait. That's the other "insurance" market.
Just ran a quote for a new Tesla Model S 70 on Geico and it comes out to $270/mo, ouch. My few years old Subaru is only $75/mo with full coverage. Even a new Audi S6 would run me a far more reasonable $130/mo.
If you ever had AAA insurance or had ever been to a AAA office, you'd know Elon Musk is right!
On a drive from Texas to California, two weeks ago, I saw a truck, painted with Tesla logos and Arizona plates, driving west on I40, in New Mexico.
I thought, shit, must suck to have a Tesla in NM that can't even be fixed without shipping it to the next state over... but since the truck pulling it was a Tesla truck (Ford or Chevy pick-up, I think) I figured it was a warranty repair at least. There was no visible damage on the car.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
What is the first thing most shops do when working on a vehicle...body work or...(mechanical?) ?
Disconnect the battery.
Disconnecting the Tesla Batteries and making them safe is not, I expect, the same as disconnecting a DieHard battery.
Lack of technicians qualified to work on the Tesla is likely driving up the repair costs.
Hell, First Responders are going through special training to learn how to deal with a Telsa wreck and the batteries. Your average body shop guy is starting with much less knowledge.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Big Gasoline pulled their sweaty tits out and started screaming "Lobby lobby lobby lobby" while crying crocodile tears over how they can't pay for their second homes and pressured AAA into jacking up the prices for competition.