It feels to me more and more like you need to be rich to afford living without bartering away your personal information.
I'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth."
And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.
Frankly, it's exhausting to try keep your life private. The sheer number of different ways your privacy can be violated via modern cars, phones, computers, social media, surveillance/facial recognition, IoT devices (including 'smart' TVs), etc. is quite staggering.
Definitely seems like a losing battle. My retirement plan is a remote cabin in the woods.
It may appear that way, but even privacy-for-profit schemes are illusory. The devices still send the data, it is still collated. Eventually this will effect the elites personally and negatively, someone will slip up with their parallel construction, and then we'll see real change in the US. Sadly, not before then.
No, you have to pay those anyway. But it will lower the total spend and so you'll have money available to pay them. You don't have to be rich or anything. I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage.
So if someone were to buy a $10k car and instead chose a $5k car, it'll be as if insurance were cut to $700/year for the next 10 years!
About $868 of that is for "Comprehensive" and "Collision" coverage, if it helps. It's possible it's just me, though. I've crashed my car once, and been hit on my motorcycle. In general, given that, I would assume it's more because of that than in general since I'm obviously a high risk driver. When I set my address from San Jose to San Francisco (I used to store the car at my friend's) it went up $200/yr so that's the SF premium for Geico at least.
About $1100 (comprehensive). I’ve never made a claim and have no speeding points, so I guess I get a good rate; but the OP rate still seemed pretty high for the model.
The majority of cost risk in insurance is that of third parties, not the value of your own vehicle.
People often say "the insurance costs more than my car is worth!" as if it's scandalous. But what it's insuring you against, primarily, is the risk of paying millions of $CURRENCY in medical fees to the third party. Your car's value is peanuts in comparison.
I have always maxed out my liability insurance (what my insurance company would have to pay others in case it was my fault), and I have a spotless driving record, and it has always been $40 to $50 per month for 5k miles per year.
Comprehensive and collision, what your insurance company pays you regardless of who is at fault, is what cases insurance to be expensive in my experience.
Car insurance is partly based on the distances you travel with the car, and the area. The US is bigger than the UK, so on average, that component of the insurance price should be higher in the US.
It's true, and it's not great, but I think the flip side of this is that as I get older I find myself increasingly paying for the anti-social behavior of others.
There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,000 TV for a single super bowl party and then return it.
I actually desperately want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts" - all solutions I can think of violate my privacy but we'll find out what's worse...
Is respect for social contracts really all that's necessary? I don't see it as adversarial, so much as I see it as "normal _and_..." for many vendors.
For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?
Because they really don't like the TV for some reason/ Or an expensive purchase that should last for years falls apart after 9 months? Leaches who have made many companies cut back on generous return policies with "my ten year old coat is worn out, replace it" are basically turds who make life worse for other people.
ADDED: Furthermore, research has has shown (e.g late pickups at daycare) that when you add a fee to an anti-social behavior it can actually make the behavior more likely because it's now a transactional activity.
I've often wondered how well it would work if you went "right well, if you pick them up 15 minutes late today, you've got to pick them up 15 minutes early tomorrow", or "... drop them off 15 minutes late tomorrow".
It still turns transactional. Maybe the parent has a job that is usually flexible but they have to put out fires every now and then, they'd happily sign up for this deal. Meanwhile it solves none of the daycare's problems and only adds new ones.
Your suggestion proves my point! With social contracts I don't need to pay this fee, but by getting rid of them I do; I'd be getting charged for other people's anti-social behavior!
Stepping back, social contracts are forms of trust at the societal level. Any economist or business person will tell you that being able trust others dramatically lowers transactional and operational costs. I want to be trusted so that I can take advantage of those lower costs.
The problem with that is that it assumes both that the people giving the score are good, unbiased actors who agree with your assessment of what is appropriate, and that bad actors will be unable to game the system.
Even in a well-designed system, both of those will be suspect.
> want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts"
Cultural background + class would be the strongest indicator of this behavior. It describes the norms and expectations to which you are accustomed. Unfortunately it's illegal to discriminate based on most signifiers of this trait.
The alternative to shared trust is costly and intrusive enforcement mechanisms.
How about just asking "Have you ever returned any item to a store for any reason except that it is faulty?"
If they say no, and you don't find their name on a few big stores lists of frequent item-returners, then you trust them. Everyone else, you consider shady and don't offer good deals to.
Remember lying to gain a benefit is wire fraud - so anyone who falsely answers this question has committed a crime - and a store is totally allowed to treat a customer they suspect has a committed a crime differently.
> and a store is totally allowed to treat a customer they suspect has a committed a crime differently.
That's not true either. There are vastly different standards of enforcement.
This issue is a lot bigger than returning items at the store. Every social system we have was built with assumptions about how people would behave. For example: the Seniors who are easily scammable are those who grew up around people who didn't scam each other.
I think for the most part, you can't really monetize your own data. You can just trade it away for "free" services.
Unless I've missed something...
Sidebar: The government is buying all your data from data brokers. We should all collectively submit FOIA requests to get copies of it, to create an undue burden on them doing so. Maybe they'll scale it back.
I’ve started seeing ads for companies that try to get your data removed from sites and data broker.[1] I don’t know how effective they are but we’ve reached an age where there is a clear market for privacy. That feels very dystopian.
I hate how true this is! A case in point is also apps like Ibotta or Fetch which reward you based on your shopping data. Sell your shopping patterns, earn money! Rich can protect their privacy.
Even if you were to pay the fee or drive a gas car, or you pay for the 'better' insurance to not be tracked, your movements are still recorded everywhere with ALPR cameras.
But at the same time, I feel like this creates opportunities for enterprising individuals. How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?
Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.
> How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost?
A lot of the monitors for older cars (that don't have 'tracking' built in) just plug into the cars OBD2 port and the CAN bus data - and is extremely hackable by anyone thats used an Arduino. It would be much harder to interfere if the monitor is wired in or using its own GPS to monitor speed and distance travelled though.
I think the people who say “the public doesn’t care about privacy” are either completely ignoring the fact that most people will give it up if it means the product is cheaper (because, financial survival) or they are deliberately pushing the agenda.
My auto insurance provider (in the US) has never even offered such a tracking program to me (and I know my current rates are pretty reasonable/in line with other companies). Maybe it's because of my history with the provider (I'm 50 and they've been covering me since I was 16)?
Recently were shopping insurance providers for our brick and mortar business that has a few delivery vehicles, and MANY of the commercial insurers are requiring that their apps be used to monitor employee driving behavior. I hadn't shopped for insurance in quite awhile and was shocked at how prevalent this requirement seemed to be.
On the one hand, I hate the intrusiveness, that's a huge minus.
On the other hand, commercial drivers are subject to all kinds of perverse business incentives--too many hours driving, poorly maintained fleets, etc.--and if the insurance companies can stamp those out, that's a plus.
Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas. So they have a "deal" for EV drivers: pay an exorbitant registration fee (hundreds more than other vehicles) or install an OBD device in your car and carry a surveillance app to be charged for how much your vehicle is driven [0]. The measurement route requires 2 separate accounts with 3rd parties, one of which has your payment information on file.
Given that states can't even get voting right [1], this is not the future I wanted. (Plus, we should be incentivizing EV purchases at this stage, not punishing them.)
(Heck, they put my marriage license on a blockchain for some dumb reason. I didn't even want it on a blockchain!)
I'd be interested in seeing the numbers, and how they slice it up (whether they're completely treating federal roads separately or using it for the total, etc), as at $0.364 per gallon in Utah, it seems like it results in a large amount to put towards funding something, so it would be interesting to track where it's going.
That sounds like it's equating Utah's taxing to total U.S. road funding, to which I say both "duh" about the result and "that can't be all that's going on in the report if it's about Utah, so there must be some disconnect in what we're talking about."
The context we were in is Utah gas taxes and how much it affects road funding that Utah does. Were you referring to something different? I would assume that Utah gas taxes, if they are intended to fund road work, would go towards state roads in Utah (but that's just an assumption, which is why I was interested in the source).
That isn't the stated purpose of most gas taxes, though. (The stated purpose is funding roads programs.) Intuitively, EVs still need to use and pay for road use. It's probably better for legislatures to explicitly pass carbon taxes (or similar things like cap-and-trade programs).
No, gas taxes were always seen as part of conservation measures as well, especially since the 1970s. I see this claim all the time that gas taxes are purely a use tax, and that hasn’t been true for about half a century or longer, and just about everyone knows this, so I consider that kind of claim to be dishonest.
And yes, it’s less efficient than a carbon tax, but fundamentally you cannot deny the net effect of getting rid of the conservation aspect of gas taxes BEFORE passing a compensating carbon tax would have the effect of basically eliminating a carbon tax.
In other words, let’s talk about adding compensatory EV fees AFTER passing a carbon tax. Sounds fair and certainly better for climate.
My gas car registration fees in Seattle are $160/year total. Of that either $80 or $120 is flat by weight and the remainder scales by value. If your fees are $500/year, your vehicle is extremely heavy, expensive, or both.
It's kind of funny, because from my perspective I'm an old man who learned himself a trade decades ago and worked things right to the point that I don't have to drive around a shit-box anymore, but to you I'm a privileged asshole. Which one is the truth?
Nobody called you an asshole, that's you projecting what you assume people think of you. They suggested that your being owning a luxury vehicle means you can afford and should contribute slightly more to society than somebody who doesn't, which is a lot more reasonable than calling you an asshole who needs to be punished.
You aren't taxed more on larger, more expensive vehicles because the powers that be (or the poster you were responding to) think you're a privileged asshole. You're taxed more because heavier vehicles cause more road wear, and because Washington has no income tax (which are typically progressive in nature), so the rest of their tax system needs to lean more progressive to make up for that. Thus, more expensive vehicles get taxed more.
Did you benefit from paying no state income taxes for decades? Well, now you're paying a little back into the system. I'd think you'd be happy to do that, after having paid no state income taxes for so long. I'd also think you were well aware of the registration taxes when you purchased the vehicle? If so, given these two facts, why are you complaining about it?
You can still be an asshole if you want of course, but being an asshole has nothing to do with your registration taxes.
The effect of weight on Washington state vehicle registration cost is small. It is probably only contributing less than $40 to his registration cost.
What is pushing his cost way up by hundreds of dollars is the regional transit excise tax that some Washington counties have. That tax is based on the value of the vehicle, which is the MSRP discounted by a depreciation factor. The tax is 1.1% of depreciated value.
One thing to look into. If you're married, give the vehicle to your spouse, and note the amount of the gift in a notarized letter. That then becomes the value of the vehicle for tax purposes. We live in a state that essentially has an import tax on vehicles. It's unconstitutional, but you'd have to take that to court and that would take years. We did this with our vehicles when we moved to the state. The person at the vehicle registration place was unhappy, but they had to accept it - an extra benefit.
You're not an asshole to drive around a ride you've earned.
Statists will always find some rationale for taxing more that sounds perfectly reasonable and good, when its obvious the motivation is envy.
WA state simply does not recognize valuations below blue book. My dad sold me my first car for below (blue book) market value and it was just assessed as if it were sold at blue book value.
It's just part of the cost of ownership. Not classy to balk about a few hundred bucks more to register your car when you've paid tens of thousands for it, and are also paying more to insure it, and to maintain it, and in depreciation. Presumably you anticipated all that in the purchase as part of the TCO.
Not to mention, the tradition of wealthier persons contributing more to society stretches back in Western civ to the Roman period at least. Better IMO to take some pride in your attainment of some small aspect of patrician status rather than resentment at the responsibilities that come with it.
Wow. I'm on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle, over in Kitsap county, and I'm paying just under $70/year to register my car (a 2006 Honda CR-V).
I knew there were extra costs in King county (and Pierce and Snohomish counties) due to a regional transit excise tax but had no idea it could raise costs that much.
It looks like it is 1.1% of MSRP x depreciation, where depreciation comes from this table [1]. Ouch!
OP's car is heavier and 10x more expensive than yours. Don't read too much into their figure. The King County RTA fee floors at $40, I think, which is what you would pay with a 2006 era vehicle. There's also a $40 Transportation Benefit District fee in the city. I suspect you would pay approximately what I do ($160/year) in the city, or less ($120/year) outside of city limits.
My non-plugin hybrid is charged the EV registration fee in WA. They say it's to support adding more EV chargers, but I can't even use them. It's not terrible, but an additional $75/yr is stupid IMHO...this is more expensive that my gas guzzling truck (which is higher than a car because of it's weight).
Well it kinda makes sense - eventually you will have to use EV chargers because ICE cars will get phased out entirely(maybe not in 10 but in 30 years for sure) so we're all paying forward for the infrastructure that we're all going to need.
If your EV is worth ~2.1x the Civic, that would track (~$210 in value-scaled registration + $130 EV tax). Given how much EVs cost, that ratio wouldn’t be terribly surprising.
> Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas
That's because they kind of are. Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes.
EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.
This is going to require a significant shift about how states and cities think about their road maintenance budgets and the taxes required to sustain them. A lot of states are going to, predictably, get this wrong.
I figure it’s semi trucks that do almost all the road damage. We could just tax the trucks, but that would just get passed along in higher prices for everything. So might as well pay for road repair out of the general fund than have special taxes.
A diesel truck that has three times the pressure on the road and easily ten to fifteen times the total weight, while getting about 1/3rd the gas mileage of the average US passenger vehicle.
Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car for what amounts to shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars?
I still think this is BS, considering trucks are causing 2500 times [0] more damage than gas cars and are certainly not bringing tax income proportionally to this. Why should EV then?
This seems like a weird argument to make. We either pay collectively more for taxes for the roads we use, or collectively we pay WAY more for food, materials, and basically everything else if we tax trucks proportionally. Large trucks are carrying stuff, and the cost of that stuff is going to be directly associated with the cost of logistics.
Yes, some states haven't figured out what that looks like, but I really don't think the right answer is to dump all that cost on truckers. I would rather pay more for my car's operational tax, increased EV tax or existing gas tax on ICE, than disproportionately affect the price of groceries for someone living paycheck to paycheck.
Doesn’t this assume that the cost will not effect behavior? If trucking logistics becomes more expensive to properly account for the externalities, wouldn’t companies be more motivated to find more cost efficient methods. I’m sure there are plenty of items that could be shipped by rail, but aren’t because trucking is currently cheaper for the individual company, while the cost in road damage, pollution, greenhouse gasses, increased traffic, etc. are paid by everyone else.
As for disproportionately affecting the poor, sales taxes (like on groceries and other goods) and excise taxes (like on gas) are exactly the regressive taxation systems that burden the very people living paycheck to paycheck. Shifting the tax burden from skimming off the top for the people spending all their income on daily necessities, towards companies paying the full cost of their chosen operations, would give the poor more buying power and allow market forces to find and utilize the most effective and efficient means to provide services instead of the cheapest means that are only cheap because they are subsidized by everyone else.
I think you misunderstood my argument. I'm not saying vehicles should be taxed proportionally to road usage, on this I don't have an opinion. I'm saying either you do this for all vehicles or none. You cannot say "EV vehicles pay proportionally but trucks not" without clearly being biased against EV (whatever the reasons).
> Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car
This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim. By states, car makers, the federal government, and third party analysis firms. It's incredibly uncontroversial. It's even got a name, and associated math: it's called the Fourth Power Law https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
> shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars
Gas taxes make up a relatively small part of the cost of gas. If you run the numbers, you'll find that it's maybe closer to around 3.5-4x for most passenger EVs. At scale, that becomes a problem, but at the individual level, it's still a relatively small amount - and certainly less than the cost of gas.
> This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim.
Your source claims no such thing. EVs may be heavier than equivalent ICE cars, but an electric Smart (the brand) is going to do less damage than a loaded Ford F150.
If you meant SUVs or pick-ups by trucks yeah, insignificant and a bad proxy for weight anyway. No point in taxing EVs when what you need to tax is weight.
The fourth power law is uncontroversial, the fact that on average (or just take per model) EVs wear more than your "average ICE car" (especially as SUVs are the average now) is not
Add a supplemental registration tax to EVs and hybrids to make up the cost of consuming less fuel. Of course, taxes never go away, so enjoy this new tax as we enter an electric future.
"Fuel duty is currently levied at a flat rate of 52.95p per litre for both petrol and diesel, while VAT at 20% is then charged on both the product price and the duty."
I figured it was implied since we were talking about the US, but context has a way of collapsing in threaded conversations. Thanks for bringing it back around.
I travel a lot, and see semis from most states, and commercial pickup haulers from all states. They say NJ, NY, KY, and UT, are especially penurious about additional registration and licensing.
No, externalities should be priced in where practical otherwise the market will be more inefficient, which in this case means the public footing an unnecessarily high road repair bill.
Terrible source, yes, but it happens to be at least roughly on point in this instance; if my dim recall of the relevant engineering is correct, road damage grows quadratically to the pressure exerted on the road by tires, and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles.
2255kg is the maximum load, and 1700kg is not at all an ordinary car weight; hatchbacks are often closer to 650 and my sedan is barely over 1000.
You could argue that those aren’t luxury vehicles, but downmarket EVs need to be heavy too, because batteries do not match the energy density of petrol.
Myself, I’m replacing nearly every car trip with biking where feasible (young kids make that challenging, admittedly, but the car doesn’t see a ton of use these days).
Under a ton?! Do you mean under 1000 kg? How do you figure?
The Dacia Sandero, one of the smallest cars I can think of here in France, that's also supposed to be cheap so doesn't have a lot of... anything, has a curb weight of 1,025–1,204 kg (2,260–2,654 lb) according to wikipedia [0].
The previous generation Renault Clio, which is a small city car, weighed around 1000 kg, too (980 at the lowest). [1]. Wikipedia doesn't have data for the current generation, which is somewhat bigger physically.
Our country’s Sandero is actually a bit big for the B segment. The Polo, Corsa and Fiesta are all a bit smaller and lighter, at least the previous generation. You’re right about the current generation, though. Not that many on the streets, but they generally are a bit over a ton.
At least the popular A segment cars like the Aygo, Up or 500 still tend to be under a ton.
Sadly even heavier cars are becoming more popular, so in the future a ton will be far from the median.
They are clearly heavier which causes more wear and tear. The estimation that they are nearly twice as heavy is inaccurate. Do you agree with these statements?
Does a sharp pointy thing poke a hole in a surface more easily or less easily than a big flat thing?
The "list of academic and government citations" is all just finger-in-the-air unscientific "we think it works like this because it fits our primary school child view of the world".
IMO gas and diesel vehicles should pay a higher tax for all the air pollution they create that the public has to clean up or deal with (in terms of adverse health effects, health care, etc).
Now, about those "paying their fair share of 25% of the cost of the roads" gas taxes: In Utah, the gas tax was $0.245 in 1997. Today it's $0.34, when adjusting for inflation alone it should be $0.46, so drivers have received what amounts to a 25% tax reduction in the last ~30 years. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in thirty years. So there's another tax break drivers have gotten.
That's just inflation. Average fuel economy has risen from 18mpg to over 22, which means per mile drivers are paying on average 20% less of "their fair share" due to mileage increases alone.
So it's a bit weird that suddenly people in gas cars are getting high and mighty about EV owners "not paying their fair share."
> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher rate. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.
The Ford F150, which is the most popular "car" sold in America, is between 4,069 and 5,697 pounds.
A Tesla Model 3 is 3,862 to 4,048 lbs. A Chevy Bolt is ~3600lb.
Yet..who gets taxed more by Utah? Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?
Also, where were all these concerns about increased road wear on budgets when American purchasing trends tilted toward larger and heavier SUVs and pickups? Average vehicle weight has risen 10%+ since 1990.
EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?
Bish, please.
Utah didn't want to raise the gas tax (it's a political third rail) so they relied on their extremely stupid electorate to buy up the myth that drivers in gas cars are "paying their fair share" and instituted a punitive tax on EVs which Dumb Yokel Bob fully supports because it's sticking it to those "libruhls in them fuckin' priuses an shit", believing everything he hears on conservative radio about EVs (for example, that they 'cost' more CO2 to make than a regular car. Which is true....until around 14,000 miles into ownership when the EV breaks even compared to a gas car.)
Yes, in the near term it absolutely would because we need to decarbonize transport. Or put another way, fuel taxes are an impromptu way of taxing the huge externalities of ICE vehicles in terms of carbon emissions and exhaust, and unless those taxes are increased, adding special EV-only fees and taxes (which many states already have at much higher rates than the state fuel tax) will actually do the opposite, effectively negating this taxation of externalities that already exists.
Would it be better to focus on the larger problem, rather than distract with a symbolic but ultimately meaningless and punitive "solution"? Yes, it would be better to ignore it for now and focus on adjusting the gas tax to properly reflect how fuel efficiency increases allow for less and less gas to be bought for heavier and heavier weight. To skip over everything noted in the OP comment that hasn't been done to have ICE drivers "pay their fair share" only to then to focus on the tiny minority of EV drivers rings pretty hollow.
>if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.
What if you have an older and less fuel efficient car? Why should new car buyers get a tax break vs older car owners when it is vehicle weight that is doing the road damage? Would it be better to ignore the problem?
This is why I advocate for a gross vehicle weight rating and vehicle miles traveled tax, regardless of energy source (although gas should still be taxed on its own). GWVR and VMT pretty much measure how much impact a car has on road maintenance, so it makes sense to charge heavier vehicles and vehicles that drive more, more.
I think it even makes sense for semis, the cost may go up for goods slightly as they pass that cost onto customers, but we'd be paying less in federal taxes for roads, less in property taxes for roads, and if you drive less (good for health, environment, etc) you'll likely be saving money. It also more accurately taxes EVs with ICEs based on road wear and tear instead of all these haphazard ideas.
> This is why I advocate for a gross vehicle weight rating and vehicle miles traveled tax
The problem is, while that works out on highways and other federally owned road, the distribution on state or county/city level is almost impossible. Say you have a trucking company doing regional service and one doing interstate transport - both their fleets will have similar driven miles because economically, companies want their many-hundred-thousand-dollar assets to be on the road as long as traffic safety laws allow. Now, assuming they both pay the same mile tax to the state... the state makes an insane profit on the interstate trucking company given that only a low percentage of the miles driven were happening on that state's roads, with the clear majority being on federal highways and other states' roads.
The truck that the parent poster refers to is not a 16-wheeler or panel truck used for commercial purposes, but someone's impeccably clean F-150 that hasn't hauled anything in 2+ years
Instead of that, they could mandate meters on the charging stations that add a surcharge to the electricity. That would be less invasive, and be analogous to how they collect usage fees by taxing gas.
There is a general legal principle that the state must use the least intrusive means to accomplish a goal. A lawsuit might force a change.
In my country you pay an anual fee for having a vehicle, like property tax but for vehicles. The larger the vehicle, more you pay, discount if you have an EV (no emissions). It's not that difficult.
Power and fuel are still taxed on usage basis. There is no real difference except that road maintenance is also funded by a basic fee. It's a two way system.
Which is basically what we do in NZ. We have Road User Charges (RUC) that you buy in advance. We put road tax on petrol, so petrol vehicles don't pay RUCs. But no road tax on diesel, because tractors and other machinery that doesn't go on public roads. So we just extend the same RUC system for diesel vehicles to EVs.
(But not yet because we were incentivising EV up take. RUCs for EVs will be required in 2024 I believe.)
EV drivers more than make this up by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers. Gas drivers seem to always conveniently forget those real societal costs when they're trying to talk about "fairness".
That still doesn't pay for roads. I love EVs and think their use should be more broadly encouraged, but the gas tax made for a very simple use tax and it's not obvious how one would replace it to do the same thing for EVs.
Simply saying EVs are so much better for the environment that they don't need to pay for roads at all seems a little short sighted.
>it's not obvious how one would replace it to do the same thing for EVs.
Taxing tires would work. Also, mileage is already recorded during vehicle inspections. That could be used to calculate tax but would be more open to fraud.
I don't want tires to be taxed, it would incentivize people to use tires more than they would do today, and that is bad news for traffic safety. Not only for themselves but for other people on the road too.
> by not having nearly as many externalities (pollution) as gas drivers
Depend where you get your electricity from. Also most of car pollution comes from tires and brake dust, which EV create more of given their weight and torque
The article you linked is specifically talking about particle emissions, not anything gaseous. If it included the negative externalities of all emissions (CO2, NOx's too), it might paint a different picture.
How much fuel-tax revenue do we think Utah is recovering from EV drivers?
I would guess that we are talking about very small numbers -- certainly under 5% of drivers.[1] Whatever principle Utah is asserting to "recover" fuel taxes from EV drivers isn't making much of a difference.
At the same time, the Utah policy is clearly discouraging EV adoption.
> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight.
We are talking about a small presence in the automobile market. If everyone were to drive a Tesla, then yes we would have more heavy passenger cars on the road.
For example, a 2023 Honda Civic weighs between 1,429 kg and 1,517 kg. One best-selling SUV, the Toyota RAV4, weighs 1755 kg.
But the most popular type of vehicle in the US (and in Utah) by sales is the pick-up truck. The top three pick-up trucks each weigh about 2500 kg.
If we are going to start quibbling about weight this way, we will need to recognise that drivers of vehicles should be taxed according to their obesity to maintain our roadways.
If it's not linear then the difference between a 4000 lbs car vs a 3000 lbs one is nothing compared to the damage done by a loaded 80 000 lbs truck.
What I notice, on european highways: it's always the rightmost lane that is deformed. The leftmost lane is never deformed. The aquaplanning risks due to water present in two bands on the lane is always on the rightmost lane. Always, always, always.
Why? Because the rightmost lane is the one trucks do use.
Where I live atm, in the middle of nowhere, there are two things deforming the road: heavy vehicles (I'm not talking about 4000 lbs cars here but tractors / trucks) and... Tree roots. Most of the patches made on the road are due to tree roots lifting the road's concrete.
It's amazing how nosey Utah is. They want to scan your DL to find out who's buying alcohol, they're demanding id based age verification for watching porn online, and apparently they want to enforce monitoring on your phone+car.
The state itself is at least half Mormon. When you get out of Salt Lake and Ogden, it's a lot more. But there's a lot of scenery and skiing and outdoors things to do. There's a lot of things right with the state. (Start with cities that are safer than expected for their size. Mormons have something to do with that, too.)
But in terms of how the state is run... yeah, you're not wrong.
Taxes on EV are just starting. A lot of taxes come from gas in the first place and once the market for EV is ripe the goverment will unleash the tax whip on the EV category before you know it. It is inevitable.
Taxes on EVs will be at a maximum just before around 20% if the market is EV, as they’re seen as a way to soak/punish people who are weird (ie early adopters). Once people actually see how disproportionate the fees are and if significant numbers of voters have to pay them, support will drop.
WA state is also ridiculous about this: I can understand a road usage tax to replace the gas tax we're not paying, but they also charge an additional fee on top of that for a state fund to add more EV charging stations, even though logically it should be ICE drivers who are paying this to help incentivize the transition! People who already bought EVs clearly aren't concerned with the number of charging stations which exist now.
It strikes me just how detached and ignorant your perspective is, largely not because it bothers me that people like you exist, but how it seems practically impossible for such detached and decadent perspectives to proliferate without collapse being imminent.
So you, member of the spoiled rotten, pilfering upper strata, parasitizing the larger society while at the same time degenerating it, want the regular people you are living off in decadence, to also pay not just current rates, but even higher rates so you can see your utopian, egotist, narcissistic vision come to fruition?
You want people who can’t afford the luxury of EVs and who are already being destroyed and pillaged by the likes of your strata, to on top of that abuse, also pay more?
Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?
It’s unfortunate that humans seem to have made essentially zero progress in preventing what has been captured in numerous stories. Possibly the most relevant one being that Hubris is struck down by Nemesis; the origins of those two words themselves, something most people do not even realize.
If you ever have the chance, there is an excellent statue of Hubris in the Louvre. It is a bit hidden and tucked away, which makes it all the more prescient. Note when it was created.
>Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?
I think billionaires are buying private planes, not EVs. The people buying EVs for their daily transportation several orders of magnitude closer to being homeless than they are to being billionaires.
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines. You can't do that here, regardless of how right your views are or you feel they are.
Normally I'd just post a warning but your account has a pattern of breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It’s not just Utah. Oregon has been talking for the better part of a decade about the best way to have EV owners help pay for road maintenance. Both the things you mention are things they have tried in large scale tests. I imagine most states are trying to figure out the same thing and coming up with solutions similar to Utah (or, more likely, Utah got the ideas from other states).
It's shocking to me that it requires an OBD device and a surveillance app. Can't they just check your odometer when you go to update your registration?
They do that in AU / VIC for the EV road use tax, you have to upload a photo. I don't see the problem, just make it illegal to lie and fine the ones you catch.
Eventually of course road taxes need to be extracted from something other than fuel. How soon that switch is made just depends on how long you want gas car drivers to subsidize the roads for EV drivers. I think most would agree that the time to stop that subsidizing is "not yet".
Why you would need to track how much a vehicle is driven I don't understand though. Unless you want to measure how far it's driven within some geographical area (such as a state) and can't merely charge for the total distance driven, but that seems unnecessarily complex, given that a car will only be registered in one region and it should balance out across state borders.
So at the anual/biannual mandatory inspections (which make a lot more sense to add if they aren't already mandatory, than any tracking!) just check the distance driven and charge road tax accordingly. I pay around $800/year for road tax for my car. And $8/gallon for the fuel. But I do get great roads for it.
There's a gulf between "fuel tax drops 50% leading to budget shortfalls" and "drops 99% to insignificant revenue" and states still need to pay for roads during that window.
I don't agree with the language you used but EV drivers are not paying the taxes that were levied to maintain roads. And obviously the EV's use the roads.
Yes. 5-7 years ago I used to work for a vehicle telemetry SaaS company. It was explained to me that most of the Brazil market was for govt mandated tracking.
A few years ago our insurance would give us a discount if we added a small monitoring device to the car for 2 months. We agreed and at the end of the time we mailed it back to them. Now we have switched companies and the new one doesn’t have a discreet device, but instead want me to install an app that has 24 hour access to my location on my phone. That was too much for me. So instead a bought the cheapest android phone I could find, and installed the app on that and left it in the car.
Did it give you any significant discount? A few people I know that did something similar ended up saving $2 per year. If you bought a phone I'm guessing your discount was much higher.
This is one of the least bad invasions of privacy I've seen. It shifts the burden of insurance premiums more towards those likely to cause accidents, and incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel. There are actual benefits to responsible people, and to society at large, which is not something you frequently see with invasion of privacy.
The data doesn't need to be used now, today, for this purpose. What happens when an insurance company foists a new privacy policy on you, the insured, saying that it'll be using back data that it's collected for new purposes? To my knowledge, there are no laws on the books in the US that prevent that kind of behavior (ex-post-facto only applies to the legal system), and I'd imagine few would change insurance providers because of a privacy policy change.
> incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel.
Think very carefully about whether you want to be behind a person who is scrupulously obeying every single traffic law. Especially if you get 3 of them abreast.
That seems like... a good outcome? The privacy implications troubling enough to give me pause but the idea of more people actually driving at safe and legal speeds seems like a net positive, but perhaps there's some disaster scenario I'm not considering?
Traffic flow relies on people mostly obeying the rules but being slightly flexible about breaking them to be courteous.
A car passing another at exactly 55mph while another car is going the same speed will take forever. We expect people to pull out, accelerate slightly, and then pull back in to get out of the way after passing even if that means you go above the speed limit for a bit.
Two lane roads often clog with truck traffic up hills. People pass these trucks on lanes in areas that allow it. The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.
We call scrupulous adherence to rules "malicious compliance" for a reason.
> A car passing another at exactly 55mph while another car is going the same speed will take forever.
Why would either driver would try to pass the other if they are going the same speed? If they're not passing then they should move to the right out of courtesy. (And they're legally required to in some states.)
> The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.
If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely. Whereas if the truck driver is traveling near the speed limit then the line of people "trapped for hours" are also moving near speed limit which seems fine. Plus, drivers of slower vehicles (trucks, RVs, farm equipment) are often courteous and pull over occasionally to let other drivers pass.
So that leaves cases where someone is driving a bit under the speed limit and is unwilling or unable to move to the side to let others pass. I don't begrudge someone breaking the limit by ~5mph to pass in such a case, but I also don't mind being "trapped" behind someone who scrupulously obeys every single traffic law even if it slows my journey by a few minutes. That would certainly be preferable to the unsafe behavior I see out on the roadways on a daily basis.
> Why would either driver would try to pass the other if they are going the same speed? If they're not passing then they should move to the right out of courtesy. (And they're legally required to in some states.)
And, yet, I deal with this all the time in Texas and California. I shudder at the thought of more of these kinds of people on the roads.
> If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely.
I think you don't have much driving experience with idiots on two-lane roads. I have experienced this failure mode in California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania--I have no reason to believe it doesn't also fail elsewhere. It doesn't take very many cars piled up behind a truck before you do not have the ability to overtake them all while your passing zone exists. See this video for what kind of zone I am talking about (sorry that it's an annoying comedy defensive driving video): https://youtu.be/Duw-c8O8Y9Y?t=104
These kinds of tracking devices will make these failure modes worse, not better.
Probably safe to assume that this feed will be sold to Lexis Nexis or Acxiom, etc. From there, who know how it will be used for or against you in whatever sphere of life, at whatever time.
I find it dubious that people who get good scores on these telematics are actually better drivers or less likely to cause accidents.
I've been stuck behind people doing 40 mph on the entrance ramp trying to merge into a 70 mph interstate. It's terrifying. They get a great rating for their leisurely acceleration, while vehicles on the interstate have to slam on their brakes and swerve to avoid them.
I am also skeptical of the accuracy of the initial rules but this seems like a domain that should be fairly easy to refine with a large enough corpus of data. Once an insurance company has a sufficient number of claims from telematics users I would wager that they will be able to find strong signals in the telematics data to identify customers who are likely to be expensive.
It's ok we'll just feed your speeds, GPS locations, braking data, and acceleration data into a black box AI model and have it spit out a bill multiplier.
Determining whether a particular driver is driving properly seems overkill. Any correlation between driving behavior and insurance payouts seems like it would be sufficient to improve the accuracy of your risk scores.
Let's say you only analyze vehicle speed data. That is clearly insufficient for training self-driving.
But it is very likely there is some correlation between speed and insurance payouts. For example, say you are able to segment your customer base including one subset with drivers who typically drive >80 miles an hour and another subset with drivers who typically drive <55 miles per hour. Are you saying that you would predict that the two populations have identical risk profiles? That speed data has no correlation with risk?
Someone can be a “safe” driver on paper, never get into an accident, but their actions regularly put other people in harm’s way. For example someone who’s driving well below the flow of traffic will provoke other drivers to have to pass them, but then eventually it results in someone getting into a head on collision.
Sure the passing driver is ultimately at fault, but the slow driver has blood on their hands despite no accountability. If they were driving the legal speed limit it may have prevented a serious accident and loss of life. of course, the insurance company would be none the wiser.
> Sure the passing driver is ultimately at fault, but the slow driver has blood on their hands despite no accountability.
If the slow driver is on a highway with a minimum speed limit or they're performing other unsafe maneuvers like weaving between lanes or stopping abruptly then they're clearly not a safe driver, so I agree that slow does not always equal safe.
But otherwise the collision is both morally and legally 100% the fault of the passing driver. Drivers have no moral or legal right to always operate at the speed limit if it's not safe to do so.
My semi-rural town has very narrow roads and I regularly encounter utility vehicles, school busses, farm vehicles, and cyclists on the roadway, not to mention turkeys, deer, and turtles. If a passing driver caused an accident or was pulled over and they tried to argue to the police officer that the slower vehicle "provoked them" into passing dangerously I can't imagine anyone finding that a compelling argument.
> and incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel.
Going 55 mph when everyone else is going 70 mph is extremely dangerous but the insurance company will give you good marks for obeying the speed limit.
I refuse to use one of these monitoring devices, it’s extremely intrusive and patronizing. Insurance companies are not going bankrupt due to pricing risk incorrectly.
The problem is that the data is interpreted without context. At worst, it incentivizes bad behaviour.
The box knows I slammed on the brakes. Does it know the schmuck in the next lane dove in front of me?
If the user figures out the way to minimize beeping/penalties is to drive 45 in a 50 zone, does he now become a hazard for other drivers?
Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?
> The box knows I slammed on the brakes. Does it know the schmuck in the next lane dove in front of me?
It doesn't really matter. You are still incentivized financially by the insurance company to slam on the brakes to avoid accidents.
> Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?
The way this is being interpreted is as if people will respond to an extreme degree to any incentive whatsoever, and they will choose the worst response to that incentive automatically. Your insurance rates will not double because you slammed on the brakes once. And people are probably more likely to learn to drive with better spacing so they don't have to frequently slam on the brakes, as opposed to playing a game of chicken trying to avoid having the insurance system know they once had to press the brake pedal hard once.
> The way this is being interpreted is as if people will respond to an extreme degree to any incentive whatsoever, and they will choose the worst response to that incentive automatically.
The interpretation is that (for most people) regular and consistent incentives/punishments at frequent intervals are more habit forming than irregular incentives/punishments that occur rarely and randomly.
If people were capable of internalizing that they had to drive safely to avoid having their insurance go up, then what would be the point of these boxes? Why introduce the reward/punishment structure at all if insurance premiums on their own are enough to influence behavior?
Frequency/predictability are hugely important for habit forming. A box that beeps at you every single time you brake too hard is a more effective punishment than a random insurance premium increase. Honestly, the premium risks are kind of irrelevant in both cases -- getting immediate negative feedback every time you brake is the problem.
These devices disincentivise hard braking when a pedestrian steps into the road in front of your car.
The idea that these devices can measure safe driving technique comes from the same school of thought as:
- More productive programmers write more lines of code per unit time;
- Democracy puts the best people in positions of power; and
- Telling the teacher is the best way to deal with bullying.
Road rules are simply the first order effectors of driving style; the exact conditions of the road are second-order effectors; the intentions and behaviour of other drivers are third-order effectors. All must be taken into account to drive safely.
That is not even remotely how people in the real world think; most people who are even consciously trying to think about long-term consequences struggle to prioritize safety measures while they're being actively discouraged against prioritizing them.
Consider that if people were capable of internalizing that hitting a pedestrian was more costly than being 5 minutes late to work -- and were capable of consistently applying that cost-benefit analysis in their everyday life, we wouldn't need laws like speed limits in the first place.
The human brain is not wired to think about risk in that way. It is wired to respond to regular consistent punishments for braking by braking less often. It is wired to respond to irregular novel punishments for rare events like hitting a pedestrian by ignoring that risk.
This reads like an article from /r/ABoringDystopia that showcases, among other things, technology that was suppose to improve people’s lives is actively weaponized against them.
What worries about this from a consumer level is that the insurance companies are not required to disregard old data. If you got a speeding ticket or other minor infraction, it will eventually drop off of your driving record as far as your insurance is concerned. Which makes sense and seems more fair because you are not necessarily the same driver you were two years ago. My concern is that they will keep this data in the aggregate and indefinitely penalize drivers with insurance rates that don’t actually reflect their present risk during a policy term.
The headline seems quite disingenuous when the article is based on a study that puts the adoption rate of these surveillance technologies at around 14%.
How do these apps work, in practice? The article states:
> If you’re at the wheel focused on the road, but someone in the passenger seat is changing the music on your phone, the app may think it’s observing distracted driving and count it against you.
Is the app running on the car, or on the user's phone, which somehow detects that the user is driving a car? Is there some way that a paired phone (Bluetooth - or maybe this is a feature of CarPlay / Android Auto) can tell a car that it's being used?
State Farm sends a Bluetooth beacon that you pair with your phone. Each car gets a beacon. Whichever beacon is closest is the car you’re in. The app on the phone uses gps and accelerometer data to determine driving behavior. Presumably the stream of data is sent to the insurance company at some point.
I don't think this works anymore, COVID tracking apps basically said fyou if you don't have a smartphone, or even when your phone is old enough that the app doesn't work.
I cannot find the source but I recall reading that telematics insurance causes more incidents as it makes drivers afraid of braking hard, knowing that any maneuver by you to avoid a deranged driver is counted against you.
This has been extremely common in the UK for about 10 years - especially for young drivers.
I warned my nephew off it but sure enough, he took the £200 (£1400 to £1200) discount on insurance. His insurance was cancelled because they say he did over 35mph in a 30 zone, so now his insurance premiums are £2000+ because he has to declare he has a history of having an insurance policy cancelled.
Damn that is shady as hell. Enticing with a small discount then boom, guaranteed increased premiums for years.
The big comparison websites are complicit too as they list those policies along the others in a table sorted by price, not making much of a deal about the risks etc and how different the policy is
In NC we have mandatory yearly safety inspections. To renew your registration you must pass inspection. It would be easy for them to use the odometer reading at the inspection to assess a road use tax.
We do already pay a gas tax and a yearly property tax at the state and local level for cars plus a sales tax on new cars.
When I tried this a few years ago, the unit beeped when it sensed braking or lane changes it didn’t like. It beeped constantly in the course of normal New York City defensive driving. I found myself running more than one red light to avoid the “hard braking” beep.
It completely eliminated any enjoyment of the new car I sacrificed to save up for.
After 3 months I was horrified to get an email with a list of time stamped infractions and an offer for a 15% reduction in my premium.
Yeah, no. I switched to Geico, cut my premium in half, and vowed never to willingly trade surveillance for an insurance discount.
I had the same experience. The beeline that Progressive's snapshot device did actively encouraged worse driving behavior in a city.
I could see it being more beneficial in rural communities where there's less erratic driver behavior, but in a major US city it was doing me no favors.
I can tell you that they don't work on Landrover Defenders, because they are reading about half way to "OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING" just sitting in the car park with the engine idling.
I'm not sure how you'd get them from the car park to moving down the road without switching the ignition on. Is there some trick to going from a switched-off stationary vehicle to 30mph without some ramping up in between?
Yup, I saw that offer with my auto-insurance provider and despite knowing how much data they’d be harvesting, I was still tempted to do it. Insurance just costs so much. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect driving record for almost 2 decades. Costs just slowly creep up just like everything else. It feels like we’re in a world where privacy and data ownership is a luxury reserved for the wealthy.
In Belgium you couldn't drive a miles without being recorded on some ALPR camera.
Speed cameras everywhere. And the current rage is average speed cameras. So they take your photo on an on-ramp and when you take the exit they'll calculate the average. Above the speed limit: ticket. With no way of facing your accuser in court. The machine said so...
Why is this comment downvoted? I think is pretty fair to say "I would quit my job before participating in that". More tech workers should say "NO" to so much BS today. Tech does give us so much good things, but we drive full speed into a new kind of slavery.
So you're claiming these are inaccurate? Do you have any other solutions for speeding? I think these are still much better solution than a device that tracks your location all the time.
Uh I know right. Then there’s those other radicals called homeowners who don’t want government cameras in their house checking they aren’t doing anything illegal.
Homeowners have such a strong sense of entitlement
Cars are inherently dangerous; to the people inside, people outside, and to infrastructure and buildings around them. The faster they go the more dangerous they are. They drive on publically funded infrastructure in a public setting.
I am against mass surveillance. Remember when Snowden released all those documents? How we were all angry about the NSA spying on its own citizens?
Systems like this do the same, although they justify it as a means to stop speeding, which, to be fair, they do very well.
But we go from one month of data retention to multiple months, and then someone finds old data that was not deleted and the government allows its use, and now its acceptable to store this data for 2 years etc etc.
Is this considered new? In Canada I had an app on my phone for 100 days which tracked accelerations/break/speed. Sure it felt intrusive-ish, but the program was not mandatory so seems like a win-win. I got a 22% discount (got 96/100!) and now the app is off my phone.
I would not recommend it if you don't live in the suburbs though. Slow and steady is the name of the game, ideally you want light traffic and mostly empty roads.
hypothetically it’s pretty easy to fake the odb reader versions of these. Just buy a male to 2 female odb splitter, strip one and hook a 9 volt battery and usb charger to the power wires.
Plug your device into your car and turn it on, wait for device to blink green, attach 9 volt and unplug, carry inside and plug in usb charger to the wall.
I hate this but man am I tempted. I take my old car out for like 2k miles a year.
I think of getting rid of it but it takes so little time & money to keep around, and it's great being able to do occasional road trips. Otherwise I'd totally get rid of it. Insurance is the biggest cost, but pretty cheap all-in-all.
Given how little it's used, and given what a generally chill driver I am, I do think I deserve a better deal. Then again, it's old & I don't think it has OBD, so I'm probably not eligible anyways.
Waiting for insurance companies to 'team up' and 'exploit synergies' with car companies to 'enhance revenue', so that this stuff it built in, and you don't get to turn it off.
My relative in the UK got a black box because insurance for beginner drivers is pretty high. Her summary is that punishing hard braking is counterproductive.
Her relative also had it for three months, but after that the insurance company said he would be better off without it.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadI'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth."
And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.
Definitely seems like a losing battle. My retirement plan is a remote cabin in the woods.
So if someone were to buy a $10k car and instead chose a $5k car, it'll be as if insurance were cut to $700/year for the next 10 years!
If you value your privacy, that's a solution.
Wow, that’s crazy high. In the UK my Porsche 911 (992) is cheaper to insure than that! (Without an insurance tracker)
Anyone know if US insurance generally much higher (than other comparative nations)? Or is SF an anomaly?
How much do you pay?
About $1100 (comprehensive). I’ve never made a claim and have no speeding points, so I guess I get a good rate; but the OP rate still seemed pretty high for the model.
And if I added this Porsche 911 https://www.carfax.com/vehicle/WP0CA29984S653662 it goes to $1.8k.
So I suppose it comes down to driver risk in the end since my car is only $32k, not $200k like yours.
People often say "the insurance costs more than my car is worth!" as if it's scandalous. But what it's insuring you against, primarily, is the risk of paying millions of $CURRENCY in medical fees to the third party. Your car's value is peanuts in comparison.
Comprehensive and collision, what your insurance company pays you regardless of who is at fault, is what cases insurance to be expensive in my experience.
There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,000 TV for a single super bowl party and then return it.
I actually desperately want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts" - all solutions I can think of violate my privacy but we'll find out what's worse...
For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?
ADDED: Furthermore, research has has shown (e.g late pickups at daycare) that when you add a fee to an anti-social behavior it can actually make the behavior more likely because it's now a transactional activity.
I've often wondered how well it would work if you went "right well, if you pick them up 15 minutes late today, you've got to pick them up 15 minutes early tomorrow", or "... drop them off 15 minutes late tomorrow".
Your suggestion proves my point! With social contracts I don't need to pay this fee, but by getting rid of them I do; I'd be getting charged for other people's anti-social behavior!
Stepping back, social contracts are forms of trust at the societal level. Any economist or business person will tell you that being able trust others dramatically lowers transactional and operational costs. I want to be trusted so that I can take advantage of those lower costs.
Behaving is too hard for some people and I'm fine with punishing via a social credit score.
Even in a well-designed system, both of those will be suspect.
Yet you are arguing for giving some of them way more power to fuck things up.
Cultural background + class would be the strongest indicator of this behavior. It describes the norms and expectations to which you are accustomed. Unfortunately it's illegal to discriminate based on most signifiers of this trait.
The alternative to shared trust is costly and intrusive enforcement mechanisms.
If they say no, and you don't find their name on a few big stores lists of frequent item-returners, then you trust them. Everyone else, you consider shady and don't offer good deals to.
Remember lying to gain a benefit is wire fraud - so anyone who falsely answers this question has committed a crime - and a store is totally allowed to treat a customer they suspect has a committed a crime differently.
That's not true either. There are vastly different standards of enforcement.
This issue is a lot bigger than returning items at the store. Every social system we have was built with assumptions about how people would behave. For example: the Seniors who are easily scammable are those who grew up around people who didn't scam each other.
Unless I've missed something...
Sidebar: The government is buying all your data from data brokers. We should all collectively submit FOIA requests to get copies of it, to create an undue burden on them doing so. Maybe they'll scale it back.
[1] https://incogni.com/
Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.
Wouldn't that be fraud?
A lot of the monitors for older cars (that don't have 'tracking' built in) just plug into the cars OBD2 port and the CAN bus data - and is extremely hackable by anyone thats used an Arduino. It would be much harder to interfere if the monitor is wired in or using its own GPS to monitor speed and distance travelled though.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/resea...
Not only that, but insurance companies don't cover claims when the policy was obtained by fraud.
I have dumb electronics that are way less intrusive than their luxury versions.
Water wet.
On the one hand, I hate the intrusiveness, that's a huge minus.
On the other hand, commercial drivers are subject to all kinds of perverse business incentives--too many hours driving, poorly maintained fleets, etc.--and if the insurance companies can stamp those out, that's a plus.
Given that states can't even get voting right [1], this is not the future I wanted. (Plus, we should be incentivizing EV purchases at this stage, not punishing them.)
(Heck, they put my marriage license on a blockchain for some dumb reason. I didn't even want it on a blockchain!)
[0]: https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/
[1]: Basically anything by https://twitter.com/jhalderm
> whether they're completely treating federal roads separately or using it for the total, etc
The tax does not distinguish types of road, much like a gas tax does not.
The context we were in is Utah gas taxes and how much it affects road funding that Utah does. Were you referring to something different? I would assume that Utah gas taxes, if they are intended to fund road work, would go towards state roads in Utah (but that's just an assumption, which is why I was interested in the source).
And yes, it’s less efficient than a carbon tax, but fundamentally you cannot deny the net effect of getting rid of the conservation aspect of gas taxes BEFORE passing a compensating carbon tax would have the effect of basically eliminating a carbon tax.
In other words, let’s talk about adding compensatory EV fees AFTER passing a carbon tax. Sounds fair and certainly better for climate.
By which you mean $130 (equating to ~13,000 miles driven under the 1 cent-per-mile pricing)?
https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/faq.php#fees
I agree it should be easier and more privacy-preserving to measure real usage (e.g., an odometer read once a year or something like that).
Did you benefit from paying no state income taxes for decades? Well, now you're paying a little back into the system. I'd think you'd be happy to do that, after having paid no state income taxes for so long. I'd also think you were well aware of the registration taxes when you purchased the vehicle? If so, given these two facts, why are you complaining about it?
You can still be an asshole if you want of course, but being an asshole has nothing to do with your registration taxes.
What is pushing his cost way up by hundreds of dollars is the regional transit excise tax that some Washington counties have. That tax is based on the value of the vehicle, which is the MSRP discounted by a depreciation factor. The tax is 1.1% of depreciated value.
You're not an asshole to drive around a ride you've earned.
Statists will always find some rationale for taxing more that sounds perfectly reasonable and good, when its obvious the motivation is envy.
I knew there were extra costs in King county (and Pierce and Snohomish counties) due to a regional transit excise tax but had no idea it could raise costs that much.
It looks like it is 1.1% of MSRP x depreciation, where depreciation comes from this table [1]. Ouch!
[1] https://www.dol.wa.gov/regional-transit-authority-rta-motor-...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/was...
That's because they kind of are. Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes.
EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.
This is going to require a significant shift about how states and cities think about their road maintenance budgets and the taxes required to sustain them. A lot of states are going to, predictably, get this wrong.
Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car for what amounts to shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars?
Wear on the road is a function of weight. It’s really simple and uncontroversial. An EV generally weighs more than an ICE of equivalent size.
Hopefully, the federal push to install tons of charging stations will usher in useful EVs with smaller batteries, lowering weight.
[0] https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
Yes, some states haven't figured out what that looks like, but I really don't think the right answer is to dump all that cost on truckers. I would rather pay more for my car's operational tax, increased EV tax or existing gas tax on ICE, than disproportionately affect the price of groceries for someone living paycheck to paycheck.
As for disproportionately affecting the poor, sales taxes (like on groceries and other goods) and excise taxes (like on gas) are exactly the regressive taxation systems that burden the very people living paycheck to paycheck. Shifting the tax burden from skimming off the top for the people spending all their income on daily necessities, towards companies paying the full cost of their chosen operations, would give the poor more buying power and allow market forces to find and utilize the most effective and efficient means to provide services instead of the cheapest means that are only cheap because they are subsidized by everyone else.
Also you could just get a slightly smaller cars since EVs tend to be a bit more space efficient.
Noting the increased road damage isn't an attack on EVs, it's a call to be smarter about infrastructure:.
This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim. By states, car makers, the federal government, and third party analysis firms. It's incredibly uncontroversial. It's even got a name, and associated math: it's called the Fourth Power Law https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
> shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars
Gas taxes make up a relatively small part of the cost of gas. If you run the numbers, you'll find that it's maybe closer to around 3.5-4x for most passenger EVs. At scale, that becomes a problem, but at the individual level, it's still a relatively small amount - and certainly less than the cost of gas.
Your source claims no such thing. EVs may be heavier than equivalent ICE cars, but an electric Smart (the brand) is going to do less damage than a loaded Ford F150.
Tax the weight, not a shitty proxy for weight.
Your comparison is misleading. Compare an ICE car to an EV car, not the lightest EV to the heaviest ICE.
It is pretty much insignificant increase on road wear vs what trucks put on it?
If you meant SUVs or pick-ups by trucks yeah, insignificant and a bad proxy for weight anyway. No point in taxing EVs when what you need to tax is weight.
Over in the EU it seems that taxes and duties represent at least half of the cost of petrol, more in some member states
https://www.statista.com/statistics/937796/pump-price-and-ta...
Q: How are governments going to replace this?
Add a supplemental registration tax to EVs and hybrids to make up the cost of consuming less fuel. Of course, taxes never go away, so enjoy this new tax as we enter an electric future.
Q: How much fuel duty and tax does the average ICE vehicle (or rather, its driver) contribute?
I did some back-of-napkin math and came up with a figure of €500
I still have the dents in my driveway pavement!
https://racfoundation.org/data/percentage-uk-pump-price-whic...
Not anymore. You just get an IFTA sticker and apportioned plates.
However, EVs cause around 2x more damage to roads than non EVs.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/26/pothole-electric...
Wait til the semi EVs hit the road!
EVs also have significantly higher particulate emissions due to increased tire wear.
A 3-series BMW clocks in at 1700-2255 kg. A comparable Tesla Model Y clocks in at 1778-2003 kg (from empty to fully loaded).
You could argue that those aren’t luxury vehicles, but downmarket EVs need to be heavy too, because batteries do not match the energy density of petrol.
Myself, I’m replacing nearly every car trip with biking where feasible (young kids make that challenging, admittedly, but the car doesn’t see a ton of use these days).
The Dacia Sandero, one of the smallest cars I can think of here in France, that's also supposed to be cheap so doesn't have a lot of... anything, has a curb weight of 1,025–1,204 kg (2,260–2,654 lb) according to wikipedia [0].
The previous generation Renault Clio, which is a small city car, weighed around 1000 kg, too (980 at the lowest). [1]. Wikipedia doesn't have data for the current generation, which is somewhat bigger physically.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Sandero
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Clio#Fourth_generation...
At least the popular A segment cars like the Aygo, Up or 500 still tend to be under a ton.
Sadly even heavier cars are becoming more popular, so in the future a ton will be far from the median.
A brand new 330i is 3500lbs. A Model Y is 4500lbs. That's a 28% increase in weight for a similar size car.
A Honda Civic is 3100lbs in full trim. A 530i is 3800lbs. My VW SUV is only 3850lbs.
That means more tire wear and more road wear. Are we at the point where EV fans are going to deny that EVs are far heavier?
GP said "and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles"
Also I'm sure you know that 330i is a sedan. Model Y is a SUV. They are not similar. A BMW similar to Model Y would be X3. it's weight is 4150lbs.
Did you know that BMW series 7 is around 4720lbs, compared to 4790lbs of a model S?
EV is heavier than ICE. That's never been a question. EV is gentler to the environment despite the weight.
Does a sharp pointy thing poke a hole in a surface more easily or less easily than a big flat thing?
The "list of academic and government citations" is all just finger-in-the-air unscientific "we think it works like this because it fits our primary school child view of the world".
Hiding the externalities is somewhat communist.
26% of road funds come from gas taxes; 11 percent from tolls, another 25% from the federal government: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
Now, about those "paying their fair share of 25% of the cost of the roads" gas taxes: In Utah, the gas tax was $0.245 in 1997. Today it's $0.34, when adjusting for inflation alone it should be $0.46, so drivers have received what amounts to a 25% tax reduction in the last ~30 years. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in thirty years. So there's another tax break drivers have gotten.
That's just inflation. Average fuel economy has risen from 18mpg to over 22, which means per mile drivers are paying on average 20% less of "their fair share" due to mileage increases alone.
So it's a bit weird that suddenly people in gas cars are getting high and mighty about EV owners "not paying their fair share."
> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher rate. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.
The Ford F150, which is the most popular "car" sold in America, is between 4,069 and 5,697 pounds.
A Tesla Model 3 is 3,862 to 4,048 lbs. A Chevy Bolt is ~3600lb.
Yet..who gets taxed more by Utah? Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?
Also, where were all these concerns about increased road wear on budgets when American purchasing trends tilted toward larger and heavier SUVs and pickups? Average vehicle weight has risen 10%+ since 1990.
EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?
Bish, please.
Utah didn't want to raise the gas tax (it's a political third rail) so they relied on their extremely stupid electorate to buy up the myth that drivers in gas cars are "paying their fair share" and instituted a punitive tax on EVs which Dumb Yokel Bob fully supports because it's sticking it to those "libruhls in them fuckin' priuses an shit", believing everything he hears on conservative radio about EVs (for example, that they 'cost' more CO2 to make than a regular car. Which is true....until around 14,000 miles into ownership when the EV breaks even compared to a gas car.)
Yes, if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.
>> EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?
Would it be better to ignore the problem?
Would it be better to focus on the larger problem, rather than distract with a symbolic but ultimately meaningless and punitive "solution"? Yes, it would be better to ignore it for now and focus on adjusting the gas tax to properly reflect how fuel efficiency increases allow for less and less gas to be bought for heavier and heavier weight. To skip over everything noted in the OP comment that hasn't been done to have ICE drivers "pay their fair share" only to then to focus on the tiny minority of EV drivers rings pretty hollow.
>if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.
What if you have an older and less fuel efficient car? Why should new car buyers get a tax break vs older car owners when it is vehicle weight that is doing the road damage? Would it be better to ignore the problem?
https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/state-tax/603259/states-with...
https://ktla.com/news/california/these-states-have-the-rough...
I think it even makes sense for semis, the cost may go up for goods slightly as they pass that cost onto customers, but we'd be paying less in federal taxes for roads, less in property taxes for roads, and if you drive less (good for health, environment, etc) you'll likely be saving money. It also more accurately taxes EVs with ICEs based on road wear and tear instead of all these haphazard ideas.
The problem is, while that works out on highways and other federally owned road, the distribution on state or county/city level is almost impossible. Say you have a trucking company doing regional service and one doing interstate transport - both their fleets will have similar driven miles because economically, companies want their many-hundred-thousand-dollar assets to be on the road as long as traffic safety laws allow. Now, assuming they both pay the same mile tax to the state... the state makes an insane profit on the interstate trucking company given that only a low percentage of the miles driven were happening on that state's roads, with the clear majority being on federal highways and other states' roads.
Roads are a public good.
Having a road available to use, is worth almost as much as actually using it.
Not to mention all the positive externalities of a better connected country (more trade, business, economic growth).
The positive externalities created by trucks shipping food into cities massively outweigh almost all passenger traffic.
So charging by weight/road damage makes no sense.
You're costing X times more to the system because you're diabetic/obese/predisposed ? You should pay more!
That's how it sounds, and if we want to live like that we can go back to cavemen times, because we didn't built societies to play this silly game
There is a general legal principle that the state must use the least intrusive means to accomplish a goal. A lawsuit might force a change.
You still need a charger/adapter between the outlet and the vehicle. Perhaps build the meter into the vehicles charging port.
Just charge on the odometer reading each year. 3p a mile or whatever. Maybe charge more based on weight.
(But not yet because we were incentivising EV up take. RUCs for EVs will be required in 2024 I believe.)
Simply saying EVs are so much better for the environment that they don't need to pay for roads at all seems a little short sighted.
Taxing tires would work. Also, mileage is already recorded during vehicle inspections. That could be used to calculate tax but would be more open to fraud.
Depend where you get your electricity from. Also most of car pollution comes from tires and brake dust, which EV create more of given their weight and torque
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...
See, we can play this silly game all day long or just all chip in.
Also, having lived in a city I can tell you that brake dust and tire wear is also a big part of car pollution.
Unless you want 100% toll roads, we need to come up with fair-ish way to tax EV road use.
I would guess that we are talking about very small numbers -- certainly under 5% of drivers.[1] Whatever principle Utah is asserting to "recover" fuel taxes from EV drivers isn't making much of a difference.
At the same time, the Utah policy is clearly discouraging EV adoption.
> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight.
We are talking about a small presence in the automobile market. If everyone were to drive a Tesla, then yes we would have more heavy passenger cars on the road.
For example, a 2023 Honda Civic weighs between 1,429 kg and 1,517 kg. One best-selling SUV, the Toyota RAV4, weighs 1755 kg.
But the most popular type of vehicle in the US (and in Utah) by sales is the pick-up truck. The top three pick-up trucks each weigh about 2500 kg.
If we are going to start quibbling about weight this way, we will need to recognise that drivers of vehicles should be taxed according to their obesity to maintain our roadways.
[1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/24/current-ev-registrations-in-t...
If it's not linear then the difference between a 4000 lbs car vs a 3000 lbs one is nothing compared to the damage done by a loaded 80 000 lbs truck.
What I notice, on european highways: it's always the rightmost lane that is deformed. The leftmost lane is never deformed. The aquaplanning risks due to water present in two bands on the lane is always on the rightmost lane. Always, always, always.
Why? Because the rightmost lane is the one trucks do use.
Where I live atm, in the middle of nowhere, there are two things deforming the road: heavy vehicles (I'm not talking about 4000 lbs cars here but tractors / trucks) and... Tree roots. Most of the patches made on the road are due to tree roots lifting the road's concrete.
The state itself is at least half Mormon. When you get out of Salt Lake and Ogden, it's a lot more. But there's a lot of scenery and skiing and outdoors things to do. There's a lot of things right with the state. (Start with cities that are safer than expected for their size. Mormons have something to do with that, too.)
But in terms of how the state is run... yeah, you're not wrong.
So you, member of the spoiled rotten, pilfering upper strata, parasitizing the larger society while at the same time degenerating it, want the regular people you are living off in decadence, to also pay not just current rates, but even higher rates so you can see your utopian, egotist, narcissistic vision come to fruition?
You want people who can’t afford the luxury of EVs and who are already being destroyed and pillaged by the likes of your strata, to on top of that abuse, also pay more?
Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?
It’s unfortunate that humans seem to have made essentially zero progress in preventing what has been captured in numerous stories. Possibly the most relevant one being that Hubris is struck down by Nemesis; the origins of those two words themselves, something most people do not even realize.
If you ever have the chance, there is an excellent statue of Hubris in the Louvre. It is a bit hidden and tucked away, which makes it all the more prescient. Note when it was created.
I think billionaires are buying private planes, not EVs. The people buying EVs for their daily transportation several orders of magnitude closer to being homeless than they are to being billionaires.
Normally I'd just post a warning but your account has a pattern of breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Why you would need to track how much a vehicle is driven I don't understand though. Unless you want to measure how far it's driven within some geographical area (such as a state) and can't merely charge for the total distance driven, but that seems unnecessarily complex, given that a car will only be registered in one region and it should balance out across state borders.
So at the anual/biannual mandatory inspections (which make a lot more sense to add if they aren't already mandatory, than any tracking!) just check the distance driven and charge road tax accordingly. I pay around $800/year for road tax for my car. And $8/gallon for the fuel. But I do get great roads for it.
If we get to a point where fuel consumption is so low that it stops generating significant tax revenue, then that is a great problem to have.
Think very carefully about whether you want to be behind a person who is scrupulously obeying every single traffic law. Especially if you get 3 of them abreast.
A car passing another at exactly 55mph while another car is going the same speed will take forever. We expect people to pull out, accelerate slightly, and then pull back in to get out of the way after passing even if that means you go above the speed limit for a bit.
Two lane roads often clog with truck traffic up hills. People pass these trucks on lanes in areas that allow it. The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.
We call scrupulous adherence to rules "malicious compliance" for a reason.
Why would either driver would try to pass the other if they are going the same speed? If they're not passing then they should move to the right out of courtesy. (And they're legally required to in some states.)
> The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.
If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely. Whereas if the truck driver is traveling near the speed limit then the line of people "trapped for hours" are also moving near speed limit which seems fine. Plus, drivers of slower vehicles (trucks, RVs, farm equipment) are often courteous and pull over occasionally to let other drivers pass.
So that leaves cases where someone is driving a bit under the speed limit and is unwilling or unable to move to the side to let others pass. I don't begrudge someone breaking the limit by ~5mph to pass in such a case, but I also don't mind being "trapped" behind someone who scrupulously obeys every single traffic law even if it slows my journey by a few minutes. That would certainly be preferable to the unsafe behavior I see out on the roadways on a daily basis.
And, yet, I deal with this all the time in Texas and California. I shudder at the thought of more of these kinds of people on the roads.
> If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely.
I think you don't have much driving experience with idiots on two-lane roads. I have experienced this failure mode in California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania--I have no reason to believe it doesn't also fail elsewhere. It doesn't take very many cars piled up behind a truck before you do not have the ability to overtake them all while your passing zone exists. See this video for what kind of zone I am talking about (sorry that it's an annoying comedy defensive driving video): https://youtu.be/Duw-c8O8Y9Y?t=104
These kinds of tracking devices will make these failure modes worse, not better.
I've been stuck behind people doing 40 mph on the entrance ramp trying to merge into a 70 mph interstate. It's terrifying. They get a great rating for their leisurely acceleration, while vehicles on the interstate have to slam on their brakes and swerve to avoid them.
All hail AI.
Let's say you only analyze vehicle speed data. That is clearly insufficient for training self-driving.
But it is very likely there is some correlation between speed and insurance payouts. For example, say you are able to segment your customer base including one subset with drivers who typically drive >80 miles an hour and another subset with drivers who typically drive <55 miles per hour. Are you saying that you would predict that the two populations have identical risk profiles? That speed data has no correlation with risk?
Sure the passing driver is ultimately at fault, but the slow driver has blood on their hands despite no accountability. If they were driving the legal speed limit it may have prevented a serious accident and loss of life. of course, the insurance company would be none the wiser.
If the slow driver is on a highway with a minimum speed limit or they're performing other unsafe maneuvers like weaving between lanes or stopping abruptly then they're clearly not a safe driver, so I agree that slow does not always equal safe.
But otherwise the collision is both morally and legally 100% the fault of the passing driver. Drivers have no moral or legal right to always operate at the speed limit if it's not safe to do so.
My semi-rural town has very narrow roads and I regularly encounter utility vehicles, school busses, farm vehicles, and cyclists on the roadway, not to mention turkeys, deer, and turtles. If a passing driver caused an accident or was pulled over and they tried to argue to the police officer that the slower vehicle "provoked them" into passing dangerously I can't imagine anyone finding that a compelling argument.
Going 55 mph when everyone else is going 70 mph is extremely dangerous but the insurance company will give you good marks for obeying the speed limit.
I refuse to use one of these monitoring devices, it’s extremely intrusive and patronizing. Insurance companies are not going bankrupt due to pricing risk incorrectly.
The box knows I slammed on the brakes. Does it know the schmuck in the next lane dove in front of me?
If the user figures out the way to minimize beeping/penalties is to drive 45 in a 50 zone, does he now become a hazard for other drivers?
Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?
It doesn't really matter. You are still incentivized financially by the insurance company to slam on the brakes to avoid accidents.
> Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?
The way this is being interpreted is as if people will respond to an extreme degree to any incentive whatsoever, and they will choose the worst response to that incentive automatically. Your insurance rates will not double because you slammed on the brakes once. And people are probably more likely to learn to drive with better spacing so they don't have to frequently slam on the brakes, as opposed to playing a game of chicken trying to avoid having the insurance system know they once had to press the brake pedal hard once.
The interpretation is that (for most people) regular and consistent incentives/punishments at frequent intervals are more habit forming than irregular incentives/punishments that occur rarely and randomly.
If people were capable of internalizing that they had to drive safely to avoid having their insurance go up, then what would be the point of these boxes? Why introduce the reward/punishment structure at all if insurance premiums on their own are enough to influence behavior?
Frequency/predictability are hugely important for habit forming. A box that beeps at you every single time you brake too hard is a more effective punishment than a random insurance premium increase. Honestly, the premium risks are kind of irrelevant in both cases -- getting immediate negative feedback every time you brake is the problem.
The idea that these devices can measure safe driving technique comes from the same school of thought as:
- More productive programmers write more lines of code per unit time; - Democracy puts the best people in positions of power; and - Telling the teacher is the best way to deal with bullying.
Road rules are simply the first order effectors of driving style; the exact conditions of the road are second-order effectors; the intentions and behaviour of other drivers are third-order effectors. All must be taken into account to drive safely.
The monetary incentive is still wildly in favor of hard braking as opposed to hitting a pedestrian. I don't understand this criticism.
Consider that if people were capable of internalizing that hitting a pedestrian was more costly than being 5 minutes late to work -- and were capable of consistently applying that cost-benefit analysis in their everyday life, we wouldn't need laws like speed limits in the first place.
The human brain is not wired to think about risk in that way. It is wired to respond to regular consistent punishments for braking by braking less often. It is wired to respond to irregular novel punishments for rare events like hitting a pedestrian by ignoring that risk.
What worries about this from a consumer level is that the insurance companies are not required to disregard old data. If you got a speeding ticket or other minor infraction, it will eventually drop off of your driving record as far as your insurance is concerned. Which makes sense and seems more fair because you are not necessarily the same driver you were two years ago. My concern is that they will keep this data in the aggregate and indefinitely penalize drivers with insurance rates that don’t actually reflect their present risk during a policy term.
> If you’re at the wheel focused on the road, but someone in the passenger seat is changing the music on your phone, the app may think it’s observing distracted driving and count it against you.
Is the app running on the car, or on the user's phone, which somehow detects that the user is driving a car? Is there some way that a paired phone (Bluetooth - or maybe this is a feature of CarPlay / Android Auto) can tell a car that it's being used?
Wonder how self-incriminating that is - at some tipping point of adoption, not opting in becomes THE negative signal.
Outside regulation to limit retention and prevent misuse of data is there even a longer term option here?
Perhaps I should capitulate early and save more money.
I can only find anecdotal references https://www.quora.com/Does-Progressive-Auto-insurance-actual...
I warned my nephew off it but sure enough, he took the £200 (£1400 to £1200) discount on insurance. His insurance was cancelled because they say he did over 35mph in a 30 zone, so now his insurance premiums are £2000+ because he has to declare he has a history of having an insurance policy cancelled.
The big comparison websites are complicit too as they list those policies along the others in a table sorted by price, not making much of a deal about the risks etc and how different the policy is
We do already pay a gas tax and a yearly property tax at the state and local level for cars plus a sales tax on new cars.
It completely eliminated any enjoyment of the new car I sacrificed to save up for.
After 3 months I was horrified to get an email with a list of time stamped infractions and an offer for a 15% reduction in my premium.
Yeah, no. I switched to Geico, cut my premium in half, and vowed never to willingly trade surveillance for an insurance discount.
I could see it being more beneficial in rural communities where there's less erratic driver behavior, but in a major US city it was doing me no favors.
I can tell you that they don't work on Landrover Defenders, because they are reading about half way to "OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING" just sitting in the car park with the engine idling.
In Belgium you couldn't drive a miles without being recorded on some ALPR camera.
Speed cameras everywhere. And the current rage is average speed cameras. So they take your photo on an on-ramp and when you take the exit they'll calculate the average. Above the speed limit: ticket. With no way of facing your accuser in court. The machine said so...
Car-drivers have a strong sense of entitlement that i never have seen in other non-radical groups.
Homeowners have such a strong sense of entitlement
Cars are inherently dangerous; to the people inside, people outside, and to infrastructure and buildings around them. The faster they go the more dangerous they are. They drive on publically funded infrastructure in a public setting.
I am against mass surveillance. Remember when Snowden released all those documents? How we were all angry about the NSA spying on its own citizens?
Systems like this do the same, although they justify it as a means to stop speeding, which, to be fair, they do very well.
But we go from one month of data retention to multiple months, and then someone finds old data that was not deleted and the government allows its use, and now its acceptable to store this data for 2 years etc etc.
I would not recommend it if you don't live in the suburbs though. Slow and steady is the name of the game, ideally you want light traffic and mostly empty roads.
Plug your device into your car and turn it on, wait for device to blink green, attach 9 volt and unplug, carry inside and plug in usb charger to the wall.
I think of getting rid of it but it takes so little time & money to keep around, and it's great being able to do occasional road trips. Otherwise I'd totally get rid of it. Insurance is the biggest cost, but pretty cheap all-in-all.
Given how little it's used, and given what a generally chill driver I am, I do think I deserve a better deal. Then again, it's old & I don't think it has OBD, so I'm probably not eligible anyways.
Her relative also had it for three months, but after that the insurance company said he would be better off without it.