This seems interesting but they recorder is missing a lot of context. If you drive Los Angeles freeways you'll be hitting the breaks a lot for random people who cut you off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the data will only show you stomping on the breaks all the time and the insurance company might conclude you're a bad driver because you're not paying attention.
Also how does it distinguish between drivers? My kids often "borrow" the car and I'd like to be able to "advise" them when they're causing our insurance to go up by driving poorly.. :-)
> If you drive Los Angeles freeways you'll be hitting the breaks a lot for random people who cut you off in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but the data will only show you stomping on the breaks all the time and the insurance company might conclude you're a bad driver because you're not paying attention.
That is the correct conclusion though. The insurance company could care less whether you're a bad driver—what they really care is how much of an accident risk are you.
Even a good driver frequently caught in LA traffic is a higher risk than a good driver elsewhere. Hence the device is reporting exactly what the company needs.
I've used one of these devices in my car for the last couple of years and have enjoyed really cheap car insurance as a result (variable based on my driving but usually $30-$35 CAD/month).
It is very true that if you are driving in rush hour traffic you have no choice but to appear to be a bad driver. The irony of this is that the accident happening in rush hour is probably minor, yet when I'm barrelling down the highway at a steady pace I appear to be a great driver whereas an accident would be very costly (fatal perhaps).
Also they normalize your infractions (sharp breaking, sharp acceleration, speeding, etc) by distance driven so long highway driving is even more beneficial (few infractions, long distances) than traffic jams (many infractions, short distances).
Insurance companies have a strong financial incentive to have their models be well calibrated with reality, so you should expect it more and more with time that when an insurance company thinks you're a bad driver then it really means that your driving sucks.
True, but they'll happily take 10 horrendous accidents over 1100 minor bumps if the bumps cost them a thousand each and the bad accidents cost them a hundred thousand each.
Our incentives are different. We would rather have many tiny incidents (up to a limit) than a few life threatening incidents.
Therefore, while an insurance company would happily put into place a process that turns a small number of drivers into maniacs and everyone else into placid sheep they'd take it.
Not that they are, and it sounds unlikely that such a process can even exist, but it's important to know that our incentives aren't aligned.
Kids on your policy pretty much raise your rates, period.
And the insurance companies have been doing this for a long, long time. Many moons ago (pre-internet) I worked summers doing telemarketing for a Very Large insurance company. When people signed up for auto policies the agents would casually ask the ages of the children during conversation. That information was stored away for years, sometimes a decade, until the kid turned 16.
My job was to call and "casually" ask questions like "so, which of your cars is Johnny driving when he gets the keys?". You can guess the rest.
Insurance companies usually want to have accurate models and accurately predict the future. Hence, I presume they'll figure out the "LA freeway braking" issue.
One of my siblings had one of these. It constantly squawked/beeped at them when they went too fast/they braked too hard (which is actually a lot more often that you might think - the deacceleration threshold ).
It got to be a point of humor in their family. "Mommy, you're driving too fast!"
It did lower their car insurance considerably. Thankfully, it was a temporary deal to have it installed, not a permanent commitment.
When they installed license-plate scanners on bridges, government buildings, and roaming police cars, there was initially the claim that this system wouldn't be used to create a giant centralized database tracking everybody's movement.
We all know how that turned out.
And now with these airplane-style black boxes inside cars (the manufacturers have their own black boxes, too) ... I'm sure the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc would never start drinking from this firehose of data, and mis-use it.
I'm sure Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, etc would find this info useful, too ... although with the installed user base of Android phones, Google / Apple pretty likely already have quite a bit of this info.
Can you give me one example of the government "misusing" the data from license-plate scanners? I know how it "turned out"; it turned out to be an effective means of tracking people on the run.
Two-year database of every car's location at specific times & dates. Though it is hard to say if it's been misused or not since they frequently ignore FOIA's about its existence.
As with most surveillance, there hasn't been much misuse of the data yet.
The things I worry about for the future:
1. Evidence of everybody breaking the law. (In this case, speeding). If everybody is in violation of the law, the government can choose who to prosecute.
2. Extortion. You might not care about privacy from big brother, but what if your friends and family were to know everything you had ever SMS'd? One day, boom, that might happen to everybody with a low credit score. Everybody else would need to pony up if they want their data kept secret.
3. Data leaks. With these huge vaults of private information, some is bound to leak before too long. Once the data is leaked, there is no putting it back. Eventually, all recorded data from this time period will enter the public record.
I think it is unreasonable that I have to put a personally identifiable ID number on my car in the first, it is abhorrent to me they need use this number I am required to install via the threat of violence to then create a database of ever mile I drive, and place I go, and everything I do
Who has access to the database? Probably hundreds of people/engineers. What if one of them is stalking someone? What if he wants to know where his wife was last night?
I think he was asking for actual incidents, not hypotheticals. Its not hard to think of bad things that could happen. But whether anything has actually happened is a completely different question.
Mostly for writing parking tickets. When they rolled out plate scanners in DC they didn't even have access to stolen cars database -- it was purely for parking tickets.
Living in a world where the IRS will secretly leak your tax details to your political enemies* means I'd rather the centralized database not exist in the first place ... at least, not without massive effort to remove personally identifying information.
This is harder than it sounds. I believe Schneier had an article up showing how a person's lat-lon tracks alone makes them very easy to identify, if you already know things like where they live, where they work, etc.
* well, they did promise they really didn't do it, so I guess it's okay then, because they wouldn't lie about it ... and I also believe 7 hard drives or whatever can simultaneously accidentally break, when they just happen to be the ones containing evidence under Congressional subpoena.
Sounds good, and I agree with the change. That said, something to convey "spying on you to keep you safe" has a nice Orwellian ring to it, which I feel this topic deserves. Just my two cents, that's all.
I don't think that braking slower, or accelerating less (or even limiting turning g-forces) is really an indicator of "Safe Driving". Yes, it is definitely a signal, and obviously a good one otherwise insurance companies wouldn't be using it. But I think that the mark of good driving is knowing what you and your car can do, and actively paying attention to the road around you (several hundred feet behind and in front), and thinking about piloting the 2 ton piece of metal you're in as opposed to blindly doing it. A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance -- but it has to be all in or nothing.
On the flip side, I would find it somewhat amusing to put one of the trackers in my track car and see what they think of that...
> I don't think that braking slower, or accelerating less (or even limiting turning g-forces) is really an indicator of "Safe Driving". Yes, it is definitely a signal, and obviously a good one otherwise insurance companies wouldn't be using it. But I think that the mark of good driving is knowing what you and your car can do, and actively paying attention to the road around you (several hundred feet behind and in front), and thinking about piloting the 2 ton piece of metal you're in as opposed to blindly doing it.
If it is a "good signal" then it's an indicator pretty much by definition. The thing is, it doesn't matter what is the poetic mark of "good driving"; what counts are accident statistics going down. One constant about all humans is that you can't ask them to think, or care, or be nice, and expect them to change behaviour. You need to make them change, by changing their habits and/or incentive structures around them, of which, in the case of cars, the insurance bill is a very important part. People behave in a deterministic way, especially when you look at big groups (such as drivers). You don't yell at a river and expect it to change it's way, you force it to do it.
> A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance
That would most certainly help, but I wouldn't call it the number one thing (the number one thing would be banning human drivers and replacing them with self-driving cars). I'd love to see driving licenses requiring training comparable to pilot licenses.
> So I guess it has accelerometers because GPS doesn't refresh quickly enough to measure acceleration.
True, at least not for anything less than a second or two.
> So, who's going to design/build a nice shock-dampening mount for the devices?
Android devices have accelerometers built in that are cheap and would provide adequate resolution for this kind of measurement, and that can't be easily broken. No shock mount required.
I think the idea of the parent comment was to build a mount that would hide periods of high acceleration. I imagine that's only possible if your "shock mount" is significantly longer than the car itself.
You'd have to refuse to create computational devices of all sorts. It is the case of the Great Web of Causality, that things are heavily interconnected with each other. Everything you do inflicts consequences on everything else within your light cone, and back-tracing effects to what caused them is only the matter of enough data and computing power.
To put it in a less grand/mythological way: they can always find another way to get the data they need. It's only a matter of computing power and having a little nut of imagination in one's head. Think of all the side-channel attacks talked about recently - reading speech data from laser, reading speech data from high-speed video, reading crypto keys from power consumption patterns, reading crypto keys from voltage variations on Ethernet cable, reading data from screen reflections off the wall, reading data from RF emissions of CRT displays, reading keypresses from phone accelerometer, reading speech from phone accelerometer, etc. etd.
That doesn't mean I will be the one to build it. Many undesirable things are imminently possible, easy even, but very few people do those things. With enough solid arguments and education, mass surveillance, even ostensibly for good purposes, can be added to that list.
I don't know... The more I think of it, the more I start to believe some form of technological determinism is driving humanity. That the new technologies determine what will be taught to people and what they will argue about, not the other way around. I mean, do we have a single example of a new technology that could be useful to some while harmful to others, that we collectively agreed not to use or pursue, by means of arguments and educations? Nuclear weapons don't really count, because their use seems dictated solely by game-theoretic reasons (MAD that saved us from global destruction, some nations like Russia apparently pushing their luck by declaring readiness to use tactical nuclear weapons to support their conventional forces, etc.).
Kind of. What counts to the insurance companies is having to pay out as little as possible, while still taking as much of people's money as they'll give. So they do want fewer accidents, but they also want more paying customers that won't file claims (uninsured/undocumented driver's fault) or have claims filed on them (when it's their own fault). Using incentives to manipulate (manage) customers' behavior achieves this, with the PR goal of "lowering accident statistics."
But by your same logic the number one thing isn't banning drivers and replacing them with self driving cars (have you ever written perfectly, 1000% bug-free code?), it's banning all movement faster than walking speed -- and even then requiring people to wear crash helmets and blinkers and "blind sport information systems"...
There is no perfect approach. But I don't think that insurance companies doing this is even on the 'better' spectrum.
It doesn't solve people: not turning on their lights, not merging correctly, talking on the phone, keeping their cars in safe operating condition...
Yes, paying attention to a few numbers and alerting people helps -- but if you want real improvements, you have to tackle the source.
Much like trying to drive on a highway of people who's sole purpose is to "achieve the best MPG EVER!!!!" this encourages hyper-focus in the wrong direction.
So don't yell at drivers. They won't listen, they won't change.
> But by your same logic...
A small digression: that's why I hate "logic". Logic is so 1200s. We have this thing called probability theory and we really can deal with numbers other than 0 and 1.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. Cars get people killed (random statistics time! It's about Hiroshima + Nagasaki every two months.). Pedestrians not wearing crash-helmets rarely so (I'm not counting idiots who think they can go on a highway on a bike at night without any light or HV clothing; but there it is again, they fail at basic risk/reward calculation and you need to force them somehow to behave). Self-driving cars don't need to be "perfectly, 1000% bug-free", they just have to drive better than humans, which doesn't seem too high a standard and I'm confident it will be reached in few years.
> There is no perfect approach.
Couldn't agree more.
> But I don't think that insurance companies doing this is even on the 'better' spectrum. It doesn't solve people: not turning on their lights, not merging correctly, talking on the phone, keeping their cars in safe operating condition... (...) but if you want real improvements, you have to tackle the source.
Well, I honestly don't know of any better way. Education doesn't work. Most of the drivers I know don't accept the fact that their reckless driving is a part of the problem (I do know exceptions, but sadly, those are mostly exceptions, and they still seem to care about insurance costs more). Social expectations are really hard to manufacture, and the current one worldwide seems to be "driving is a right, drivers are the best, lawmakers and traffic controllers impose bullshit restrictions on speed to make money on us". So forcing people financially to behave seems like the only real option left.
> this encourages hyper-focus in the wrong direction.
I think I get your point - you're afraid that our values (safety) and insurance company's values (profit) are not well-aligned. I agree. But I believe they're aligned enough to push us in the right direction some more in an effective way. But I do believe that at some point those values will fall out of alignment to the point that we might be forced to ditch dependence on insurance for behaviour forming. The question is when.
Next: "Insurance companies warn against unsafe, self-driving driving cars." Spy on me then kill the very thing that could make car insurance obsolete. Fuck off.
Actually it's an exercise in manipulation. HN tends to take itself too seriously sometimes (you know, pressure for intellectual rigour and all that), so occasionally I'll throw something out there to see how many points I can lose.
Now people will optimize for whatever this meassure, at the cost of driving safely. Don't take the route that has slow driving traffic, take the one with fast moving traffic even though you are going to cause far more damage. Don't stop for a red light, it will cost breaking points.
You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it.
> You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents
No, their job is to collect as much money as they can from the best drivers possible while avoiding having to pay anything at all. That's how health insurance works, that's how auto insurance works, that's the nature of insurance. "Avoid paying out unless legally required to, and then pay out as little as you can legally get away with." and the best way to do that is to have a customer base comprised of people who you're unlikely to have to pay out for (good drivers, healthy people)
> Now people will optimize for whatever this meassure, at the cost of driving safely.
The point is, insurance company has a strong financial incentive make the measure be as much an accurate proxy for driving safely as possible. If people start ignoring red lights to avoid braking points, insurance companies will try to get to that data (by offering you discounts for providing it). This is a good scheme; the best way to "outsmart" insurance is to drive safely. This can be a textbook example of http://xkcd.com/810/.
Thinking about it, I'm starting to believe that speeding tickets should be sent to insurance companies directly. I.e. keep driving like a moron, and soon you won't be able to afford to drive. (also, it would be helpful to replace point&click speeding cameras with average-speed computing ALPRs)
> You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it.
No, if people don't cause accidents then insurance company gets free money.
For many people, having insurance is required, either by the state (for a car) or a bank (for a house). Those who don't fall into these categories often choose to self-insure, and self-insurance has the advantage that you derive the benefit of the invested money, rather than the insurance company's stockholders.
There's always a chance that you will. Thinking otherwise is very naive. No human is a perfect driver, everyone can get distracted, or have health problems, or somehow end up in a situation where only superhuman reflexes could help.
The only way to be sure you don't cause accident is for you to never drive, at which point you don't need car insurance, and rightly so. As you can see, the system works well - if you can't cause a car accident, you don't need a car insurance.
Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways. Solutions using GPS mileage logging devices are already being piloted in Oregon to implement a tax per mile model.
Also by 2020 wireless broadband will be mandatory in vehicles, and studies are being conducted re feasibility of providing remote management of vehicles from state traffic management centers.
"The safety applications currently being developed provide warnings to drivers so that they can prevent imminent collisions, but do not automatically operate any vehicle systems, such as braking or steering. NHTSA is also considering future actions on active safety technologies that rely on on-board sensors. Those technologies are eventually expected to blend with the V2V technology."
> Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways
Then they might as well take a page off the Finnish playbook of late 1990's. (The "financially molested" chapter, to be precise.)
Finland has long had a punitive annual tax for vehicles that use diesel. After all, for a very long time, diesel was way cheaper than gas. In 1990's, the tax was ~5k FIM/year. Professional drivers had calculated that the break-even point was about 30000 km a year, and if you drove more than that, diesel was still cheaper.
Then, a company came up with a fully electric van. It ran on batteries only. It was cumbersome, and it was suited for in-city travels only. Nonetheless the Finnish legislators freaked out. A car that ran on something that didn't produce tax revenue? An abomination!
So they did what any (in)sensible legislators would do anywhere in the world: they mandated an extra tax to be levied on all-electric cars. Namely, 20x annual diesel tax. (A good van cost about 100k FIM at the time.)
The net effect was that for the privilege of owning an all-electric vehicle you would have needed to fork out roughly the price of the new car every single year as taxes. This particular law was struck off the books a few years later, when the onslaught of hybrids and electric cars had become apparent.
But it did show exactly how car owners were viewed, and how even a prospect of missed tax revenue was a cause for extreme measures.
1) Concerning privacy: I imagine that with systems like eCall in Europe drivers privacy is/will be a fiction (eCall is intended to bring rapid assistance to motorists involved in a collision).
2) Methodology for calculating premiums: in my opinion one of the most interested technology for premium calculation was introduced by UK-based company http://mydrivesolutions.com. The basic difference between this one and most of US solution I've seen so far is about getting context information from the environment to better calculate the risk for the insurer. They extract information from road attributes and build behavioral map to better understand driving behavior in a certain context (events are more complex than braking and accelerating).
I'm surprised it has taken so long for insurance companies to start to do this, I was working with systems that could have done this over ten years ago.
61 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadAlso how does it distinguish between drivers? My kids often "borrow" the car and I'd like to be able to "advise" them when they're causing our insurance to go up by driving poorly.. :-)
That is the correct conclusion though. The insurance company could care less whether you're a bad driver—what they really care is how much of an accident risk are you.
Even a good driver frequently caught in LA traffic is a higher risk than a good driver elsewhere. Hence the device is reporting exactly what the company needs.
It is very true that if you are driving in rush hour traffic you have no choice but to appear to be a bad driver. The irony of this is that the accident happening in rush hour is probably minor, yet when I'm barrelling down the highway at a steady pace I appear to be a great driver whereas an accident would be very costly (fatal perhaps).
Also they normalize your infractions (sharp breaking, sharp acceleration, speeding, etc) by distance driven so long highway driving is even more beneficial (few infractions, long distances) than traffic jams (many infractions, short distances).
Our incentives are different. We would rather have many tiny incidents (up to a limit) than a few life threatening incidents.
Therefore, while an insurance company would happily put into place a process that turns a small number of drivers into maniacs and everyone else into placid sheep they'd take it.
Not that they are, and it sounds unlikely that such a process can even exist, but it's important to know that our incentives aren't aligned.
And the insurance companies have been doing this for a long, long time. Many moons ago (pre-internet) I worked summers doing telemarketing for a Very Large insurance company. When people signed up for auto policies the agents would casually ask the ages of the children during conversation. That information was stored away for years, sometimes a decade, until the kid turned 16.
My job was to call and "casually" ask questions like "so, which of your cars is Johnny driving when he gets the keys?". You can guess the rest.
It got to be a point of humor in their family. "Mommy, you're driving too fast!"
It did lower their car insurance considerably. Thankfully, it was a temporary deal to have it installed, not a permanent commitment.
We all know how that turned out.
And now with these airplane-style black boxes inside cars (the manufacturers have their own black boxes, too) ... I'm sure the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc would never start drinking from this firehose of data, and mis-use it.
I'm sure Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, etc would find this info useful, too ... although with the installed user base of Android phones, Google / Apple pretty likely already have quite a bit of this info.
http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic...
Two-year database of every car's location at specific times & dates. Though it is hard to say if it's been misused or not since they frequently ignore FOIA's about its existence.
The things I worry about for the future:
1. Evidence of everybody breaking the law. (In this case, speeding). If everybody is in violation of the law, the government can choose who to prosecute.
2. Extortion. You might not care about privacy from big brother, but what if your friends and family were to know everything you had ever SMS'd? One day, boom, that might happen to everybody with a low credit score. Everybody else would need to pony up if they want their data kept secret.
3. Data leaks. With these huge vaults of private information, some is bound to leak before too long. Once the data is leaked, there is no putting it back. Eventually, all recorded data from this time period will enter the public record.
That is very sad
This is harder than it sounds. I believe Schneier had an article up showing how a person's lat-lon tracks alone makes them very easy to identify, if you already know things like where they live, where they work, etc.
* well, they did promise they really didn't do it, so I guess it's okay then, because they wouldn't lie about it ... and I also believe 7 hard drives or whatever can simultaneously accidentally break, when they just happen to be the ones containing evidence under Congressional subpoena.
* Old title: Safety Spies
* New title: Lower Your Car Insurance Bill, at the Price of Some Privacy
... the new title's better, but I think adding (safety spies) in parentheses at the end would be a good compromise.
On the flip side, I would find it somewhat amusing to put one of the trackers in my track car and see what they think of that...
If it is a "good signal" then it's an indicator pretty much by definition. The thing is, it doesn't matter what is the poetic mark of "good driving"; what counts are accident statistics going down. One constant about all humans is that you can't ask them to think, or care, or be nice, and expect them to change behaviour. You need to make them change, by changing their habits and/or incentive structures around them, of which, in the case of cars, the insurance bill is a very important part. People behave in a deterministic way, especially when you look at big groups (such as drivers). You don't yell at a river and expect it to change it's way, you force it to do it.
> A better, more strict drivers licensure program is the number one way to increase safety on roads and thus lower the cost of insurance
That would most certainly help, but I wouldn't call it the number one thing (the number one thing would be banning human drivers and replacing them with self-driving cars). I'd love to see driving licenses requiring training comparable to pilot licenses.
So, who's going to design/build a nice shock-dampening mount for the devices?
True, at least not for anything less than a second or two.
> So, who's going to design/build a nice shock-dampening mount for the devices?
Android devices have accelerometers built in that are cheap and would provide adequate resolution for this kind of measurement, and that can't be easily broken. No shock mount required.
Ah. Missed that.
> I imagine that's only possible if your "shock mount" is significantly longer than the car itself.
Yes, true -- a little calculation shows it would be nearly impossible to hide a car's jackrabbit start from within the car.
To put it in a less grand/mythological way: they can always find another way to get the data they need. It's only a matter of computing power and having a little nut of imagination in one's head. Think of all the side-channel attacks talked about recently - reading speech data from laser, reading speech data from high-speed video, reading crypto keys from power consumption patterns, reading crypto keys from voltage variations on Ethernet cable, reading data from screen reflections off the wall, reading data from RF emissions of CRT displays, reading keypresses from phone accelerometer, reading speech from phone accelerometer, etc. etd.
There's always a way.
That doesn't mean I will be the one to build it. Many undesirable things are imminently possible, easy even, but very few people do those things. With enough solid arguments and education, mass surveillance, even ostensibly for good purposes, can be added to that list.
Kind of. What counts to the insurance companies is having to pay out as little as possible, while still taking as much of people's money as they'll give. So they do want fewer accidents, but they also want more paying customers that won't file claims (uninsured/undocumented driver's fault) or have claims filed on them (when it's their own fault). Using incentives to manipulate (manage) customers' behavior achieves this, with the PR goal of "lowering accident statistics."
But by your same logic the number one thing isn't banning drivers and replacing them with self driving cars (have you ever written perfectly, 1000% bug-free code?), it's banning all movement faster than walking speed -- and even then requiring people to wear crash helmets and blinkers and "blind sport information systems"...
There is no perfect approach. But I don't think that insurance companies doing this is even on the 'better' spectrum. It doesn't solve people: not turning on their lights, not merging correctly, talking on the phone, keeping their cars in safe operating condition...
Yes, paying attention to a few numbers and alerting people helps -- but if you want real improvements, you have to tackle the source.
Much like trying to drive on a highway of people who's sole purpose is to "achieve the best MPG EVER!!!!" this encourages hyper-focus in the wrong direction.
So don't yell at drivers. They won't listen, they won't change.
> But by your same logic...
A small digression: that's why I hate "logic". Logic is so 1200s. We have this thing called probability theory and we really can deal with numbers other than 0 and 1.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. Cars get people killed (random statistics time! It's about Hiroshima + Nagasaki every two months.). Pedestrians not wearing crash-helmets rarely so (I'm not counting idiots who think they can go on a highway on a bike at night without any light or HV clothing; but there it is again, they fail at basic risk/reward calculation and you need to force them somehow to behave). Self-driving cars don't need to be "perfectly, 1000% bug-free", they just have to drive better than humans, which doesn't seem too high a standard and I'm confident it will be reached in few years.
> There is no perfect approach.
Couldn't agree more.
> But I don't think that insurance companies doing this is even on the 'better' spectrum. It doesn't solve people: not turning on their lights, not merging correctly, talking on the phone, keeping their cars in safe operating condition... (...) but if you want real improvements, you have to tackle the source.
Well, I honestly don't know of any better way. Education doesn't work. Most of the drivers I know don't accept the fact that their reckless driving is a part of the problem (I do know exceptions, but sadly, those are mostly exceptions, and they still seem to care about insurance costs more). Social expectations are really hard to manufacture, and the current one worldwide seems to be "driving is a right, drivers are the best, lawmakers and traffic controllers impose bullshit restrictions on speed to make money on us". So forcing people financially to behave seems like the only real option left.
> this encourages hyper-focus in the wrong direction.
I think I get your point - you're afraid that our values (safety) and insurance company's values (profit) are not well-aligned. I agree. But I believe they're aligned enough to push us in the right direction some more in an effective way. But I do believe that at some point those values will fall out of alignment to the point that we might be forced to ditch dependence on insurance for behaviour forming. The question is when.
You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it.
Presumably they can stop offering the discounts if they don't actually reduce accidents.
No, their job is to collect as much money as they can from the best drivers possible while avoiding having to pay anything at all. That's how health insurance works, that's how auto insurance works, that's the nature of insurance. "Avoid paying out unless legally required to, and then pay out as little as you can legally get away with." and the best way to do that is to have a customer base comprised of people who you're unlikely to have to pay out for (good drivers, healthy people)
The point is, insurance company has a strong financial incentive make the measure be as much an accurate proxy for driving safely as possible. If people start ignoring red lights to avoid braking points, insurance companies will try to get to that data (by offering you discounts for providing it). This is a good scheme; the best way to "outsmart" insurance is to drive safely. This can be a textbook example of http://xkcd.com/810/.
Thinking about it, I'm starting to believe that speeding tickets should be sent to insurance companies directly. I.e. keep driving like a moron, and soon you won't be able to afford to drive. (also, it would be helpful to replace point&click speeding cameras with average-speed computing ALPRs)
> You are an insurance company your job is to pay when people cause accidents - if people don't cause accidents there is no reason to have it.
No, if people don't cause accidents then insurance company gets free money.
The only way to be sure you don't cause accident is for you to never drive, at which point you don't need car insurance, and rightly so. As you can see, the system works well - if you can't cause a car accident, you don't need a car insurance.
Electric cars and hybrids are breaking the fuel tax methodology of funding highways. Solutions using GPS mileage logging devices are already being piloted in Oregon to implement a tax per mile model.
Also by 2020 wireless broadband will be mandatory in vehicles, and studies are being conducted re feasibility of providing remote management of vehicles from state traffic management centers.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2014/USDOT+t...
"The safety applications currently being developed provide warnings to drivers so that they can prevent imminent collisions, but do not automatically operate any vehicle systems, such as braking or steering. NHTSA is also considering future actions on active safety technologies that rely on on-board sensors. Those technologies are eventually expected to blend with the V2V technology."
Landowners are going to be more willing to allow access if there is a way to get paid for it.
Then they might as well take a page off the Finnish playbook of late 1990's. (The "financially molested" chapter, to be precise.)
Finland has long had a punitive annual tax for vehicles that use diesel. After all, for a very long time, diesel was way cheaper than gas. In 1990's, the tax was ~5k FIM/year. Professional drivers had calculated that the break-even point was about 30000 km a year, and if you drove more than that, diesel was still cheaper.
Then, a company came up with a fully electric van. It ran on batteries only. It was cumbersome, and it was suited for in-city travels only. Nonetheless the Finnish legislators freaked out. A car that ran on something that didn't produce tax revenue? An abomination!
So they did what any (in)sensible legislators would do anywhere in the world: they mandated an extra tax to be levied on all-electric cars. Namely, 20x annual diesel tax. (A good van cost about 100k FIM at the time.)
The net effect was that for the privilege of owning an all-electric vehicle you would have needed to fork out roughly the price of the new car every single year as taxes. This particular law was struck off the books a few years later, when the onslaught of hybrids and electric cars had become apparent.
But it did show exactly how car owners were viewed, and how even a prospect of missed tax revenue was a cause for extreme measures.
This was the land of the free. I'd rather control my own steering wheel, acceleration and brakes, thank you very much.
Welcome to the future.
2) Methodology for calculating premiums: in my opinion one of the most interested technology for premium calculation was introduced by UK-based company http://mydrivesolutions.com. The basic difference between this one and most of US solution I've seen so far is about getting context information from the environment to better calculate the risk for the insurer. They extract information from road attributes and build behavioral map to better understand driving behavior in a certain context (events are more complex than braking and accelerating).