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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
So now imagine law enforcement has access to your cumulative driving habits/traits and the last 20 minutes of driving that day. Imagine the insurance company has processed that data for its own purpose and assigned some kind of (totally arbitrary and contrived) "aggressive" or "risk" rating to certain actions etc. Law enforcement now has a prepackaged report that will invariably say you're a terrible driver. Of course the data collected is going to say that as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money.
Now, whether or not you were or were not driving in a reckless manner, theres data to make a case with and nobody is perfect. That data may or may not reflect the reality of the situation and even so, prosecutors are known to take the easy route to boost their own stats. Now imagine a prosecutor looking for an easy win has a prepackaged report of biased information from the insurance company?
This whole thing seems like a way to possibly save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you.
The final straw for me after a few months was another driver running a stop sign and feeling my brain waste milliseconds deciding if I should hit the brakes as hard as I should or juuuust hard enough to avoid hitting them in hopes I don't get a beep. I did the latter and it beeped anyway so I ripped it off the ODBII port and threw it on the floor. I changed insurance companies the moment I got home from work.
My final score was really poor and I was pissed since I'm the slowest and safest driver I know.
It's a failure of the industry that they tend to market this monitoring as all about the driver. It's really not, it's just conditional probability.
Yes, aggressive driving is a bad thing--but it's not something easily detected by a sensor.
I called 911 and the police took 30 minutes to arrive on the scene. The officer talked to me for about 3 minutes and then threw up their hands and said they wouldn't do anything because I didn't have a plate number and couldn't identify the driver.
The police didn't even want to bother trying to get footage from nearby cameras when I called back and noted the location of several nearby security cameras that might have picked up the vehicle.
By some miracle, I wasn't seriously injured.
But the law is, auto insurance companies can only make money on scale. If they charge premiums that are out of line for the risk being covered they have to refund them. This happened when people drove significantly less during covid.
Some state they may charge you more, however. I just looked up a few:
State Farm: "Drive Safe & Save is always a discount and does not surcharge your policy. The Drive Safe & Save discount is based on your annual mileage and basic driving characteristics."
Nationwide: "Can SmartRide increase my premium? No. This is a discount program. SmartRide measures driving behavior to reward you with a discount, not raise your rates."
Allstate: "Customers will receive a policy discount for participating in Drivewise and those who sign up and avoid risky behaviors can save on their premium. If customers stay active in Drivewise (active participation means at least one driver takes 50 trips or drives prior to renewal processing), their participation discount will not decline, but overall premium savings from Drivewise will depend on the customer's driving behaviors. Drivers who have riskier driving behaviors are expected to see a higher price from participating in Drivewise."
GEICO: "DriveEasy is a new program that promotes safe driving by providing both GEICO and the customer valuable information about individual driving patterns. This is designed to help you become a safer driver. Most customers will be able to save based on their safe driving habits, however riskier drivers may see a higher rate – depending on the state you live in."
If you want to buy a car that doesn’t have such a device, do you need a 2010? A 2019? Country dependent?
Isn't that what they did in paragraph 1?
Historically, as a XXI century society, we tend to adopt solutions like this (AirBnB, Uber, “you are the product” platforms, blindly accepting ToS, etc).
I don’t mean to be a nihilist, I just wanted to point out that this nothing new and that this is a trend. Hopefully there will be a way to balance this like the other examples, even if a little.
Your insurance company pays more if you are at fault, so they'd prefer to prove you innocent.
I believe any box or anything that monitors car will be used by insurance company to simply not pay up.
Nowadays, everything they come up with is like this.
First off, you're usually relying on ODB-2 + GPS + usually some type of streaming backend, which means you're looking at 2 unreliable (or, at least, hard to _interpret_) sources of data delivered and presumably analyzed by a notoriously tricky delivery mechanism (near-real time streaming), which has a tendency to be too much to handle for the notoriously non-"tech" insurance world. The chances that data is being interpreted quite differently to what's happening on the road, but yet is treated as a source of truth for your premium model!, is certainly not zero.
Even if you assume these companies handle all that properly (or outsource it), these data sets are some of the creepiest by their very nature - not only can you trivially determine somebody's home address by analyzing frequency of the reverse-geocoded data points (or any other geospatial features you derive), you can also determine any other patterns within a person's life - schedules, work location & employer, health habits (do they go to the gym or a bar? do they only ever leave to go to the grocery store?) etc., not to mention all the data ODB-2 gives you about actual driving behavior. And guess what, you can't use synthetic data for testing for much of this (I tried), so we would up testing these systems with real data, albeit with employees who volunteered.
A home address is arguably not that sensitive, given that that is public record if you own your home and your insurance company has that data anyways, but the patterns + all the other metadata + all the "public" data that is out there ready for purchase about the average American, now you have something close to a personality profile that would make your average marketing exec (or, potentially, bad government actor) squeal in delight.
1984 aint got nothing on that insurance company. Do you remember the name so we can all collectively try to avoid it?
I'd rather some scrappy startup have all my data than my bank or my insurance provider. At least the startup has limited power. My bank can ruin my life by giving my a shit credit score because their model told them to, and by appealing to their trusted societal position, they'll convince themselves that it was the right thing to do.
Facebook was once a scrappy startup.
As was Google.
Well, your phone has already done that - Waze "helpfully" auto-populated my home and work address for me.
I'm pretty sure your insurance company knows where you live.
iOS allows me to set relatively fine-grained permissions and privacy settings. Unless I actively use Google Maps (or any other GPS enabled app), it won't be able to report my location data.
It is possible that your phone provider does not have more than 24 hours of records of which phone towers you connected to.
It is almost certain that the granularity of any information subpoenaed after the fact will not be sufficient to establish any specific behavior at the time of the accident.
Your phone provider is probably not using some off-the-shelf ML modeling to slap together a risk profile that you will be unable to appeal and yet is years ahead of any government regulation. (E.g., in the US if your credit rating causes you to get a worse rate, you must be notified. I have not looked, but I'm very dubious that your "Driver Risk Profile (TM)" will have any such obligations - now or in the imaginable future. See below.)
Biden's proposed AI Bill of Rights [1] is (surprisingly) a pretty interesting read:
> You should know that an automated system is being used and understand how and why it contributes to outcomes that impact you.
If this were a law, this part would be useful.
> You and your communities should be free from unchecked surveillance
I suppose watching your every move in the car isn't going to be considered "unchecked". Since people are all carrying cell phones, I'm not as hopeful this point goes anywhere useful.
[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights/#privacy
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.
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...
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.
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?
Definitely seems like a losing battle. My retirement plan is a remote cabin in the woods.
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.
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.
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...
Wouldn't that be fraud?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Her relative also had it for three months, but after that the insurance company said he would be better off without it.
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.
> 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?
Liberty Mutual only records your behavior for one quarter, and then gives you a discount for as long as you hold your policy. I ended up with a permanent 28% discount!
It analyzes your driving based on four factors: total miles drive, how fast you accelerate and decelerate, and whether you drive in the wee hours.
I found the temporary loss of privacy to be totally reasonable and an excellent tradeoff.
I called and turns out my insurance was already so “low” that 2% is the most it would have ever offered.
I dunno about elsewhere but in Canada, insurance is like tech job salaries, the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years.
I had Farmers for about 5 years in a row. It started off at $440/6months and ended up at $900/6months -- on the same two cars (comprehensive on only one of them). I tried calling them up and asking why my insurance was going up when the amount they were actually covering was going down due to depreciation. They avoided my calls and lost my business.
Now I'm trying to deal with the legalities of having a child in college in another state, but no car.
I have a hunch that the risk is the longer they keep you the more likely to have an accident they have to pay out. So if you are a good customer, no claims for 3 years your engagement with them has been very profitable. If they keep you for another year and you have an claim then that engagement is unprofitable. Just a hunch as insurance math is complicated.
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.
Is there any proof that any of these behaviors actually correlate with tangible risk? (I mean, I can understand that "simply driving a lot" increases risk.)
Personally, I'd be more interested in cars with cameras using machine learning to build a risk profile of other cars. I'm not the only person who sees dangerous behavior all the time. It would be interesting if I could sell a stream from my cameras to a company that builds risk profiles based on observed behavior.
I do think that a key component for success is near real-time feedback so it feels like a game and not a speeding ticket in the mail.
However, with a large enough corpus of training data including years of telematics on drivers with and without insurance claims it certainly seems like it should be possible to build models that can make much more accurate risk assessments than they can with the data they currently collect such as age, zipcode, and past accidents.
Put another way, I would be surprised if there was zero correlation between driving behavior and insurance claims.
The biggest factor they can monitor is verifying miles driven. Miles driven, unsurprisingly, has a bigger impact than virtually anything else someone signing up to be monitored would be guilty of.
In general, no surprises.
What really surprises me is that my insurance company never asks for an odometer reading. I haven't changed insurance in years. It's also hard to estimate how many miles I will drive in a year because my life situation changes every few years.
Technology could play a big role in ensuring people actually follow the rules and are held accountable for criminal negligence causing injury or death.
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.
Each insurance company uses the telematics differently. While the pricing model is regulated, it is not public. There is a substantial difference company-to-company
I think this is an instance of HN-confirmation bias. We all hate monitoring, so a study or article that says UBI and behavioral modification is harmful appeals to us.
Soon, I discovered that Aviva had a plan for which you can signup: you download the app, and leave that active (data and location) while driving. The app monitors your driving pattern for aound 200 miles. Then it scores you out of 10. I felt smug that I scored 9.7 (IIRC). And, as promised, I got a rather neat discount on my insurance. IIRC, it came under GBP 300.
I just wanted to say that alternatives like the above exists.
Aviva continued to quote me lowest, until this year. I had to move away because, it happend to me, too, what happens to every loyal customer in the UK: deals popup elsewhere that are available only to new customers. So, exploring switching providers every now and then, is worthwhile.
I don't think I'm giving away much personal data: The insurance set up a separate legal entity that performs the ranking, with a easy-to-read EULA that rules out selling data.
My insurance is using the Cambridge Mobile Telematics modules.
Great case in point, Tesla insurance dings people for "late night driving" -
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/10xaj74/do_not...
But of course prices can only go up.
You pay a small retainer fee ($1.50/day) and then a per mileage fee. This requires the use of a logging device which also impacts your per-mile rate depending on your driving.
I haven't dug into the nuts and bolts of this, but I wonder how well you are covered when the vehicle is not in motion - parked in garage, on the street, etc. At least in my area parking in public can be a risky option between the hit and runs, catalytic converter theft, break-in, 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.
Although its going to be really awkward when they find out my home address and kid's daycare.
For 200km / Month it's working just fine. Below that sometimes fails.
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.
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.
Homeowners have such a strong sense of entitlement
Water wet.
I was paying $620 (for 6 months) with Geico while letting them monitor my driving via my cell phone. The premium never went down although I had 110 scores in their EasyDrive app (In driving for over 11 years in the US, I never had an accident and never filed any claim car insurers; I always drive defensively and never got any ticket either). What I found was EasyDrive app is always punishing me for bad driving practices like running red light (again, the same experience some has mentioned here with Progressive) in fear of registering a hard-brake event; and worse, slowing down excessively to turn the corners (basically, surprising the cars behind me and risking them bumping into my car) because EasyDrive thinks ONLY IF you go below 15 mph then you are doing the cornering right. I guess these EasyDrive developers (or rule makers) never drove on a real road, and found that usually 20mph is the safe way to go about turning on the right corner.
Regardless, I got 15% premium bump in the renewal despite having 110 EasyDrive score (I think Geico raised their premiums by a very high percentage in CA as well; I live in FL and have been using Geico for all the years I've been driving in the US). That pissed me off and I explored other options, and finally got Progressive for $570 for six months. The sacrifice I have to do for this lower rate is to subscribe to their Snapshot program. I used my phone and have been driving for over a month. The relief (good thing) about using Snapshot app is that it doesn't monitor your cornering score. However, like some mentioned here, it still promotes bad driving behavior like running yellow/red light in fear of hard-brakes. It also seems to be a bit proactive in determining what a hard-brake is (again, I'm using their phone app) because I registered 2 hard-brakes (the only two hard brakes that I have recorded so far in about 1.5 months of driving) on my grocery trip. I swear I didn't do any hard brakes (or maybe at most once) because I know the road pretty well and I usually do grocery runs in early mornings on weekends when there are very few cars on the road.
I know I got much cheaper ($570 vs. $710) rate from Progressive now just because I am a new customer. I am pretty sure come next or next, next renewal, they'll jack up my premiums like what Geico did, and then I'll have to switch to yet another insurer like musical chair game. I wish that the car insurers actually have a more accurate, realistic, non-intrusive tech to monitor the driving habits (e.g., the ones who don't use turn signals when turning right/left or changing lanes, which really could cause accidents) and ACTUALLY give discounts to drivers like me who are very careful with their driving (plus, my wife and I drove a total of 6050 miles in the last year). This is all to say that the risk-reward distribution system with car insurance companies is still inefficient.
