So how do you disable it?
Talking cars were supposed to be wisecracking inanimate sidekicks, not narcs for the insurance company. Stupid present not being any of the good futures we were promised in sci-fi.
We wanted KITT. We got some 1984/Umbrella Corp shit.
We got capitalism. This is always how it was gonna turn out when you reward the most sociopathic and morally bankrupt criminals with wealth and power; as long as they act behind the liability shield of a corporation, and do it for-profit.
If you steal 100k you go to prison for years. If you steal 100k from your employees via wage theft you’ll probably only have to pay back a fraction of it and won’t face any criminal charges. There are hundreds of examples the world over of corporations engaging in some of the most heinous crimes imaginable and the criminals responsible facing little more than a public shaming for a news cycle; walking away scott-free with a kings ransom.
Tobacco companies wilfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to lie and endanger public health — for decades — killing millions of people. Everyone involved should have spent the rest of their lives in prison, and been stripped of all their wealth. Same thing happened with lead and asbestos.
The way we’ve allowed, normalised, and accepted corporate criminals prospering for their psychopathy and narcissism, we deserve dystopia.
Didn’t anyone tell you not to hassle the Hoff9000?
Ignoring the privacy implications for a second. The premium goes up for these models if you drive poorly. From a fuck cars perspective I say: raise the premium more, fuck unsafe drivers and their stupid spy cars. I have little sympathy
What defines “unsafe”? Amazon drivers were getting penalized for “taking their eyes off the road” when they were looking at their rear view mirrors. I don’t trust the insurance company’s systems to know when an “unsafe” action is actually the better option.
If those stupid little OBD port modules from the insurance company are anything to go by, slamming your brakes because someone cut you off at a normally safe speed will ding you.
Suddenly stopping because you rear ended that idiot to avoid the ding will also likely ding you.
In theory, on average, your rates should go down because these sudden changes in motion shouldn’t be statistically common, but it’s controlled by profit-seeking entities, so in practice it’s just more unsurprising authoritarian corporate spyware that can’t get the whole picture, scolding you and justifying your punishment.
Do you trust a multi million corporation to fairly implement this sort of system and not squeeze their customers for every cent?
I’m not advocating for the insurance company and never said to trust them or their definitions. Stop trying to turn this into something it’s not.
You were the one that mentioned “premiums” and not “fines”.
Ahh yes we should go from an actual indicator of actual accidents to a computer interpretation of g forces and what an insurance company wants to use to make more money.
Seems totally reasonable to ditch actual accident data for interpolation. Super smart.
Accident data is rare and random. You might be a good driver and have gotten unlucky once. You might be a terrible driver and gotten lucky every single time.
That’s what happens if you have such an extremely tiny sample size.
Accident data is rare and random
wut.
In the U.S., millions of car accidents occur annually, with around 6.1 million police-reported crashes in 2023, leading to roughly 40,900 fatalities, though total crashes including non-injury ones reach over 13 million.
And its not random, some car brands have much higher crash rates.
There are 237.7 million licensed drivers in the US. That means there’s 0.026 police reported crashes per driver per year. (Crashes not reported to the police are usually also not reported to insurance and thus don’t matter in this discussion.)
Or to put it differently, that’s one crash per 39 years of driving per driver or on average 1.6 crashes in a lifetime.
Yes, every crash is one to many and every fatality of course as well. In that regard it’s far too many, but that’s not what we are talking about.
We are talking about insurances estimating the likelyhood of future crashes of a driver. That means, on average, insurance has 1 data point per driver, and for anyone younger than 35 likely 0 data points.
That’s not nearly enough to make any kind of statistically significant guess on how likely someone is to cause a crash.
For any statistically significant result you’d need at least a few dozen data points.
For that crashes are far, far too rare, so it makes sense to try to get better data that actually has some kind of significance.
Fuck the insurance companies, they should all be nationalized, with zero compensation for the capitalists running them now.
But yeah, we really don’t have useful accident data on the individual level. Tracking behavior that makes crashes more likely (and especially severe crashes, which cause a lot of damage) is a much more reasonable way to determine rates.
Unfortunately they don’t work. I used one for a time, and basically took even my slowest, most gentle start in order to register as safe acceleration. Stopping was a disaster where most of the time I needed to just put it in neutral and coast to a stop or risk watching my rates go up. Had so many “yellow” trips, it was insane. And then if someone were really worried I can actually see it being distracting where they might now have to consider a rate increase when slowing down to avoid an accident which, given how bad a decision making people are already, doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea.
I drive a BRZ, and I think the app used the accelerometer in the phone, so maybe it was calibrated for a big soft thing and just assumed that anything I did was street racing.
For context, I’m the kinda person to stop at all stop signs, even the one at the end of a drive-thru at 3am where I can see for miles all around me. I keep following distances so well that I actually don’t use my brakes enough and they get rustier quicker than normal, especially since I drive so rarely these days. These apps would punish me for my driving and reward people in large SUVs who are more likely to turn into a pedestrian than anything(but a reasonable speed!).
Don’t forget, accelerating quickly is the correct and safe thing to do in a lot of scenarios. If people could stop merging into 60 MPH highway traffic at 35, that would be great. That’s a common driving experience where making use of your cars 0-60 time is important and safer, but the monitoring system will just see “rapid acceleration, that’s unsafe”.
Yea holy shit, it’s insane that people will try to merge like that. And some on-ramps are quite short, which I support because it’s less land wasted, so you really gotta boogey.
This can be an issue when a short ramp has a curve. For larger or heavier vehicles it can be unsafe or straight up impossible to reach high enough speed on those ramps.
And the incredibly large vehicles can be easily seen and accommodated for. One exception does not make the idea bad and besides, for many of the oversized ramps found in downtowns one issue is that trucks of that size shouldn’t even be allowed there anyways. North Americans are just used to the idea of shoving an 18-wheeler or whatever into areas that should never be in but it’s not good just because it’s normal.
It isn’t just 18 wheelers that would struggle, city & school buses, service vehicles for infrastructure, box trucks and large vans used for trades and deliveries.
City and school buses don’t go on highways, or at least it is vanishingly rare, and service vehicles are likewise not nearly common enough for it to have any kind of impact, nor are they even often present on the highway during busy times. Box trucks and vans are more common, but they’re not exactly powerless and they aren’t common.
Besides, highways through the middle of town shouldn’t be there at all so I don’t really give a damn.
This. Apart from the privacy stuff, this is actually what we want.
If this could be done without massive privacy implications it would be optimal to have a device in every car that instantly fines you for every wrong action you take in traffic.
Change lane without blinking? That’s €2.
Follow too closely? Another €2.
Just briefly made it over the speed limit? Costs you another €2 per second over the limit.
Honking in no-honking-zones? That will be €2 again.
Don’t let a pedestrian cross at a pedestrian crossing? Again, €2.
If every infraction is fined, the fines themselves don’t be massive like they are right now. That takes away that gambling-like excitement and also punishes bad drivers significantly (since they break the laws all the time) while not incurring significant fines for someone who drives well but accidentally made a mistake once.
Love the idea, but let’s add one zero. Or we make it a point system and once you hit 10 penalties the car shuts off until someone qualified to drive comes around to take over.
The reason why fines currently have to be so high is because drivers aren’t caught in 99+% of cases when they break the law.
You can speed all day every day and only get caught once a month, so the fine needs to be high to compensate for the low rate of getting caught.
If you get caught every single time you do something wrong, that means that someone who routinely ignores the laws will accumulate high fines while someone who drives well but made a mistake once doesn’t get high fines.
Imagine this scenario: You missed a speed limit sign. Your in car entertainment system beeps and shows a small message: “Too fast, €2”. You immediately reduce your speed and comply with the law.
Alternatively, you ignore the message and continue to drive too fast. Every few seconds the system beeps again and fines you another €2. By the end of the trip you racked up €200 in fines.
That’s a much fairer system than the current one where missing one speed limit sign once can cost you a lot of money while someone who memorized the locations of the speed cameras can get away with speeding all the time without getting caught.
Love the idea, but let’s add one zero.
You’re being vindictive. The fines should be as low as they can be and still change motorist behavior, while being scaled to wealth/income.
On one hand, yeah, fuck this surveillance bullshit. The last thing my car should be doing is making anything more expensive, and it’s not the job of the insurance companies to be the road police.
On the other…. Maybe don’t drive like an ass? It really isn’t hard to, I dunno, use your blinkers, leave enough room between you and the car in front of you, and to get in the correct lane ahead of time.
I just feel like the lady doth protest too much in this particular situation.
