Big Blue to give car insurers IoT peeking powers IBM has announced it will spend US$3 billion over four years on a new internet of things business unit. The company reckons the internet of things label now applies to all the the smart city stuff it did for water and traffic management applications in recent years. The idea seems to be to take that work, sprinkle on a little …
Insurers will know I'm driving safely, despite my 25 years experience, spotless driving record, clean licence and 10 years of no claims history telling them that. And then they'll still try and batter me for that time I braked too hard to avoid squashing a cat, or accelerated too hard overtaking a tractor.
No thanks.
at what point does insurance stop being a cost pool spreading risk? If it's finely tuned to me as an individual driver maybe it's cheaper for me to not have insurance coverage beyond the basic required by law.
Targeted charging for younger drivers seems to have reached the point of stopping people driving, which is going to do wonders for the profits of insurance companies in the future, though when we have driverless cars that's going to make the insurance situation interesting.
Not interested. If a newer car has some kind of module that tries to "phone home", I will remove it. I know damned well, these modules will not be used to *reduce* anybody's rates, only to increase them.
Also, the existing module an insurance co. or two advertise (that plug into the OBD2 port) do not recognize good driving habits, just hard braking, acceleration, and speed. So the jackass that drifts down the onramp at 45MPH and fails to yield, cutting into 70MPH traffic (causing problems for everyone else), then goes into the left lane (we drive on the right here) and becomes a 55MPH traffic obstruction (causing problems for everyone else), will be seen as "Hey, they really aren't accelerating that hard, good on them!" while someone using a badly designed interchange that requires some hard braking or accelerating to safely match the flow of traffic will be dinged, not for using the badly designed intersection but because this stupid unit sees them braking or accelerating.
And then..... Your insurance company rings up and says we're not getting data from your car. You're obviously driving with a fault/ driving in weird places with no internet/ etc.
Whatever it is, we're putting your rates up.
What you need is to hack the dongle and feed it with data they will like.
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