A few days ago, The New York Times had a story that simultaneously both felt alarming and at the same time entirely expected. The story was about how carmakers are sending driving data to insurance companies, with data broker firm LexisNexis acting as a middleman. This data is then used for insurance companies to, usually, it seems, jack up rates. There’s all sorts of troubling implications about this, but I think one of the least discussed ones is that the data being gathered really doesn’t make sense as the basis of deciding whether or not a particular driver is “safe” or not, and really shouldn’t be used to adjust a driver’s insurance premiums.
The mechanism by which this data is gathered and sent off to be judged are via connected car applications like GM’s Smart Driver, which tracks metrics like distance driven, average speed, hard acceleration, hard braking, and late night driving (between midnight and 4 am). Other carmakers have very similar systems, but for the moment I’m going to look at the GM one as a representative of this phenomenon.
Long before the NYT article came out, owners had been noticing that their data was being tracked, sometimes alerted to this fact if they happen to live in a state with laws that require notification if certain data-tracking criteria are met. One such state is Colorado, which is where the Reddit user that posted this year-ish old post lives:
Chevrolet Smart Driver is really freaking creepy. Here’s how to turn it off.
Got some vague letter in the mail from LexisNexis about how Colorado law requires me to be notified when I have a certain number of red flag something-or-others on my account. When I tried to figure out if my identity was stolen or something, I was able to get a huge report about myself. Part of it was about every trip I’ve made in that car. No location data, but date, time, distance, VIN, and events (Acceleration, Hard brake, and High speed). Mind you, this was NOT from a GM-internal report, it was one of those companies that do credit reporting and the like. So GM must be sharing this. It took some fumbling around to figure it out, but here’s how I was able to unenroll:
Log in to the myChevrolet app
Go to More
Tap Chevrolet Smart Driver
Here you can see all the stuff that’s tracked and shared. On top, there’s a Driving Activity drop-down that doesn’t immediately look like a drop-down. Click that, and Enrollment Settings
Ignore the “Program Overview” thing that tries to justify it’s creepy existence. Well, I guess you can look if you want. But be sure to tap Unenroll
Pick a reason (I chose Other because there is no “this is creepy AF” option) and click Unenroll again
Click OK at the pathetic notification that they’ll miss tracking you
Let your state’s attorney general know that you don’t appreciate being tracked (and data shared, tied to you personally) without explicitly opting in to a program.
As the NYT article emphasizes, this owner was not aware that this data was being shared by GM to a third party – LexisNexis – who then sells that data to insurance providers, who can use it to adjust the rates their clients pay. Now, if you are aware that this data is being tracked at all, a car owner could see much of this data, and the “driving score” that is computed from the data, via the Smart Driver app:
Of course, it’s still not obvious that this information is being shared by any organization other than GM, and it’s definitely not clear that these results could be used to crank up your insurance premiums. The data is presented in a gamified way, encouraging drivers to try for higher scores.
There are so many problems with all of this, from data privacy to consumer rights and so on, but it’s also worth noting that the metrics used here really have nothing to do with whether a driver is safe or not.
What these metrics appear to be steering a driver toward is a sort of languid, easy, calm sort of driving experience, which I suppose isn’t inherently bad, but it’s also a horrible way to measure a safe driver because it’s a set of criteria completely removed from the environment and situation that the car is actually being driven in.
Take the “hard braking” metric, for example. It’s treated as a negative, with scores lowering if you have a lot of hard braking incidents. But there are absolutely times while driving where you want to brake, and brake hard. If a kid or deer or a kid on a deer or dog or tortoise or whatever bolts out unexpectedly in front of you, a safe driver will apply their brakes, hard. Soft, gradual braking is not safe in such a situation, but the data gathering does not appear to take the overall situation into account.
Same goes for hard acceleration; there are times when the safe thing to do is to get out of the way of something, fast, and that means accelerating hard. Sometimes you need to merge from a short on-ramp onto a fast moving highway – I remember sections of the 134 and 2 highways around Pasadena, California being like that – and if you didn’t accelerate quickly, you’d be putting yourself and cars behind you in some genuine peril.
And don’t get me started on the “Late Night Driving” metric; some people work night shifts! Perhaps statistically there’s more wrecks in those hours, but there are also plenty of valid and safe reasons to drive whenever the hell you want.
Even average speed is deceptive; if most of your driving is on large, open highways with a speed limit of 70+, should you be penalized for having a high average speed?
Fundamentally, the issue here is that these sort of driving scores attempt to make people drive to satisfy a set of criteria that has nothing to do with the actual driving situation the driver is in. You should drive based on what is happening immediately around your car. If you can drive slowly and gently, wonderful, but if you need to react quickly to a situation around your car, the safe thing is to do just that, arbitrary driving scores on your phone be damned.
The truth is that none of this driving score bullshit is for the benefit of the driver. Even if they displayed the driving score in real time on your dash so you can work to maximize it, that wouldn’t really help, because the “score” is meaningless. The data that gets sent, sneakily, from your car to your insurance provider is not really there to help you. It’s there because it may help the insurance company make money, and we all know that.
If this was genuinely for safety reasons, there is one thing that an insurance company could do: they could use the car’s Bluetooth capabilities to pair with the driver’s phone upon entry to the car, and then disable most of the non-emergency uses of that phone. Allow maps/navigation, maybe some music playing, and emergency calls, and that’s it. The biggest threat to driving safety today is distracted driving, and if insurance companies want safer drivers, they can take care of that.
If a driver opts into such a program, then the insurance company should cut their premiums by some decent amount, since they know that driver will not be distracted texting or watching TikTok or live-streaming for their OnlyFans. The problem is such a program doesn’t offer any means to increase premiums, so I suspect it’ll be a non-starter.
Safe drivers adjust their driving to the situation in the real world that surrounds their car, not some gamified set of inane rules.
Cars – well, modern, internet-connected cars – are already known to be some of the worst offenders of not respecting your privacy of almost any product out there. Hell, remember when we learned that Kia and Nissan reserved the right to learn about the “sexual activity” of their customers? It’s bad! It’s safest to just assume modern, connected cars will be gathering and selling as much data as they legally can. At the moment, that doesn’t seem to include specific location data, but it does include the number of trips driven, how long they last, when they occurred, and so much more. The realization that this information is going to insurance companies to rat you out is depressing but expected. It’s not even particularly secret, once you start looking. LexisNexis even published a press release about it in 2022.
The carmakers, the insurance companies, and LexisNexis are not doing any of this for you. They’re trapping drivers in an ill-fitting set of driving criteria that is doomed to bite you in the ass, at some point. If you have a modern, connected car, I encourage you to get LexisNexis to send you their Consumer Disclosure Report so you can see for yourself just what data is being collected. You can also collect a report from Verisk, who works with GM, Hyundai, and Honda.
Or, you can buy a charming old car, free of any internet anything! If they want to track you in your, say, 1964 Chevy Corvair Monza, let those bastards get in their car and come find you.
Sure, you can opt out *for now*, but soon these big insurance companies will simply refuse coverage to anyone who doesn’t agree to be monitored because they will have a mountain of statistics to prove that *knowingly monitored drivers* drive safer leading to less payouts and … of course … saving precious lives. They’ll be so moral, “you don’t have anything to hide, do you?”
Bought a 2022 Maverick brand new. Immediately pulled the fuse that enabled the “telematics control module”.
Sure, no more remote start or fuel gauge reading from the app…but also no sending my driving and vehicle data to 1) Ford, 2) the dealer, or 3) 3rd party companies (I.e. data brokers.)
Once they start paying me for collecting my data, then we can talk.
Non-issue on my 2022 Camry. The day I bought the car (2 years ago), I paired the app, and withdrew consent for “insure connect.”
You’re not screwed with this on a modern connected car, you just need to know enough about your purchase to know how to opt out of stuff like this.
It’s so cute that you believe them!
Is that supposed to make me feel bad or something?
Do YOU have full control over all the potential bad actors in your life? Do have control over every byte of data on the electronic device you are using? Do you trust google/microsoft/apple to always do the right thing?
I told people that there are ways to opt out of this on a connected car. Of course opting out doesn’t guarantee that an entity won’t break laws. I never said that that wouldn’t happen, just that if people do due diligence, they can opt out of stuff, that’s all.
That sounds a hell of a lot better to me than just buying pre-2010 cars for the rest of my life.
Not at all, sorry if it came across that way. It was just snark about those businesses’ bald-faced perfidy.
Every time there is an update, they probably automatically restore your “consent”.
If you buy a completely pre digital / non traceable car you’re still screwed if your cell phone is on.
Not everyone has a cell phone. After all, I don’t.
Over 95% of American adults have cell phones. Numbers vary but they are all in the upper 90s. Almost everyone has a cell phone.
As I’ve been following this I just realized LexisNexis was different from Lexile level. Clears things up some
Also different from Alexis Texas.
I mean, if they want to send her my location… okay. Maybe she’s impressed with hard-driving events?
I thought I’d look into this for my Acura, and it does it through the AcuraLink app. I have that installed on my phone. However, I never actually tied it to my car, due to some combination of laziness, never thinking about it when I was near my VIN number, and realizing that there was no useful thing that the app could do for me. It’s been sitting on my phone for almost a year, waiting to be paired. So I uninstalled it just now. This is why laziness is a good thing.
I did want to share this, from Honda’s site, regarding this nonsense. Made me laugh:
“The Driver Feedback program is an additional feature within the AcuraLink app that provides insight into your driving behaviors and suggests ways to adopt better driving habits. As an added benefit, it may qualify you for insurance discounts.”
Torch 100% correct. A few things I found out lately but not sure of,
1. All these insurance companies offering discounts to track your data don’t discount just don’t raise the premium unless bad score so no reason to opt in.
2. If you do use the app and use your phone when you are a passenger you still get dinged.
Just wait until they raise premiums just for refusing to sign up.
One more reason to hate Technophilic cars and insurance companies.
Technophilia, along with Constitutional Fetishism, are the scourges of our land.
Every once and a while you read articles like this and want to throw your smartphone out the window and go buy a “burner” flip phone that doesn’t know anything about you.
It need the app right for sending the data? It always is about the app.
It sucks, of course it’s been happening a long time, but the government will never be able to stop it.
20yrs ago the government made a big stink about financial institutions sharing data about you. Regulations we’re put in place that are pretty much useless. You know those annual privacy notices you get, that require you to opt out every year by calling them or sending a letter? Yet you can not limit all the sharing of your data. Regardless even if you opt out, you would have no idea if they broke the rules, which certainly does happen.
Do Not Call, LOL what a joke.
So yeah don’t hold your breath on restricting your car manufacturer sharing data on you, doesn’t matter if you opted out.
If any company has data on you, 99% chance its being shared or sold, unfortunately its a world that we can not do anything about.
The total failure of do not call shows how well the government does well anything
….I’m confused. I’m on that list and, especially recently, I’m rarely getting any calls whatsoever, just stuff like my doctors’ offices.
Very occasional scam/spam calls where there’s no one on the other end (presumably just listening to confirm your number is active and is owned/used by a person) but that seems hard to prevent.
Virginia’s DMV sells your phone number to list compilers. This is perfectly legal. So I just give them the number to the head office in Richmond
What my insurance company learns from my cars* may be summarized as “Oh, we’ve never heard of one of those. We’ll have to get back to you on that.” I look forward to repeating this exchange when my ’82 Triumph Acclaim gets here. I see this as yet another educational opportunity for their underwriters and I assume by now my file has been flagged appropriately for their convenience.
*Aside from my ’67 SAAB 96. They’d heard of that, or at least it was in their system.
For what it’s worth, I like how Torch highlights the whole data broker angle (Lexis-Nexis). I think that’s a vastly under-appreciated part that needs to play a bigger role in our public discussions on the internet and privacy, generally speaking.
We tend to focus on the technology firms themselves (pick any currently-in-the-news one you want) and not as much on the companies that actually make the money selling the data those firms create. Many of the big firms we all naturally think of are not monetizing our data, it’s actually the brokers.
I’m not saying there’s not a valid reason for such firms, just that it does seem we should consider their role more when we – or our public representatives – discuss how to balance privacy vs openness and how to deal with the problems tech can create.
Maybe if the government sold our data it might be more correct and they could reduce our taxes by an equivalent amount?
This is totally outrageous to me and part of why I like older German cars. Said country’s cars were some of the last to black box your driving data for use against you later in court.
Yes, I’m an insurance agent and totally get that actuarial data supports the use of such factors in rating, but when those motherfuckers start tying that shit to my VIN, they have crossed every privacy line. This seems to be one of those situations where you agreed to something HUGE buried in the fine print and snuck right past you.
Frankly I’d rather pay 10% higher rates than tolerate that kind of Big Brother crap. Pool my risk with all the other shitheads out there and charge me accordingly.
Jason, great post. I would have used coarser words.
We as a society(not myself of course) have become numb to relentless scamming, misinformation, hype, and out-right lies and con-jobs. Dystopian forces have gone unchecked for far too long. I’ve posted many times that I will never own a connected, or software defined vehicle, and have never linked my phone to any vehicle. Driving is a death serious responsibility, and shouldn’t have any undue distractions, or needlessly complex controls that have long been muscular memory.
The modern state of technology isn’t improving consumer experience, it’s about forcing you to pay rent for a service that either used to be free, or used to be adequate, but now can steal your data and send all the money through a large, convoluted system all written in legalese
I could swear that a few years ago I read about a study that showed those insurance driver monitors were actually encouraging red light running. If even the moderate braking you sometimes need to use to stop when a light turns yellow is counted against you I can definitely see why some people would start erring on the side of trying to make it through instead…
That is true. The app I use will ding me for harsh braking but doesn’t seem to have any idea if I’ve run a red light or not.
Please stop carrying the app. You are literally taking away freedom from the rest of us.
Fascinating. Reminds me of a great book from the ’90s called Why Things Bite Back (tech and the revenge of unintended consequences) by Edward Tenner that looks at stuff like this, and notes how bad we are about anticipating these negatives as we design the tech; our nature seems to be seeing only the positive.
This worldview is fairly standard fare in econ now, but back then, we didn’t really think in those terms.
I certainly have no trouble imagining these negative events—they’re practically my first thoughts in response—and that kind of thing should be a primary consideration for any designer by way of assessing the validity of a new idea vs its positives. I wonder if these people are actually bad at anticipating negatives instead of merely denying them in deference to making a buck, be it consciously or unconsciously.
Good point – I always wonder about the role of our mechanized society plays, the layers of bureaucracy (some direct, some not) between a designer and a consumer who buys their creation. Necessary, sure, but the downsides frequently seem to speak for themselves.
I believe it. 4 or 5 years back we had GPS/accelerometer safety monitors on our vans. My boss casually mentioned that I seemed to take a certain turn way too fast each day. I reminded him where that actually was, and he agreed I couldn’t almost double the 25mph limit in an 8500lb van. There’s a large hole just as you take an acute right turn, and it would register 43 to 48 mph because of the bump.
I bring that up every time they install the newest system. And it’s also why I’ve never considered those monitors the insurance companies claim can lower your rates.
Sorry, Jason. It won’t matter if you’re driving your vintage Corvair. The data will be used to set rates for where you live, so as long as you have insurance, and a significant number of other people are driving their connected cars, your rates get increased along with theirs!
Counterpoint. Most of those metrics do indeed show you are a higher insurance risk and should have higher insurance premiums. There I said it.
1) Hard braking. If you regularly use hard braking it is definitely a sign that you are an aggressive driver. Hard braking greatly increases your chance of getting in a accident from not stopping soon enough or getting rear ended from someone behind you.
Your complaint that you have to brake occasionally is spurious at best. Realistically how times a day do you have to slam on the brakes to avoid something? I can go weeks without slamming on the brakes to avoid a collision. (And I live in a high density city of over 2 million.) If you are regularly slamming on the brakes multiple times a day then you are an aggressive driver and/or driving too fast requiring slamming on the brakes regularly.
2) Hard acceleration. Again if you need to do this regularly you are either an aggressive driver or driving in an area with poor road design. Both mean you are more likely to get in an accident.
3) Driving fast. Driving fast = you are more likely going to be in an accident. Speed also means the accidents are much more severe with higher chance of death and significant car damage.
4) Late night driving. More accidents happen at night. Poor visibility and dunk drivers contribute to a lot of serious and severe accidents. So driving at night is much more dangerous. If you drive at night regularly you are a higher risk to insure.
Actuarial science is actually amazing at tracking risks and determining factors that will increase your chances or getting in an accident. If you engage in any of the four factors above regularly, you are a higher risk to the insurance company. Data backs that up.
If you occasionally do any of 1,2 or 4, I doubt your insurance will be impacted as all of the above are expected for a normal risk driver.
However, if you REGUARLY do all four of the significantly above above a typical risk driver, then you are a higher insurance risk and should pay more.
Well, we’re talking about someone who has hit several deer this decade
Which means they are a higher risk and should pay higher premiums. We had family friends that has two cars totalled within 6 months with moose charging the car at night. Scary stuff. They were told after the 2nd totaled car that they would not be able to get insurance if they kept driving the same road at night.
There are places where that would effectively be telling someone they can’t drive out from their home to go to work or go buy food.
Moose can be a major hazard, and there are places where basically any road has a chance of being traveled by moose. Human incursion into their territory due to increasing development is going to result in more negative outcomes for both moose and drivers. But taking it out on drivers isn’t going to solve the problem. The (rather financially well-off) insurance industry would do well to lobby against over-development in and around wildlands, and lobby for and/or fund environmentally-conscious development and road works to keep wildlife and traffic separated.
If memory serves it was a un-serviced side road to get to a very basic cottage in the mountains.
The insurance agent was just warning them that another totaled car would make their claim history so bad that the would be hard pressed to ever get reasonable car insurance. This was actually good advice to warn them of the consequence of two totals in such a short period of time. Switching to another insurance company was already near well impossible given the claims and the insurance company they had would be within grounds to cancel if they had a third totaled car.
They did adjust their driving time to the cottage to only do the road at daytime as much as possible.
Deer bed in my yard regularly: this is the highest road on this half of a small mountain. I go 10-12mph as I leave around dawn. Moose would be a freaking nightmare as they’re actively aggressive whereas deer are mostly just dumb.
Yeah, moose are freaking scary. I don’t think most folks realize how dangerous they are especially if they charge a car. This is a high fatality type of collision. They often get really angry if they see headlights aimed at them and take it as a challenge.
I would love to live somewhere where deer bed in my yard. Soooo, soooo cool! Deer are so skittish and can dart in front of your car with little to no warning so driving slow at dawn is smart.
That’s the entire point of pooling risk.
Health insurance companies fight tooth and nail to keep selling plans to the smallest possible groups instead of a statewide group so they can keep rates up by not normalizing risk over a larger set of subscribers.
Based on that logic, poor people who tend to live in riskier areas, work more night shifts, and drive on streets that are less well maintained than more affluent neighborhoods get yet another hurdle in front of them in the form of higher rates.
A civilized society should be OK spreading risk and having some people pay a little more if it helps others not pay a ton more.
Insurance companies are scum and one should not be their apologists.
If you have two claims totaling cars within 6 months you will be red flagged and no matter what, will have trouble getting insurance. The insurance broker was being honest by saying anymore claims would make it next to impossible to get car insurance.
When you get quotes the very first thing insurance companies look at is your claim history. Two totals in 6 months = you are not going to get any other insurance company willing to take you on.
Yes, pooling helped soften the blow to the insurance company as they will never be able to recoup the claims costs for the life of those folks. Pooling allows costs for claims to be spread across the pool. But continual claims means you are too high risk for the pool and you can get cancelled.
We’re not talking about just totaling cars. We’re discussing various coarse signals like acceleration and braking.
My mistake. You replied under a section where I was talking about family friends that totaled two cars in 6 months. So I assumed you were talking about that sub section.
Fair enough!
I forgot to mention that you made me laugh out loud with the deer comment! Well done! 🙂
What is the name of the insurance company where you work?
Nope. 🙂 I have never worked for any insurance company. I just have an understanding of actuarial science and how it works. I find it fascinating their ability to assess risk – and the data being collected by LexisNexis lets them price risk much more accurately. It sucks for those that get flagged, but they deserve the increase if they are flagged as a risk.
I think the issue is people have trouble being grouped into risk categories based on their driving habits. I’ve run across lots of folks that are dangerous, aggressive drivers and yet insist they are safer than anyone on the road since they have never been in an accident. But the reality is there are a higher risk and should pay accordingly.
Your points have been great. It’s statistics at heart, which is good at predicting relatively large scale outcomes but less so with individual ones. But as they used to say in school, if you can’t quantify something, how can you measure it?
The big question, to my thinking, is the role of insurance in our society as currently configured. We’ve set up a system where the government mandates it and the private sector supplies it, but it’s now done in a very rigid way.
I’m not sure what the optimal public policy might be, but at the very least, we might look at increasing flexibility.
Yes, but you’re still going to have to pay more to ensure you can cover damages when you’re hit by someone who doesn’t have the car insurance they are legally supposed to have…
No. Pretty sure the data is crap. I 100% wear my seat belt while driving and looking at my stats I see low 80% on seatbelt usage. WTF.
Ever put something heavy on one of your seats? The car will think there is a passenger and flag that they aren’t buckled in.
My seatbelt chime goes off when my son puts his knees or feet against the empty front passenger seat.
That makes me wonder how they track things. Are you getting dinged because you buy too many watermelons and it’s triggering a passenger seat weight sensor, for example?
Ok, narc.
It would appear that health insurance also works this way, and it’s totally messed up. My wife often gets to hear that something won’t be covered either because she won’t live long enough to make it worth it to the insurance co, or because the insurance co thinks stuff such as therapy for depression isn’t necessary.
Her expected lifespan, due to a treatable disease, is something like 65-70, but she won’t reach that without one of the drugs the insurance co has deemed “not medically necessary.” Oh, and our insurance premiums increased 4x even though the insurance doesn’t want to cover anything. Other insurance plans offer worse coverage and higher costs. Nice, totally great.
Hey at least you’re not entirely barred from having insurance the way you would have been prior to the ACA.
Our premiums for a gold PPO plan (not even the fanciest plan) for two people are $2660 per month.
Insurance companies can go jump on a landmine.
To point 2 (hard acceleration), I’ve just never had any interest in opting in, because I’ve never seen anything to quantify that acceleration is quantified as a specific rate as opposed to a certain throttle position. Do you get dinged for owning a slow car which requires more throttle to accelerate at a normal, safe pace, but gets counted as hard acceleration for that specific car?
That is an excellent question! One would hope it is g force measurement. But since the insurance companies don’t disclose it could be either. G force makes sense but throttle position would be terrible as you stated with less powerful cars.
This is where I wish regulators would force insurance companies to use standardized metrics that are clearly defined and consistent for every car and every insurance company. This is an area that clearly needs regulation especially in clearly outlining where the data being collected is going. (And not buried in a 200 page terms of service document.)
Every car I have owned since I’ve been able to pick my cars (as opposed to having no choice but the cheapest shitheap on the lot) have been selected because they can accelerate quickly. Merging onto freeways is scary and dangerous (for you, the people behind you, and the drivers not slowing down to let you merge because they shouldn’t, it’s your job to get up to speed on the on-ramp). Getting tailgated by an angry asshole is scary and dangerous. I had to get away from less than a week ago. I was stuck in front of them by two slow cars ahead of us. *Not* accelerating hard to get out of his way would have been more dangerous.
I do admit it was also gratifying to feel my 37-y-old V8 remind him he really wasn’t impressing anybody tailgating my solid pre-reunification German ass in his low spec Hyundai.
This happens often enough where I live that I won’t drive a car that doesn’t get to 60 in less than 7-8 seconds or from 60 to 85 in a jiffy when I punch it to get away from danger. Hard acceleration is what you need on an on-ramp.
My driving record is 100% unblemished except for 1 speeding ticket 15 years ago when I drove 72 in a 65 when going down a slope at the end of a bridge. People who’ve pulled my driving history have told me they were surprised how clean it is (which surprised me, as I assumed most people have clean records too, but I guess not).
The numbers being collected are too coarse and inaccurate, and they lack too much context, to be useful. I resent being rated based on them.
This is a topic I know well, as I’ve been doing statistics, machine learning, anomaly detection, similarity measurements, smoothing, “big data” (lol) and other techniques for longer than many “data scientists” have been able to read.
When the state of the art ML systems (openai), which are miles ahead of the competition and have been trained on trillions of data points, can still hallucinate and produce racist and hateful output, I don’t trust the best actuaries (who are paid by a business whose raison d’être is to take as much of my money and give me back as little as I will tolerate) to derive accurate predictions from shit data.
I currently live in rural England. Most of the roads are riddled with bends and have speed limits that vary from 60mph to 20mph depending on hazard density. There are loads of inattentive drivers who do a constant 40mph everywhere, and loads of attentive drivers who accelerate up to a safe speed on the straight bits and slow down for hazards and speed limits.
This data rewards inattentive drivers.
It also punishes people who are enjoying their cars, which is the reason enthusiasts hate it (plus the privacy issue, and it’s reliance on data that’s easy to measure rather than data that’s useful).
So, if you buy a high-performance car primarily for track days, you are toast.
Well yes and no. High performance cars typically have much higher premiums already to cover the higher risk associated with those cars. And very few normal insurance policies actually cover track racing – that is specialist insurance territory.
All else equal maybe, but I pay less for a Viper than for either my very normal truck or van because I drive fewer miles and fewer months of the year with it.
And the point isn’t that the track event isn’t covered, that much I understand and implicitly agree to when doing the event. It’s that the tracker in the car doesn’t know I’m participating in a closed course event and thinks all that hard braking and acceleration is taking place on a public road.
You seem to have at least two other cars. So adding a 3rd car means benefitting from having those as your daily drivers.
I suspect your Viper would be a lot more expensive to insure if it was your only car that is your only daily driver.
That is a fun and cool car to have BTW!!!
Actually the agreed value policy I have on it now has no multi-line discounts for owning other cars or anything. It’s insured through a totally different company than my other vehicles. There are mileage restrictions of course, so even if I could somehow manage to drive a 2 seat RWD sports car as my only vehicle, it still wouldn’t work.
But thanks for the kind words.
They may not cover track days, but the data from the track will still get used, bet on it.
Connected cars is one of, if not the biggest reason I have not bought a newer car. I’m pushing for my next new vehicle to be a motorcycle. The shit automakers are pulling lately is also a big reason I have lost interest in cars. Makes me very angry and sad at the same time.
I swear npr reported yesterday that sales staff got incentives for getting buyers to sign up for this.
I just checked, and do find that a FAQ On Star page does say that they can share info with Lexis Nexis and Verisk—and that that may go to insurance carriers.
perhaps I’m just old, but this enrages me to an unreasonable degree
Hopefully it enrages you enough to write to your politicians to get them do something.
Good luck with that, when manufacturers and users alike seem to have a weird obsession with CarPlay and AndroidAuto. 🙂
Keep in mind too that the initial Bluetooth pairing is an interactive process; the car would not be able to make that first connection to a phone without receiving permission from the phone’s owner/operator.
Oh, you give them too much credit. I’m sure they could easily use such programs to increase premiums for those who opt out (or don’t have a phone/car combination that triggers such tools). Or, more nefariously, opting in could allow the phone to track the number of times you interact with it (or the number of times a passenger does), allowing them to increase premiums based on interacting in the ways they decided were appropriate. Oh, you were in a call while driving? You entered a nav destination with your foot on the brake instead of being in park? Well, we allow those things, but they aren’t as safe as being parked, so here’s your increase.
This makes me happy to own a 2012 MY “dumb” vehicle and reluctant to buy anything much newer. Interestingly, I learned about this on Steve Lehto’s excellent YouTube channel, and he shares a similar perspective to Jason’s.
Just to give you a heads up, on my app, they have it named the OnStar Smart Driver, so they may have two versions.
Once again I am stating how happy I am that both of my cars used 3G for telematics and all of the networks turned off their 3G systems. I haver newish cars with CarPlay and Android Auto, and none of the stupid connected infotainment garbage. Many people would see such recent vehicles losing connectivity as a negative (300pg forum threads prove my point), but it continues to be a blessing in disguise.
Are they not anonymizing the data? Insurance companies offer programs like this, but for GM to sell this data with your name on it to your insurance company, not anonymized, is insane and completely unacceptable.