Tesla's new auto insurance service will actively spy on you and modify its rates accordingly



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The electric car manufacturer Tesla is entering a new space: auto insurance. CEO Elon Musk announced Wednesday, at the automaker 's call for results for the first quarter of 2019, that Tesla would be proposing an "insurance product" starting about a month or so ago.

Ensuring a Tesla is not cheap. In fact, the high cost of insurance is one of the main complaints of many new owners, who do not expect that the policy of the Tesla Model 3 will cost as much as that of a brand new Porsche 911 in some markets .

"It will be a lot more convincing than anything else," says Musk.

Documents indicate that "Tesla Insurance Services, Inc." has been incorporated since June 2017, indicating that Tesla has been considering taking this step for some time now, but has just announced that it is preparing the service for the public. Two former Tesla employees are on the list of directors of the company; CFO Deepak Ahuja and General Council Todd Maron.

Tesla has built its reputation by offering consumers the latest technology, and the latest updates of the car are fully applicable over the air. All of these benefits mean that Tesla had direct access to a vast amount of telemetry data on its cars and drivers.

Tesla currently provides some of these data to insurance companies. Musk says it's for "help with rates," which is a recurring problem for many Tesla drivers, as insurance companies increase rates for premium and luxury segments. But as Tesla launches its own insurance product, Musk also confirms that Tesla will use this information to determine its own rates.

Musk confirms that Tesla has "a direct knowledge of the risk profile of car-based customers," said Musk, adding that it provided the automaker with an "arbitrage opportunity" based on the customer's risk profile. Thus, if a customer wants to buy Tesla insurance, he can do so and drive respectably. But drive "crazy" (as Musk says) and "the insurance rate is higher".

The idea of ​​insurance rates based on the profile is far from new. Insurance companies such as Progressive have been using this type of program since 1998. One simply plugs a dongle into their OBDII port and forgets it; the insurer then reads the data and determines an appropriate risk profile. While the Snapshot program was initially put in place to encourage good behavior, Progressive finally began to penalize bad drivers in 2013. While Snapshot relied on the transfer of data to the insurer, other providers like Allstate followed quickly by launching mobile applications to use the data from a cell. accelerometer and GPS phone; one of the first "connected" examples of data augmentation for risk-based assessments.

Data passing through an OBDII port is tiny compared to data that can be collected by Tesla. With the cameras looking outward and inward, the builder can know exactly what the occupant is doing at any given moment. Musk said on Twitter that the camera would be used if a driver entered his car in Tesla's next standalone taxi fleet.

Tesla's still connected approach means that the mothership can be sent back for information about when you decided to turn off the autopilot or purge the gas. With the detection of stop signs and traffic lights, he could (theoretically) know when you are approaching these yellow lights or if you will make a California stop sign stop. The goal of big data is to take action without screening – so you need to build a reputation high enough for risky driving, and rates may rise without human interaction.

The monitoring of the driver at this capacity could be a legitimate concern for some drivers, while others might not fall to the point of being scrutinized thoroughly with each turn of the steering wheel and that the driver could not. you press a pedal. Be that as it may, finding the right balance between extremely high insurance rates and proper driver evaluation is a real headache that Tesla is trying to solve.

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