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Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

It is trivially easy to game too in some cases. My insurer wants to use your smart phone to do the tracking over a period of 6 months after which you no longer have to be tracked. Want to do some street racing every weekend? Just leave your phone at home and go wild. Drive gently on your commute every day until the 6 month period is up and then resume driving like a maniac.

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And when they check your cars mileage and it has a boatload more than your phone recorded? After you signed something that agrees you'll always (or almost always) have your phone with you?

My insurance company has no idea what the mileage is on my vehicles (they've never asked)...maybe they would require that info before tracking you? I don't know. A few thousand miles discrepancy should be very easy to explain away though.

My insurance company has had a 3rd party auditor "audit" my data every effing 6 months for about 3 years straight. I think they're REALLY suspicious that I only put 3000 miles on this vehicle or 2000 miles on that. I've taken to just pulling up my fuel fillup tracker app every time they call. "Oh, did I say 3000 miles? No, actually, let's say 2853 miles".

Joke's on them, the per-vehicle mileage goes down every time they ask.

If they are tracking via phone, it sounds like they are more interested in the person than the vehicle. So the extra miles could be assumed to be done by other drivers.

If they track the phone, how can they tell if you are driving or just a passenger?

I'm not familiar with the exact device, but strongly suspect the cell phone simply serves as the internet link. Early car trackers had integrated cellular radios, but that can't be cheap.

>> Early car trackers had integrated cellular radios, but that can't be cheap

My TomTom 5000 SatNav, which I bought for like $200 has a permanent connection to the internet in all countries of the world with no monthly fee. It has an integrated SIM card and TomTom just paid some fee so that it can connect to the internet and get traffic updates wherever I am in the world. An even cheaper Kindle 3G also had that. So I guess it must be relatively cheap.

Obviously not earth-shatteringly expensive, no, but the tracker devices are issued for free, not $200.

Well, my ISP provided me with a very fancy fibreoptic router and a TV box with a terabyte hardrive which I am pretty sure cost them pretty penny yet I haven't paid anything for either of those things. They make money off me every month though, just like an insurance company would - they give you a fancy box for "free" and make money off you selling you their service.

I thought you needed hardware you connect to the automobile to do the tracking? My understanding was that the phone and the hardware sync using bluetooth, and the phone uploads data to the insurance companies. Kind of like Automatic: https://www.automatic.com/home/

This is how they track the hard accels, hard breaks etc., since the car puts these events on it's BUS.

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