Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatrock | Hacker News Reader

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MetroMile does this with an OBD-II device... their niche is insurance for low-mileage vehicles, and they track your mileage with a dongle device that must always be plugged in.

Seems like a huge information asymmetry, though. Anyone who's ever dealt with an insurance claim knows that they find any nitpick to get out of payments... having an insurance provider that can say "actually we don't owe you anything because according to our black box, you were 2 mph over the speed limit therefore you were negligent" seems like it defeats the purpose of having insurance.

I like the idea of more accurate pricing based on actual (low) usage, but I don't like that it gives them a disproportionately larger surface area for their lawyers to find technicalities that gets them out of paying claims. When the tollbooth transponders came out, they explicitly said "this will never be used to issue speeding tickets" even though all the data was there... I don't believe MetroMile makes any similar promise.

Anyone who's ever dealt with an insurance claim knows that they find any nitpick to get out of payments

"Everyone" says that, but I haven't found it to be true. Progressive fixed my car without any hassle (they paid nearly $5K to replace a door and fender and repaint the side of the car after someone tried to pry open the door). I also made a claim against Geico when a USPS truck hit me, again, trouble free, they paid the claim (minus my deductible) quickly and it took 18 months to get the USPS t

My sister lost her house to a fire and said that her insurance company (Allstate maybe) was super easy to deal with.

I wish I had your experiences in such clear-cut cases. I had to perform an independent investigation to get the insurance company to honor my side of the story in my last car claim, and relatives are dealing with a nightmare of a home insurance story that's looking like the insurance company is going drop them because of the complications involved.

In my experience, everyone is just trying to minimize their cash outflows. Incident claims are a zero-sum game, and if someone gets more or better information, that comes at the expense of someone else.

I wonder... Could you spoof that device? It doesn't seem all too hard to- the ODB-II interface is pretty well documented.

Yeah, there's some reddit posts about doing it to the Progressive Snapshot device. But it being an insurer, you'd potentially be on the hook for insurance fraud, which doesn't carry a light penalty...

No need to worry about MetroMile, those dongles they distribute aren't reliable at all.

Source: Me, after paying hundreds of dollars because the "signal was lost" for over a month, billed at the daily max rate, while their emails about it went to spam.

Liability insurance exists for covering even when you are liable.

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