I don't think I'm giving away much personal data: The insurance set up a separate legal entity that performs the ranking, with a easy-to-read EULA that rules out selling data.
My insurance is using the Cambridge Mobile Telematics modules.
Great case in point, Tesla insurance dings people for "late night driving" -
https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/10xaj74/do_not...
But of course prices can only go up.
You pay a small retainer fee ($1.50/day) and then a per mileage fee. This requires the use of a logging device which also impacts your per-mile rate depending on your driving.
I haven't dug into the nuts and bolts of this, but I wonder how well you are covered when the vehicle is not in motion - parked in garage, on the street, etc. At least in my area parking in public can be a risky option between the hit and runs, catalytic converter theft, break-in, etc.
I would not recommend it if you don't live in the suburbs though. Slow and steady is the name of the game, ideally you want light traffic and mostly empty roads.
Although its going to be really awkward when they find out my home address and kid's daycare.
For 200km / Month it's working just fine. Below that sometimes fails.
In Belgium you couldn't drive a miles without being recorded on some ALPR camera.
Speed cameras everywhere. And the current rage is average speed cameras. So they take your photo on an on-ramp and when you take the exit they'll calculate the average. Above the speed limit: ticket. With no way of facing your accuser in court. The machine said so...
Car-drivers have a strong sense of entitlement that i never have seen in other non-radical groups.
I am against mass surveillance. Remember when Snowden released all those documents? How we were all angry about the NSA spying on its own citizens?
Systems like this do the same, although they justify it as a means to stop speeding, which, to be fair, they do very well.
But we go from one month of data retention to multiple months, and then someone finds old data that was not deleted and the government allows its use, and now its acceptable to store this data for 2 years etc etc.
Homeowners have such a strong sense of entitlement
Water wet.
I was paying $620 (for 6 months) with Geico while letting them monitor my driving via my cell phone. The premium never went down although I had 110 scores in their EasyDrive app (In driving for over 11 years in the US, I never had an accident and never filed any claim car insurers; I always drive defensively and never got any ticket either). What I found was EasyDrive app is always punishing me for bad driving practices like running red light (again, the same experience some has mentioned here with Progressive) in fear of registering a hard-brake event; and worse, slowing down excessively to turn the corners (basically, surprising the cars behind me and risking them bumping into my car) because EasyDrive thinks ONLY IF you go below 15 mph then you are doing the cornering right. I guess these EasyDrive developers (or rule makers) never drove on a real road, and found that usually 20mph is the safe way to go about turning on the right corner.
Regardless, I got 15% premium bump in the renewal despite having 110 EasyDrive score (I think Geico raised their premiums by a very high percentage in CA as well; I live in FL and have been using Geico for all the years I've been driving in the US). That pissed me off and I explored other options, and finally got Progressive for $570 for six months. The sacrifice I have to do for this lower rate is to subscribe to their Snapshot program. I used my phone and have been driving for over a month. The relief (good thing) about using Snapshot app is that it doesn't monitor your cornering score. However, like some mentioned here, it still promotes bad driving behavior like running yellow/red light in fear of hard-brakes. It also seems to be a bit proactive in determining what a hard-brake is (again, I'm using their phone app) because I registered 2 hard-brakes (the only two hard brakes that I have recorded so far in about 1.5 months of driving) on my grocery trip. I swear I didn't do any hard brakes (or maybe at most once) because I know the road pretty well and I usually do grocery runs in early mornings on weekends when there are very few cars on the road.
I know I got much cheaper ($570 vs. $710) rate from Progressive now just because I am a new customer. I am pretty sure come next or next, next renewal, they'll jack up my premiums like what Geico did, and then I'll have to switch to yet another insurer like musical chair game. I wish that the car insurers actually have a more accurate, realistic, non-intrusive tech to monitor the driving habits (e.g., the ones who don't use turn signals when turning right/left or changing lanes, which really could cause accidents) and ACTUALLY give discounts to drivers like me who are very careful with their driving (plus, my wife and I drove a total of 6050 miles in the last year). This is all to say that the risk-reward distribution system with car insurance companies is still inefficient.
Cars are inherently dangerous; to the people inside, people outside, and to infrastructure and buildings around them. The faster they go the more dangerous they are. They drive on publically funded infrastructure in a public setting.
Given that states can't even get voting right [1], this is not the future I wanted. (Plus, we should be incentivizing EV purchases at this stage, not punishing them.)
(Heck, they put my marriage license on a blockchain for some dumb reason. I didn't even want it on a blockchain!)
[0]: https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/
[1]: Basically anything by https://twitter.com/jhalderm
That's because they kind of are. Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes.
EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.
This is going to require a significant shift about how states and cities think about their road maintenance budgets and the taxes required to sustain them. A lot of states are going to, predictably, get this wrong.
I would guess that we are talking about very small numbers -- certainly under 5% of drivers.[1] Whatever principle Utah is asserting to "recover" fuel taxes from EV drivers isn't making much of a difference.
At the same time, the Utah policy is clearly discouraging EV adoption.
> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight.
We are talking about a small presence in the automobile market. If everyone were to drive a Tesla, then yes we would have more heavy passenger cars on the road.
For example, a 2023 Honda Civic weighs between 1,429 kg and 1,517 kg. One best-selling SUV, the Toyota RAV4, weighs 1755 kg.
But the most popular type of vehicle in the US (and in Utah) by sales is the pick-up truck. The top three pick-up trucks each weigh about 2500 kg.
If we are going to start quibbling about weight this way, we will need to recognise that drivers of vehicles should be taxed according to their obesity to maintain our roadways.
[1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/24/current-ev-registrations-in-t...
If it's not linear then the difference between a 4000 lbs car vs a 3000 lbs one is nothing compared to the damage done by a loaded 80 000 lbs truck.
What I notice, on european highways: it's always the rightmost lane that is deformed. The leftmost lane is never deformed. The aquaplanning risks due to water present in two bands on the lane is always on the rightmost lane. Always, always, always.
Why? Because the rightmost lane is the one trucks do use.
Where I live atm, in the middle of nowhere, there are two things deforming the road: heavy vehicles (I'm not talking about 4000 lbs cars here but tractors / trucks) and... Tree roots. Most of the patches made on the road are due to tree roots lifting the road's concrete.
I think it even makes sense for semis, the cost may go up for goods slightly as they pass that cost onto customers, but we'd be paying less in federal taxes for roads, less in property taxes for roads, and if you drive less (good for health, environment, etc) you'll likely be saving money. It also more accurately taxes EVs with ICEs based on road wear and tear instead of all these haphazard ideas.
There is a general legal principle that the state must use the least intrusive means to accomplish a goal. A lawsuit might force a change.
26% of road funds come from gas taxes; 11 percent from tolls, another 25% from the federal government: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
Now, about those "paying their fair share of 25% of the cost of the roads" gas taxes: In Utah, the gas tax was $0.245 in 1997. Today it's $0.34, when adjusting for inflation alone it should be $0.46, so drivers have received what amounts to a 25% tax reduction in the last ~30 years. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in thirty years. So there's another tax break drivers have gotten.
That's just inflation. Average fuel economy has risen from 18mpg to over 22, which means per mile drivers are paying on average 20% less of "their fair share" due to mileage increases alone.
So it's a bit weird that suddenly people in gas cars are getting high and mighty about EV owners "not paying their fair share."
> EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher rate. And it's not linear wear per pound, either.
The Ford F150, which is the most popular "car" sold in America, is between 4,069 and 5,697 pounds.
A Tesla Model 3 is 3,862 to 4,048 lbs. A Chevy Bolt is ~3600lb.
Yet..who gets taxed more by Utah? Does Utah give people with small 3000lb gas cars a tax break, and penalize 5,000lb pickup truck owners?
Also, where were all these concerns about increased road wear on budgets when American purchasing trends tilted toward larger and heavier SUVs and pickups? Average vehicle weight has risen 10%+ since 1990.
EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?
Bish, please.
Utah didn't want to raise the gas tax (it's a political third rail) so they relied on their extremely stupid electorate to buy up the myth that drivers in gas cars are "paying their fair share" and instituted a punitive tax on EVs which Dumb Yokel Bob fully supports because it's sticking it to those "libruhls in them fuckin' priuses an shit", believing everything he hears on conservative radio about EVs (for example, that they 'cost' more CO2 to make than a regular car. Which is true....until around 14,000 miles into ownership when the EV breaks even compared to a gas car.)
By which you mean $130 (equating to ~13,000 miles driven under the 1 cent-per-mile pricing)?
https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/faq.php#fees
I agree it should be easier and more privacy-preserving to measure real usage (e.g., an odometer read once a year or something like that).
Why you would need to track how much a vehicle is driven I don't understand though. Unless you want to measure how far it's driven within some geographical area (such as a state) and can't merely charge for the total distance driven, but that seems unnecessarily complex, given that a car will only be registered in one region and it should balance out across state borders.
So at the anual/biannual mandatory inspections (which make a lot more sense to add if they aren't already mandatory, than any tracking!) just check the distance driven and charge road tax accordingly. I pay around $800/year for road tax for my car. And $8/gallon for the fuel. But I do get great roads for it.
If we get to a point where fuel consumption is so low that it stops generating significant tax revenue, then that is a great problem to have.
So you, member of the spoiled rotten, pilfering upper strata, parasitizing the larger society while at the same time degenerating it, want the regular people you are living off in decadence, to also pay not just current rates, but even higher rates so you can see your utopian, egotist, narcissistic vision come to fruition?
You want people who can’t afford the luxury of EVs and who are already being destroyed and pillaged by the likes of your strata, to on top of that abuse, also pay more?
Do you want them to also just eat cake? Or perhaps maybe they should also just try being billionaires? Just stop being poor, people. Right?
It’s unfortunate that humans seem to have made essentially zero progress in preventing what has been captured in numerous stories. Possibly the most relevant one being that Hubris is struck down by Nemesis; the origins of those two words themselves, something most people do not even realize.
If you ever have the chance, there is an excellent statue of Hubris in the Louvre. It is a bit hidden and tucked away, which makes it all the more prescient. Note when it was created.
So now imagine law enforcement has access to your cumulative driving habits/traits and the last 20 minutes of driving that day. Imagine the insurance company has processed that data for its own purpose and assigned some kind of (totally arbitrary and contrived) "aggressive" or "risk" rating to certain actions etc. Law enforcement now has a prepackaged report that will invariably say you're a terrible driver. Of course the data collected is going to say that as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money.
Now, whether or not you were or were not driving in a reckless manner, theres data to make a case with and nobody is perfect. That data may or may not reflect the reality of the situation and even so, prosecutors are known to take the easy route to boost their own stats. Now imagine a prosecutor looking for an easy win has a prepackaged report of biased information from the insurance company?
This whole thing seems like a way to possibly save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you.
First off, you're usually relying on ODB-2 + GPS + usually some type of streaming backend, which means you're looking at 2 unreliable (or, at least, hard to _interpret_) sources of data delivered and presumably analyzed by a notoriously tricky delivery mechanism (near-real time streaming), which has a tendency to be too much to handle for the notoriously non-"tech" insurance world. The chances that data is being interpreted quite differently to what's happening on the road, but yet is treated as a source of truth for your premium model!, is certainly not zero.
Even if you assume these companies handle all that properly (or outsource it), these data sets are some of the creepiest by their very nature - not only can you trivially determine somebody's home address by analyzing frequency of the reverse-geocoded data points (or any other geospatial features you derive), you can also determine any other patterns within a person's life - schedules, work location & employer, health habits (do they go to the gym or a bar? do they only ever leave to go to the grocery store?) etc., not to mention all the data ODB-2 gives you about actual driving behavior. And guess what, you can't use synthetic data for testing for much of this (I tried), so we would up testing these systems with real data, albeit with employees who volunteered.
A home address is arguably not that sensitive, given that that is public record if you own your home and your insurance company has that data anyways, but the patterns + all the other metadata + all the "public" data that is out there ready for purchase about the average American, now you have something close to a personality profile that would make your average marketing exec (or, potentially, bad government actor) squeal in delight.
I'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth."
And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.
It completely eliminated any enjoyment of the new car I sacrificed to save up for.
After 3 months I was horrified to get an email with a list of time stamped infractions and an offer for a 15% reduction in my premium.
Yeah, no. I switched to Geico, cut my premium in half, and vowed never to willingly trade surveillance for an insurance discount.
I could see it being more beneficial in rural communities where there's less erratic driver behavior, but in a major US city it was doing me no favors.
I can tell you that they don't work on Landrover Defenders, because they are reading about half way to "OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING" just sitting in the car park with the engine idling.
I can only find anecdotal references https://www.quora.com/Does-Progressive-Auto-insurance-actual...
I warned my nephew off it but sure enough, he took the £200 (£1400 to £1200) discount on insurance. His insurance was cancelled because they say he did over 35mph in a 30 zone, so now his insurance premiums are £2000+ because he has to declare he has a history of having an insurance policy cancelled.
The big comparison websites are complicit too as they list those policies along the others in a table sorted by price, not making much of a deal about the risks etc and how different the policy is
What worries about this from a consumer level is that the insurance companies are not required to disregard old data. If you got a speeding ticket or other minor infraction, it will eventually drop off of your driving record as far as your insurance is concerned. Which makes sense and seems more fair because you are not necessarily the same driver you were two years ago. My concern is that they will keep this data in the aggregate and indefinitely penalize drivers with insurance rates that don’t actually reflect their present risk during a policy term.
On the one hand, I hate the intrusiveness, that's a huge minus.
On the other hand, commercial drivers are subject to all kinds of perverse business incentives--too many hours driving, poorly maintained fleets, etc.--and if the insurance companies can stamp those out, that's a plus.
We do already pay a gas tax and a yearly property tax at the state and local level for cars plus a sales tax on new cars.
Her relative also had it for three months, but after that the insurance company said he would be better off without it.
Plug your device into your car and turn it on, wait for device to blink green, attach 9 volt and unplug, carry inside and plug in usb charger to the wall.
> If you’re at the wheel focused on the road, but someone in the passenger seat is changing the music on your phone, the app may think it’s observing distracted driving and count it against you.
Is the app running on the car, or on the user's phone, which somehow detects that the user is driving a car? Is there some way that a paired phone (Bluetooth - or maybe this is a feature of CarPlay / Android Auto) can tell a car that it's being used?
Liberty Mutual only records your behavior for one quarter, and then gives you a discount for as long as you hold your policy. I ended up with a permanent 28% discount!
It analyzes your driving based on four factors: total miles drive, how fast you accelerate and decelerate, and whether you drive in the wee hours.
I found the temporary loss of privacy to be totally reasonable and an excellent tradeoff.
I called and turns out my insurance was already so “low” that 2% is the most it would have ever offered.
I dunno about elsewhere but in Canada, insurance is like tech job salaries, the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years.
I had Farmers for about 5 years in a row. It started off at $440/6months and ended up at $900/6months -- on the same two cars (comprehensive on only one of them). I tried calling them up and asking why my insurance was going up when the amount they were actually covering was going down due to depreciation. They avoided my calls and lost my business.
Now I'm trying to deal with the legalities of having a child in college in another state, but no car.
I have a hunch that the risk is the longer they keep you the more likely to have an accident they have to pay out. So if you are a good customer, no claims for 3 years your engagement with them has been very profitable. If they keep you for another year and you have an claim then that engagement is unprofitable. Just a hunch as insurance math is complicated.
Wonder how self-incriminating that is - at some tipping point of adoption, not opting in becomes THE negative signal.
Outside regulation to limit retention and prevent misuse of data is there even a longer term option here?
Perhaps I should capitulate early and save more money.
Is there any proof that any of these behaviors actually correlate with tangible risk? (I mean, I can understand that "simply driving a lot" increases risk.)
Personally, I'd be more interested in cars with cameras using machine learning to build a risk profile of other cars. I'm not the only person who sees dangerous behavior all the time. It would be interesting if I could sell a stream from my cameras to a company that builds risk profiles based on observed behavior.
I do think that a key component for success is near real-time feedback so it feels like a game and not a speeding ticket in the mail.
However, with a large enough corpus of training data including years of telematics on drivers with and without insurance claims it certainly seems like it should be possible to build models that can make much more accurate risk assessments than they can with the data they currently collect such as age, zipcode, and past accidents.
Put another way, I would be surprised if there was zero correlation between driving behavior and insurance claims.
The biggest factor they can monitor is verifying miles driven. Miles driven, unsurprisingly, has a bigger impact than virtually anything else someone signing up to be monitored would be guilty of.
In general, no surprises.
What really surprises me is that my insurance company never asks for an odometer reading. I haven't changed insurance in years. It's also hard to estimate how many miles I will drive in a year because my life situation changes every few years.
Technology could play a big role in ensuring people actually follow the rules and are held accountable for criminal negligence causing injury or death.
I think of getting rid of it but it takes so little time & money to keep around, and it's great being able to do occasional road trips. Otherwise I'd totally get rid of it. Insurance is the biggest cost, but pretty cheap all-in-all.
Given how little it's used, and given what a generally chill driver I am, I do think I deserve a better deal. Then again, it's old & I don't think it has OBD, so I'm probably not eligible anyways.
Each insurance company uses the telematics differently. While the pricing model is regulated, it is not public. There is a substantial difference company-to-company
I think this is an instance of HN-confirmation bias. We all hate monitoring, so a study or article that says UBI and behavioral modification is harmful appeals to us.
Soon, I discovered that Aviva had a plan for which you can signup: you download the app, and leave that active (data and location) while driving. The app monitors your driving pattern for aound 200 miles. Then it scores you out of 10. I felt smug that I scored 9.7 (IIRC). And, as promised, I got a rather neat discount on my insurance. IIRC, it came under GBP 300.
I just wanted to say that alternatives like the above exists.
Aviva continued to quote me lowest, until this year. I had to move away because, it happend to me, too, what happens to every loyal customer in the UK: deals popup elsewhere that are available only to new customers. So, exploring switching providers every now and then, is worthwhile.
The final straw for me after a few months was another driver running a stop sign and feeling my brain waste milliseconds deciding if I should hit the brakes as hard as I should or juuuust hard enough to avoid hitting them in hopes I don't get a beep. I did the latter and it beeped anyway so I ripped it off the ODBII port and threw it on the floor. I changed insurance companies the moment I got home from work.
My final score was really poor and I was pissed since I'm the slowest and safest driver I know.
It's a failure of the industry that they tend to market this monitoring as all about the driver. It's really not, it's just conditional probability.
Yes, aggressive driving is a bad thing--but it's not something easily detected by a sensor.
I called 911 and the police took 30 minutes to arrive on the scene. The officer talked to me for about 3 minutes and then threw up their hands and said they wouldn't do anything because I didn't have a plate number and couldn't identify the driver.
The police didn't even want to bother trying to get footage from nearby cameras when I called back and noted the location of several nearby security cameras that might have picked up the vehicle.
By some miracle, I wasn't seriously injured.
But the law is, auto insurance companies can only make money on scale. If they charge premiums that are out of line for the risk being covered they have to refund them. This happened when people drove significantly less during covid.
Some state they may charge you more, however. I just looked up a few:
State Farm: "Drive Safe & Save is always a discount and does not surcharge your policy. The Drive Safe & Save discount is based on your annual mileage and basic driving characteristics."
Nationwide: "Can SmartRide increase my premium? No. This is a discount program. SmartRide measures driving behavior to reward you with a discount, not raise your rates."
Allstate: "Customers will receive a policy discount for participating in Drivewise and those who sign up and avoid risky behaviors can save on their premium. If customers stay active in Drivewise (active participation means at least one driver takes 50 trips or drives prior to renewal processing), their participation discount will not decline, but overall premium savings from Drivewise will depend on the customer's driving behaviors. Drivers who have riskier driving behaviors are expected to see a higher price from participating in Drivewise."
GEICO: "DriveEasy is a new program that promotes safe driving by providing both GEICO and the customer valuable information about individual driving patterns. This is designed to help you become a safer driver. Most customers will be able to save based on their safe driving habits, however riskier drivers may see a higher rate – depending on the state you live in."
If you want to buy a car that doesn’t have such a device, do you need a 2010? A 2019? Country dependent?
Isn't that what they did in paragraph 1?
Historically, as a XXI century society, we tend to adopt solutions like this (AirBnB, Uber, “you are the product” platforms, blindly accepting ToS, etc).
I don’t mean to be a nihilist, I just wanted to point out that this nothing new and that this is a trend. Hopefully there will be a way to balance this like the other examples, even if a little.
Your insurance company pays more if you are at fault, so they'd prefer to prove you innocent.
I believe any box or anything that monitors car will be used by insurance company to simply not pay up.
Nowadays, everything they come up with is like this.
1984 aint got nothing on that insurance company. Do you remember the name so we can all collectively try to avoid it?
I'd rather some scrappy startup have all my data than my bank or my insurance provider. At least the startup has limited power. My bank can ruin my life by giving my a shit credit score because their model told them to, and by appealing to their trusted societal position, they'll convince themselves that it was the right thing to do.
Facebook was once a scrappy startup.
As was Google.
Well, your phone has already done that - Waze "helpfully" auto-populated my home and work address for me.
I'm pretty sure your insurance company knows where you live.
iOS allows me to set relatively fine-grained permissions and privacy settings. Unless I actively use Google Maps (or any other GPS enabled app), it won't be able to report my location data.
It is possible that your phone provider does not have more than 24 hours of records of which phone towers you connected to.
It is almost certain that the granularity of any information subpoenaed after the fact will not be sufficient to establish any specific behavior at the time of the accident.
Your phone provider is probably not using some off-the-shelf ML modeling to slap together a risk profile that you will be unable to appeal and yet is years ahead of any government regulation. (E.g., in the US if your credit rating causes you to get a worse rate, you must be notified. I have not looked, but I'm very dubious that your "Driver Risk Profile (TM)" will have any such obligations - now or in the imaginable future. See below.)
Biden's proposed AI Bill of Rights [1] is (surprisingly) a pretty interesting read:
> You should know that an automated system is being used and understand how and why it contributes to outcomes that impact you.
If this were a law, this part would be useful.
> You and your communities should be free from unchecked surveillance
I suppose watching your every move in the car isn't going to be considered "unchecked". Since people are all carrying cell phones, I'm not as hopeful this point goes anywhere useful.
[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights/#privacy
There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,000 TV for a single super bowl party and then return it.
I actually desperately want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts" - all solutions I can think of violate my privacy but we'll find out what's worse...
Cultural background + class would be the strongest indicator of this behavior. It describes the norms and expectations to which you are accustomed. Unfortunately it's illegal to discriminate based on most signifiers of this trait.
The alternative to shared trust is costly and intrusive enforcement mechanisms.
For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?
Definitely seems like a losing battle. My retirement plan is a remote cabin in the woods.
Unless I've missed something...
Sidebar: The government is buying all your data from data brokers. We should all collectively submit FOIA requests to get copies of it, to create an undue burden on them doing so. Maybe they'll scale it back.
Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.
A lot of the monitors for older cars (that don't have 'tracking' built in) just plug into the cars OBD2 port and the CAN bus data - and is extremely hackable by anyone thats used an Arduino. It would be much harder to interfere if the monitor is wired in or using its own GPS to monitor speed and distance travelled though.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/resea...
Wouldn't that be fraud?
Not only that, but insurance companies don't cover claims when the policy was obtained by fraud.
I have dumb electronics that are way less intrusive than their luxury versions.
The box knows I slammed on the brakes. Does it know the schmuck in the next lane dove in front of me?
If the user figures out the way to minimize beeping/penalties is to drive 45 in a 50 zone, does he now become a hazard for other drivers?
Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?
It doesn't really matter. You are still incentivized financially by the insurance company to slam on the brakes to avoid accidents.
> Will fender-benders go up because drivers have been disincentivized against hard stops to the point where they risk tighter and tighter spacing and go too far?
The way this is being interpreted is as if people will respond to an extreme degree to any incentive whatsoever, and they will choose the worst response to that incentive automatically. Your insurance rates will not double because you slammed on the brakes once. And people are probably more likely to learn to drive with better spacing so they don't have to frequently slam on the brakes, as opposed to playing a game of chicken trying to avoid having the insurance system know they once had to press the brake pedal hard once.
I've been stuck behind people doing 40 mph on the entrance ramp trying to merge into a 70 mph interstate. It's terrifying. They get a great rating for their leisurely acceleration, while vehicles on the interstate have to slam on their brakes and swerve to avoid them.
The idea that these devices can measure safe driving technique comes from the same school of thought as:
- More productive programmers write more lines of code per unit time; - Democracy puts the best people in positions of power; and - Telling the teacher is the best way to deal with bullying.
Road rules are simply the first order effectors of driving style; the exact conditions of the road are second-order effectors; the intentions and behaviour of other drivers are third-order effectors. All must be taken into account to drive safely.
The monetary incentive is still wildly in favor of hard braking as opposed to hitting a pedestrian. I don't understand this criticism.
Going 55 mph when everyone else is going 70 mph is extremely dangerous but the insurance company will give you good marks for obeying the speed limit.
I refuse to use one of these monitoring devices, it’s extremely intrusive and patronizing. Insurance companies are not going bankrupt due to pricing risk incorrectly.
Think very carefully about whether you want to be behind a person who is scrupulously obeying every single traffic law. Especially if you get 3 of them abreast.
The state itself is at least half Mormon. When you get out of Salt Lake and Ogden, it's a lot more. But there's a lot of scenery and skiing and outdoors things to do. There's a lot of things right with the state. (Start with cities that are safer than expected for their size. Mormons have something to do with that, too.)
But in terms of how the state is run... yeah, you're not wrong.
Normally I'd just post a warning but your account has a pattern of breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I think billionaires are buying private planes, not EVs. The people buying EVs for their daily transportation several orders of magnitude closer to being homeless than they are to being billionaires.
To underline this, I had an enlightening moment with my auto insurance company years ago. I worked a handful of miles from where I lived, but the only way to get between the two was a freeway that is infamous for not only being highly congested (my average commute was a 45 minute drive each way), but for the numerous accidents that happened on it.
I moved much closer to my work, and when I updated my insurance policy with my new address, my premium was cut to nearly 1/3rd what it was before.
This exists. I saw a commercial for it on late-night TV.
At the bottom it noted that it was not available in California or Massachusetts, which is what made me curious to look into it and see why it's so bad that it's been banned in certain states.
OP was describing a thing they obviously dislike, don't want in their life, don't seem to want to exist anywhere. "Because someone paid me to" is such weak justification for it.
The idea that remunerative & interesting work is at worst morally neutral is one of the foulest norms of this site.
It is much longer than that (they have exabytes of data and DO keep it). They have retention periods in years not days. They also bake stuff right into the OS. As they usually have final say on what can and can not be installed on your phone.
Back when I worked this sort of thing they were looking into gathering that exact data and selling it. As being a cell phone is title II device they have a lot of wiggle room on doing exactly that as they are considered like an ISP. It is probably burred in that fine print you sign when you sign up.
https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/state-tax/603259/states-with...
https://ktla.com/news/california/these-states-have-the-rough...
Yes, if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.
>> EVs start to get popular and suddenly now everyone's very concerned about...road wear?
Would it be better to ignore the problem?
Would it be better to focus on the larger problem, rather than distract with a symbolic but ultimately meaningless and punitive "solution"? Yes, it would be better to ignore it for now and focus on adjusting the gas tax to properly reflect how fuel efficiency increases allow for less and less gas to be bought for heavier and heavier weight. To skip over everything noted in the OP comment that hasn't been done to have ICE drivers "pay their fair share" only to then to focus on the tiny minority of EV drivers rings pretty hollow.
>if your car has less weight you use less gas and therefore have a “tax break” compared to the guy on the 5,000lb truck.
What if you have an older and less fuel efficient car? Why should new car buyers get a tax break vs older car owners when it is vehicle weight that is doing the road damage? Would it be better to ignore the problem?
Simply saying EVs are so much better for the environment that they don't need to pay for roads at all seems a little short sighted.
Taxing tires would work. Also, mileage is already recorded during vehicle inspections. That could be used to calculate tax but would be more open to fraud.
Depend where you get your electricity from. Also most of car pollution comes from tires and brake dust, which EV create more of given their weight and torque
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...
See, we can play this silly game all day long or just all chip in.
Also, having lived in a city I can tell you that brake dust and tire wear is also a big part of car pollution.
Unless you want 100% toll roads, we need to come up with fair-ish way to tax EV road use.
The interpretation is that (for most people) regular and consistent incentives/punishments at frequent intervals are more habit forming than irregular incentives/punishments that occur rarely and randomly.
If people were capable of internalizing that they had to drive safely to avoid having their insurance go up, then what would be the point of these boxes? Why introduce the reward/punishment structure at all if insurance premiums on their own are enough to influence behavior?
Frequency/predictability are hugely important for habit forming. A box that beeps at you every single time you brake too hard is a more effective punishment than a random insurance premium increase. Honestly, the premium risks are kind of irrelevant in both cases -- getting immediate negative feedback every time you brake is the problem.
Consider that if people were capable of internalizing that hitting a pedestrian was more costly than being 5 minutes late to work -- and were capable of consistently applying that cost-benefit analysis in their everyday life, we wouldn't need laws like speed limits in the first place.
The human brain is not wired to think about risk in that way. It is wired to respond to regular consistent punishments for braking by braking less often. It is wired to respond to irregular novel punishments for rare events like hitting a pedestrian by ignoring that risk.
Roads are a public good.
Having a road available to use, is worth almost as much as actually using it.
Not to mention all the positive externalities of a better connected country (more trade, business, economic growth).
You're costing X times more to the system because you're diabetic/obese/predisposed ? You should pay more!
That's how it sounds, and if we want to live like that we can go back to cavemen times, because we didn't built societies to play this silly game
The positive externalities created by trucks shipping food into cities massively outweigh almost all passenger traffic.
So charging by weight/road damage makes no sense.
The problem is, while that works out on highways and other federally owned road, the distribution on state or county/city level is almost impossible. Say you have a trucking company doing regional service and one doing interstate transport - both their fleets will have similar driven miles because economically, companies want their many-hundred-thousand-dollar assets to be on the road as long as traffic safety laws allow. Now, assuming they both pay the same mile tax to the state... the state makes an insane profit on the interstate trucking company given that only a low percentage of the miles driven were happening on that state's roads, with the clear majority being on federal highways and other states' roads.
If they say no, and you don't find their name on a few big stores lists of frequent item-returners, then you trust them. Everyone else, you consider shady and don't offer good deals to.
Remember lying to gain a benefit is wire fraud - so anyone who falsely answers this question has committed a crime - and a store is totally allowed to treat a customer they suspect has a committed a crime differently.
That's not true either. There are vastly different standards of enforcement.
This issue is a lot bigger than returning items at the store. Every social system we have was built with assumptions about how people would behave. For example: the Seniors who are easily scammable are those who grew up around people who didn't scam each other.
I could easily fly up the shoulder at 40mph in a 60 zone bypassing all the stopped traffic.
Could drive down the sidewalk at a 20mph pace.
I can still weave though traffic as long as I don't go too far over the speed limit (assuming this device tracks location and speed).
I can still tailgate the fuck out of anybody.
I can still use my phone while driving.
I can be completely wasted and probably not set the thing off.
But don't you dare hit your brakes too hard!!!
Sounds like me three days a week.
I walk out of my home carrying nothing more than a $20 bill and a newspaper. I go to the French cafe a couple of blocks away and have a leisurely lunch while reading the news without any tech or financial company following me around tracing, tallying, tabulating, and selling my life.
I call it "normal."
These days that puts you in a "suspicious person without phone on them at all times" category.
Behaving is too hard for some people and I'm fine with punishing via a social credit score.
Even in a well-designed system, both of those will be suspect.
Yet you are arguing for giving some of them way more power to fuck things up.
Just charge on the odometer reading each year. 3p a mile or whatever. Maybe charge more based on weight.
(But not yet because we were incentivising EV up take. RUCs for EVs will be required in 2024 I believe.)
You still need a charger/adapter between the outlet and the vehicle. Perhaps build the meter into the vehicles charging port.
https://abcnews.go[.]com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail...
If I find the legal podcast link then I will link it here.
GP had a VERY good hot take.
A car passing another at exactly 55mph while another car is going the same speed will take forever. We expect people to pull out, accelerate slightly, and then pull back in to get out of the way after passing even if that means you go above the speed limit for a bit.
Two lane roads often clog with truck traffic up hills. People pass these trucks on lanes in areas that allow it. The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.
We call scrupulous adherence to rules "malicious compliance" for a reason.
Why would either driver would try to pass the other if they are going the same speed? If they're not passing then they should move to the right out of courtesy. (And they're legally required to in some states.)
> The problem is that if you get too many people stacked up behind the truck who won't pass because they won't accelerate past a speed limit, nobody can pass and people will be trapped for hours at half the speed limit.
If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely. Whereas if the truck driver is traveling near the speed limit then the line of people "trapped for hours" are also moving near speed limit which seems fine. Plus, drivers of slower vehicles (trucks, RVs, farm equipment) are often courteous and pull over occasionally to let other drivers pass.
So that leaves cases where someone is driving a bit under the speed limit and is unwilling or unable to move to the side to let others pass. I don't begrudge someone breaking the limit by ~5mph to pass in such a case, but I also don't mind being "trapped" behind someone who scrupulously obeys every single traffic law even if it slows my journey by a few minutes. That would certainly be preferable to the unsafe behavior I see out on the roadways on a daily basis.
And, yet, I deal with this all the time in Texas and California. I shudder at the thought of more of these kinds of people on the roads.
> If the truck driver is traveling "at half the speed limit" at any point then it should be a simple matter for even the most principled drivers to pass them quickly and safely.
I think you don't have much driving experience with idiots on two-lane roads. I have experienced this failure mode in California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania--I have no reason to believe it doesn't also fail elsewhere. It doesn't take very many cars piled up behind a truck before you do not have the ability to overtake them all while your passing zone exists. See this video for what kind of zone I am talking about (sorry that it's an annoying comedy defensive driving video): https://youtu.be/Duw-c8O8Y9Y?t=104
These kinds of tracking devices will make these failure modes worse, not better.
https://jalopnik.com/let-s-watch-cars-from-the-90s-crash-184...
Your suggestion proves my point! With social contracts I don't need to pay this fee, but by getting rid of them I do; I'd be getting charged for other people's anti-social behavior!
Stepping back, social contracts are forms of trust at the societal level. Any economist or business person will tell you that being able trust others dramatically lowers transactional and operational costs. I want to be trusted so that I can take advantage of those lower costs.
ADDED: Furthermore, research has has shown (e.g late pickups at daycare) that when you add a fee to an anti-social behavior it can actually make the behavior more likely because it's now a transactional activity.
I've often wondered how well it would work if you went "right well, if you pick them up 15 minutes late today, you've got to pick them up 15 minutes early tomorrow", or "... drop them off 15 minutes late tomorrow".
So if someone were to buy a $10k car and instead chose a $5k car, it'll be as if insurance were cut to $700/year for the next 10 years!
If you value your privacy, that's a solution.
Wow, that’s crazy high. In the UK my Porsche 911 (992) is cheaper to insure than that! (Without an insurance tracker)
Anyone know if US insurance generally much higher (than other comparative nations)? Or is SF an anomaly?
How much do you pay?
Sure the passing driver is ultimately at fault, but the slow driver has blood on their hands despite no accountability. If they were driving the legal speed limit it may have prevented a serious accident and loss of life. of course, the insurance company would be none the wiser.
If the slow driver is on a highway with a minimum speed limit or they're performing other unsafe maneuvers like weaving between lanes or stopping abruptly then they're clearly not a safe driver, so I agree that slow does not always equal safe.
But otherwise the collision is both morally and legally 100% the fault of the passing driver. Drivers have no moral or legal right to always operate at the speed limit if it's not safe to do so.
My semi-rural town has very narrow roads and I regularly encounter utility vehicles, school busses, farm vehicles, and cyclists on the roadway, not to mention turkeys, deer, and turtles. If a passing driver caused an accident or was pulled over and they tried to argue to the police officer that the slower vehicle "provoked them" into passing dangerously I can't imagine anyone finding that a compelling argument.
Let's say you only analyze vehicle speed data. That is clearly insufficient for training self-driving.
But it is very likely there is some correlation between speed and insurance payouts. For example, say you are able to segment your customer base including one subset with drivers who typically drive >80 miles an hour and another subset with drivers who typically drive <55 miles per hour. Are you saying that you would predict that the two populations have identical risk profiles? That speed data has no correlation with risk?
All hail AI.
I knew there were extra costs in King county (and Pierce and Snohomish counties) due to a regional transit excise tax but had no idea it could raise costs that much.
It looks like it is 1.1% of MSRP x depreciation, where depreciation comes from this table [1]. Ouch!
[1] https://www.dol.wa.gov/regional-transit-authority-rta-motor-...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/was...
And yes, it’s less efficient than a carbon tax, but fundamentally you cannot deny the net effect of getting rid of the conservation aspect of gas taxes BEFORE passing a compensating carbon tax would have the effect of basically eliminating a carbon tax.
In other words, let’s talk about adding compensatory EV fees AFTER passing a carbon tax. Sounds fair and certainly better for climate.
Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a bit of "but we can charge more" baked into the pricing models, but that tends to go in as a completely separate "we can charge more" line item within the internal model. This if nothing else is because in the UK the Financial Conduct Authority have an extensive list of things you can not price on, regardless of whether your models show they're indicative of a greater risk. The FCA don't care if you're charging more than you have to, but they will tear you a new one if you're shown to be breaking the rules.
It gives the insurance company a way to identify a lower risk group of drivers so they can charge that group lower prices.
But it's not hard to see how nearly 100% of people who drive recklessly would avoid such programs, but less than 100% of good drivers would.
The statistical skew makes sense to me. I doubt that insurance companies are assuming that every driver who doesn't take part in such program are bad drivers, but insurance is purely a game of statistics.
Is that true? The handful people I know who have/had these devices are definitely wouldn’t fit that category. And most removed it after a while because their premiums went back up (because of their driving). They just chose it because it offered cheaper rates and they all said the companies promised it would not raise rates above what they were already paying. So it was a “what do I have to lose” decision.
Obviously anecdotes aren’t data. I think it makes sense that the drivers that are egregiously unsafe (and know it) will avoid them. But it would take seeing actual data to make it clear to me that the majority of people who consent are safer drivers.
Insurance companies complete on actuarial accuracy. I'd rather bad drivers pay more, and be in incentivized to drive better, than young drivers and all drivers pay more.
That may be easy: there is a lot of competition in the market. If one company raises their rates too high above others, it is very easy to switch. Lots of people switch every few renewals, chasing a cheaper price.
With the individualized data, they can selectively raise their rates and either take more in from those customers, or get them (and just them) to flee. All without having to wait until _after_ an accident.
Not anymore. You just get an IFTA sticker and apportioned plates.
However, EVs cause around 2x more damage to roads than non EVs.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/26/pothole-electric...
Wait til the semi EVs hit the road!
EVs also have significantly higher particulate emissions due to increased tire wear.
https://racfoundation.org/data/percentage-uk-pump-price-whic...
Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car for what amounts to shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars?
This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim. By states, car makers, the federal government, and third party analysis firms. It's incredibly uncontroversial. It's even got a name, and associated math: it's called the Fourth Power Law https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
> shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just' 3x what you and I do in our gas passenger cars
Gas taxes make up a relatively small part of the cost of gas. If you run the numbers, you'll find that it's maybe closer to around 3.5-4x for most passenger EVs. At scale, that becomes a problem, but at the individual level, it's still a relatively small amount - and certainly less than the cost of gas.
I still have the dents in my driveway pavement!
Wear on the road is a function of weight. It’s really simple and uncontroversial. An EV generally weighs more than an ICE of equivalent size.
Hopefully, the federal push to install tons of charging stations will usher in useful EVs with smaller batteries, lowering weight.
Hiding the externalities is somewhat communist.
If it's any consolation, this is, IME, normal. Unless they stumble on a crime in progress, the cops won't do anything at all to actively attempt to catch the culprit, even when you have things like video of the car with license plates legible and it's the same car involved in a string of crimes. Maybe it's different for murder or something, but with other crimes they're basically useless, and that long predates the "defund" movement and all that.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
Patrols are down 40% since 2020. Hit and runs and other traffic incidents are up. None of the alternate solutions to law enforcement intervention have been implemented so we're just stuck with crime increases. Like a lot of places, we're dealing with an epidemic of people stealing cars for the lulz or using the cars to commit more serious crimes.
I know there are plans to fix some of these issues and I hope our local government can stop arguing about how to do it and start getting stuff done.
And I'm not in one of those supposedly-hellhole liberal cities that people claim have legalized all crime or whatever. Direct and second-hand experience with this stuff dates back to the 80s, for me. Zero times have I known the cops to help when a crime's been committed, beyond issuing a report for insurance (and sometimes charging money for that "service") and possibly snooping around to see if they can charge the person reporting the crime with something (hey, they're already right there, so that's a much easier arrest to make!)
The conversations with both parties amounted to less than 30 seconds, each.
Honestly if there's no injury, the police aren't going to care too much about damage to your car. They figure you're insured, so you'll be taken care of.
In most cities they have bigger fish to fry and a car accident with no injuries is just not that important. I don't think they're entirely wrong.
Contacted the police, took them about an hour to respond, and the officer gave me his email so I could send him the video. It was hard to make out but you could definitely see the object leave the truck, and a few seconds later appearing in my view, and me swerving.
Contacted insurance, they arranged the repairs, and I was out the deductible. About a week later I got a call from the police saying they looked up the plate and lo and behold, it wasn't even registered to a white pickup truck, but a blue sedan, so the plate was either stolen or swapped from another vehicle, at which point there really was no recourse.
Long story short, even if you have a dash cam, sometimes you're SOL. I _did_ use that as an excuse to upgrade my dash cam to one with better quality and night vision, but yeah, shit happens, and if nobody got hurt sometimes you gotta just accept it.
Assuming you have fault based accidents and can sue for the full cost, again the guys a deadbeat. I don't think this is the money saving idea that it seems. I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish, honestly.
Most dashcams can track speed too. When I was shopping for a dashcam, many of the reviews/comments said that the first thing they do when configuring their new dashcam is turn off the speed caption (sure it can still be calculated from the visuals if needed, but that's a lot more work). Last thing you want when you're using dashcam video to show someone else was at fault in an accident is their insurer to say that you were 2mph over the speed limit and therefore partially liable.
About $1100 (comprehensive). I’ve never made a claim and have no speeding points, so I guess I get a good rate; but the OP rate still seemed pretty high for the model.
And if I added this Porsche 911 https://www.carfax.com/vehicle/WP0CA29984S653662 it goes to $1.8k.
So I suppose it comes down to driver risk in the end since my car is only $32k, not $200k like yours.
People often say "the insurance costs more than my car is worth!" as if it's scandalous. But what it's insuring you against, primarily, is the risk of paying millions of $CURRENCY in medical fees to the third party. Your car's value is peanuts in comparison.
> whether they're completely treating federal roads separately or using it for the total, etc
The tax does not distinguish types of road, much like a gas tax does not.
The context we were in is Utah gas taxes and how much it affects road funding that Utah does. Were you referring to something different? I would assume that Utah gas taxes, if they are intended to fund road work, would go towards state roads in Utah (but that's just an assumption, which is why I was interested in the source).
Comprehensive and collision, what your insurance company pays you regardless of who is at fault, is what cases insurance to be expensive in my experience.
Quite simple: Explain how you would have benefited at all, or why you were SOL. It sounds like the outcome could not have been improved... I guess maybe you think that there's a better chance of the person getting caught.
Are you just sad they weren't able to put someone in a cage, even though there's no financial impact on you whatsoever.
[0] https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
Yes, some states haven't figured out what that looks like, but I really don't think the right answer is to dump all that cost on truckers. I would rather pay more for my car's operational tax, increased EV tax or existing gas tax on ICE, than disproportionately affect the price of groceries for someone living paycheck to paycheck.
As for disproportionately affecting the poor, sales taxes (like on groceries and other goods) and excise taxes (like on gas) are exactly the regressive taxation systems that burden the very people living paycheck to paycheck. Shifting the tax burden from skimming off the top for the people spending all their income on daily necessities, towards companies paying the full cost of their chosen operations, would give the poor more buying power and allow market forces to find and utilize the most effective and efficient means to provide services instead of the cheapest means that are only cheap because they are subsidized by everyone else.
Also you could just get a slightly smaller cars since EVs tend to be a bit more space efficient.
Noting the increased road damage isn't an attack on EVs, it's a call to be smarter about infrastructure:.
Did you benefit from paying no state income taxes for decades? Well, now you're paying a little back into the system. I'd think you'd be happy to do that, after having paid no state income taxes for so long. I'd also think you were well aware of the registration taxes when you purchased the vehicle? If so, given these two facts, why are you complaining about it?
You can still be an asshole if you want of course, but being an asshole has nothing to do with your registration taxes.
What is pushing his cost way up by hundreds of dollars is the regional transit excise tax that some Washington counties have. That tax is based on the value of the vehicle, which is the MSRP discounted by a depreciation factor. The tax is 1.1% of depreciated value.
You're not an asshole to drive around a ride you've earned.
Statists will always find some rationale for taxing more that sounds perfectly reasonable and good, when its obvious the motivation is envy.
Your source claims no such thing. EVs may be heavier than equivalent ICE cars, but an electric Smart (the brand) is going to do less damage than a loaded Ford F150.
Tax the weight, not a shitty proxy for weight.
Your comparison is misleading. Compare an ICE car to an EV car, not the lightest EV to the heaviest ICE.
Over in the EU it seems that taxes and duties represent at least half of the cost of petrol, more in some member states
https://www.statista.com/statistics/937796/pump-price-and-ta...
Q: How are governments going to replace this?
Add a supplemental registration tax to EVs and hybrids to make up the cost of consuming less fuel. Of course, taxes never go away, so enjoy this new tax as we enter an electric future.
Q: How much fuel duty and tax does the average ICE vehicle (or rather, its driver) contribute?
I did some back-of-napkin math and came up with a figure of €500
It is pretty much insignificant increase on road wear vs what trucks put on it?
If you meant SUVs or pick-ups by trucks yeah, insignificant and a bad proxy for weight anyway. No point in taxing EVs when what you need to tax is weight.
A 3-series BMW clocks in at 1700-2255 kg. A comparable Tesla Model Y clocks in at 1778-2003 kg (from empty to fully loaded).
A brand new 330i is 3500lbs. A Model Y is 4500lbs. That's a 28% increase in weight for a similar size car.
A Honda Civic is 3100lbs in full trim. A 530i is 3800lbs. My VW SUV is only 3850lbs.
That means more tire wear and more road wear. Are we at the point where EV fans are going to deny that EVs are far heavier?
GP said "and EVs are typically nearly twice as heavy as ICE vehicles"
Also I'm sure you know that 330i is a sedan. Model Y is a SUV. They are not similar. A BMW similar to Model Y would be X3. it's weight is 4150lbs.
Did you know that BMW series 7 is around 4720lbs, compared to 4790lbs of a model S?
EV is heavier than ICE. That's never been a question. EV is gentler to the environment despite the weight.
You could argue that those aren’t luxury vehicles, but downmarket EVs need to be heavy too, because batteries do not match the energy density of petrol.
Myself, I’m replacing nearly every car trip with biking where feasible (young kids make that challenging, admittedly, but the car doesn’t see a ton of use these days).
The Dacia Sandero, one of the smallest cars I can think of here in France, that's also supposed to be cheap so doesn't have a lot of... anything, has a curb weight of 1,025–1,204 kg (2,260–2,654 lb) according to wikipedia [0].
The previous generation Renault Clio, which is a small city car, weighed around 1000 kg, too (980 at the lowest). [1]. Wikipedia doesn't have data for the current generation, which is somewhat bigger physically.
---
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Sandero
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Clio#Fourth_generation...
Does a sharp pointy thing poke a hole in a surface more easily or less easily than a big flat thing?
The "list of academic and government citations" is all just finger-in-the-air unscientific "we think it works like this because it fits our primary school child view of the world".
At least the popular A segment cars like the Aygo, Up or 500 still tend to be under a ton.
Sadly even heavier cars are becoming more popular, so in the future a ton will be far from the median.
