I don’t think insurance companies are singling out exceptional people for low premiums, they’re just applying what their data tells them.
Exceptional people are a sample size of one. Not much the actuaries are able to do with that – they need larger sample sizes.
But I will say that I signed up for State Farm’s app that tracks my driving. I’m currently getting an $80 discount with a net premium to me of $200 for 6 months, so that’s like 29%.
intercst
I never had a touchscreen in my cars so I can’t speak from experience but having specialized in computer user interfaces, i dreaded the idea of having to control a car via touchscreen, taking your eyes off the road. Mentour Pilot talks a lot about “Situational Awareness” and taking your eyes off the road is not a good idea.
Not one of the replies considers the irony of “Embracing Physical Buttons Again.”
Tesla is removing steering wheels and foot pedals!
The Captain
Given that Tesla does not tell us how they calculate this, it’s meaningless. For instance, is this simply “miles driven with FSD” without consideration of whether it’s highway or city? The accident rates vary hugely between those two.
We don’t know if the drivers use FSD in challenging circumstances (ice, snow, rain, fog) more or less often, making any comparison with human drivers inapt.
FSD (supposedly) requires drivers to pay attention, just as a human driver would. But we don’t know how often the driver takes over in certain driving situations (anything from parking lot to suburban roads with dozens of curb cuts to Interstate), and the lack of transparency means we’ll never know.
I’d like to believe the day is coming when automated driving makes it safer - much safer - but so long as there are human drivers also on the road, it’s a long way off before cars can truly be fully safe modes of transport. (Interesting to me that there are others also doing Robotaxi and version of FSD not named Tesla, I’ll be interested to see comparisons on driving stats.)
The agency that does car safety testing in Europe reported, a couple years ago, that touch screens are dangerous, because of the way they divert the driver’s attention.
Seems US automakers have not gotten the memo. I notice the new Lincoln Navigator has an “in dash video game” that spans the entire width of the dash.
Steve
And it has nothing to do with Tesla per se. Autopilot is simply a marketing term for “fancy adaptive cruise control” that most modern automakers have as an option. The difference between Tesla and other automakers is that Tesla includes it with ALL their vehicles (oddly except Cybertruck, but that’s a low runner anyway). Basically “Autopilot” is an adaptive cruise control (will remain at set speed, but will stop, slow, or speed up depending on the traffic in front of it) with a lane keeping feature (it will steer the car to remain in the middle of the lane as delineated by the lane lines or extrapolated lane lines).
FSD is something completely different as explained in numerous earlier posts here (it’s neither “F”, nor “S” right now, but may be someday in the future).
“Adaptive cruise control” is a byproduct of the automatic steering and automatic brakes, that the insurance industry has pushed into being standard equipment on just about everything. When you wonder why your body shop bill for a minor collision costs so much, it’s because the radar and sensors that live right behind the grill had to be replaced.
Steve
Next renewal, they will claim that you aren’t taking the phone with you on every drive … LOL! (because 700 miles over 6 months is “too low”). Then you can send them photos of the odometer reading.
Why “supposedly”??? Anyone can take a drive in any Tesla with FSD and it is immediately apparent that it VERY STRICTLY requires drivers to pay attention. To many users of FSD, it is quite annoying. Look away, even at the screen, for a few seconds max, and it’ll flash the “pay attention to road” warning. And if you ignore the warning for a few seconds more, it’ll give you a “strike”. And if you garner 5 strikes, you lose access to the FSD (the beta version part of it) for a full week! (I have zero strikes, and my car only had one strike ever when my son was driving it, with me in the passenger seat, and apparently he looked away for too long. The strikes fall off one by one after a week of acceptable behavior.
It’s much more comforting right now to look at all these features as “added safety features”, like anti-lock brakes (mandated in 1994), rear view camera (mandated in 2018), seat belts (mandated in the late 60s), etc. All the new safety features incrementally make the roads safer. Will there be true autonomy someday? Maybe, maybe not, but probably. And will it be safer? Well, almost surely yes because it is yet another layer of safety feature. Will roads be safer when all the cars are automated on that particular road? Definitely yes. When will it happen? In a long, long time from now because vehicles are durable things and the switchover (from regular cars to cars that can be AVs) won’t even start for many decades.
One of the things I like a lot about our Teslas is that we DON’T have to do much on the touch screen at all. Most of the time the car does it by itself. In rare cases, I can talk to the car and tell it what to do, but I very rarely do that as I find that distracting as well. But seriously, the HVAC system on auto works really well - they even added “auto” mode for the seat heaters and coolers which is really nice. When the car is hot, it’ll turn on those seat coolers on full blast, and as the car cools down, it’ll moderate the level it uses. I mainly use the touchscreen to set my destination (and this is always done while parked anyway), and to change the channel of what I am listening to - and all that requires is a tap on a VERY large square representing the content I choose, very easy to hit that square with my finger without looking too hard at it. I also sometimes swipe over from “content being played tile” to “trip stats tile”, but that’s also a rare thing. The defaults and the auto modes work quite well for nearly everything.
Yes, and even if not replaced, they have to be inspected by a qualified technician with specialized training (and thus paid more) and specialized tools (usually expensive tools). When you add up all the new types of labor and equipment required, what used to be small bodywork for $1000-2000 suddenly turns into a $5000 bill. And I am not exaggerating at all. If you are bored, check out what a headlight assembly costs for a modern car (and the whole assembly has to be replaced due to how they are constructed and how they work).
Double thumbs up on this. Most people hear or read about the 50+ settings and things you can do on the touchscreen and think Tesla drivers spend their driving time hunting around the screen for things to tap. Not true, at least for me. I almost never touch the screen when driving and its usually at a stop light to change among the wide choice of audio selections…which is much easier than doing it on a phone.
Mike
When I moved to Louisiana in '78, they had drive through daiquiri stores. The styrofoam cup was considered an unopened container as long as the piece of tape was still over the straw hole.
You chose wisely, or were lucky. With the new generation, in 2024, everything has moved to the screen. And they have omitted the spare tire too. Even though my trusty VW is only 11 years old, I have started watching the listings for an off-lease 2022-23 Impreza Premium, to get the physical controls, and the spare tire, and the CD player,
Steve
We bought our tesla last year, my husband drives it mostly but when I drive it, I never have to touch the screen. When I get in the car with my phone, it sets the seats and mirrors to my setting, except the rear view mirror which is annoying. It sets the heat to the level I like and keeps it there. Then I drive and don’t have to do anything at all on the screen. Maybe change the audio channel sometimes but also very rarely.
Actually I got a $10 discount the first 6 months I had the app, and $80 the next 6 months. State Farm appears to be tracking my driving honestly. There’s a beacon that you must install on the front windshield, that tracks the vehicle. I don’t typically carry my phone with me (maybe 50% of the time I’m driving). And State Farm hasn’t complained about it.
They do ask you to occasionally enter the odometer reading into the app.
intercst
I’ve gotten better with the touch screen over the last month and now do almost everything with voice commands.
One thing I forgot to do when I left the doctor’s office on Tuesday was to enable the Autopilot which seems to need to be done manually. When I was driving down I-84 in Portland, a car stopped abruptly in front of me. I lifted my foot off the accelerator to get the regenerative braking, but that was insufficient so I attempted to hit the brake pedal. I hit the right edge of the pedal, and my foot slipped off and floored the accelerator. Fortunately my reaction time was sufficient to swerve into the left lane and no one was close enough to rear end me . Presumably “Autopilot” would have prevented that.
I don’t think the State Farm beacon was installed in the vehicle for that incident.
intercst
This is a clever solution. The beacon tracks excessive acceleration, hard stops, phone motion in car, speeding, etc. Then it stores the information and when it can connect to your phone, uploads it to the State Farm Drive Safe app, and the app uploads it to the State Farm servers for further analysis.
How often do the batteries need to be changed in the beacon? Or is it plugged into a power source?
[EDIT: It may not store the information, it may only record it when the phone is present. And apparently there is no power source, as it is stuck to the windshield like some of those tolling devices are.]
Beacon doesn’t have replaceable batteries, maybe it has a small lithium battery?
I’m pretty sure most smartphones have accelerometers. They wouldn’t need the beacon for that..
intercst
