[gambiting]

No, it isn't, I've been making this argument for years. In all of EU it's illegal to charge more for insurance based on gender, it should also be illegal to charge more based on age. Only your actual driving record, type of car being insured and possibly location should be taken into account when calculating the premium.

[DanBC]

> Only your actual driving record,

In practice this argument leads to insurance companies charging thousands per year for all new drivers, and then giving discounts to drivers willing to install surveillance devices that report all aspects of the driver's driving.

https://www.confused.com/campaign/car-insurance/black-box

[asdff]

I don't see how an insurance company could judge your driving without telemetry unless you've been wrecking cars and racking up points on your license.

[gambiting]

And I don't see how it's a problem, unless you make a claim on your car insurance, the car insurance provider should assume you drive like a saint.

After all, you would never agree to have trackers in your house just so the insurance company can judge if you're a safe home owner and lower your home insurance premium - why agree to it in cars?

[viklove]

This is why we need regulation. That type of surveillance should be made illegal.

[asdff]

Is measuring G forces so bad? Your phone is doing it to report traffic data to the mapping service you rely on.

[gambiting]

Yep. My sister had the tracker because her insurance required it, and it was a complete nightmare. They threatened to cancel her insurance multiple times due to "dangerous speeding", after calling them they would say the tracker registered her driving 70mph in a 20mph zone, so we would request they send the data proving so.....and every single time, the tracker would register her driving on a small 20mph road going underneath a motorway where she was actually driving doing a legal 70mph. I mean, just looking at the GPS trace it was obvious that she was on the motorway for the last 50 miles, and now for that one read she was on a smaller road crossing the motorway? She would have had to teleport to do that.

As for the G-force tracker - it's also shit, she was getting points docked constantly for "smoothness" of driving, because every time you went through a speed bump the tracker would register "abrupt braking event" and recommend "smoother braking for better scores". It was such a shit system that she willingly paid 2x the premium on her next insurance to not have a tracker.

[DanBC]

They report location too.

https://www.carrotinsurance.com/help/what-data-does-the-blac...

> This includes data on speed, smoothness and usage, which all contribute to your total Driving Style Score.

> The black box also enables your car’s GPS location to be identified in the unfortunate event that your car gets stolen.

[gkoberger]

Couldn’t you argue that’s what’s happening? As in, would you support a lower rate for people with X years of no crashes? (Meaning teens wouldn’t be eligible because they just started driving)

[gambiting]

Sure, in an ideal world an 18 year old who just started driving and a 50 year old who just got their licence should have identical rates, but in practice that's not the case - the older person will have a lower premium despite also having zero experience behind the wheel. Having a clean record is a thing you can work towards and can be rewarded with a lower premium - being older is not.

[clusterfish]

It does work like this in some places, and younger drivers aren't any better off in terms of pricing, speaking from personal experience. So this is 95% just pricing by age "with extra steps" as they say.

Consider this: if the first accident happens to an average person after 10 years of driving, young people will take a loooong time to build a driving record that can even be considered average let alone good. And you can't start charging higher rates only after the crash, such rates would need to be so high as to be ompletely prohibitive. Bottom line, young people will never be paying as good a price as older people under any system that has a semblance of fairness to it. Sadly.

[gambiting]

Sure, but the exact same argument applies to charging men more - we know as a matter of fact that men get into more accidents than women do, for various reasons. Yet at least some places decided it's illegal to charge men more - so knowing that it's a statistical inevitably that men will cause more accidents, now both sexes pay more, but at least the premiums are equal. Is it better overall? My internal logic tells me that it is, because it's not your fault that you're a man, so just because other men crash more often why should you be charged more?

(This can get into a really long discussion about a lot of things that can correlate with higher accident rates and how sometimes it's a false correlation, like how in some places black people have more accidents, but it's not because they are black but because they are poorer on average and drive older less safe cars - but filtering by race could be used as a quick filter which is, obviously, unfair(and illegal))

[clusterfish]

Age is different because it is much more equitable. Everyone was young and most people will grow to be old so most people will see both the upside and downside of fair-risk pricing by age.

Not the same with gender or race, you're stuck with what you're born with (statistically insignificant numbers of transitions notwithstanding).

I think this is a meaningful, if not perfect, distinction.