[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.