[yigitcakar]

Ex-insurance company sales manager here. I agree that the insurance premiums are a good indicator but they will stay higher than normal vehicles because of the way insurance works. Reinsurers buy the potential risks in bulk and the way it is priced is putting similar risks and assets in a basket and then comparing the data they have about event possibility of the risk. The big data usually gives a pretty good indicator of the total number of accidents, incidents that will happen.

I have been away from the insurance sector for a couple years now, but before the electric car market was evaluated as its own class. This creates a huge problem because you can't distribute the claims optimally. If I simplify it you get (electric car insurance claims/electric cars that have insurance) + operation costs + profit %. Whereas in normal cars, your premium is decided based on the drivers age, previous accidents, car's age, car's color, the horse power, where the person lives, how much they drive etc. In the company I worked for we optimized the premium with over 200 data points.

You can't use the same optimization regarding electric cars because the market is so small and the data isn't there yet. Moreover insurers increase premiums to be on the safe side.

[yarntalk]

Why can't you just calculate the premium based on 201 data points instead of 200, the 201-point being whether it's an electric car, hybrid, or regular car?

[geoduck14]

I think the "200 data point" line means "200 cars that crashed" and that there are too few electric cars around to do analysis on "electric cars with 30k miles driven, and owned by people without college degrees" or whatever- so they just look at "all electric cars" in one bucket.

[yigitcakar]

Exactly!