[malandrew]

Even better, Google and the automaker's could get into the market of managing fleets and their own insurance directly or via wholly owned subsidiaries. That's what I would do if I were in their position. Basically, this is going to completely disrupt the auto insurance industry as well and no one has more and better data to price the insurance than Google that now has hundreds of thousands of miles logged and will always be in possession of the sum total of all data on all miles ever driven. They are no longer performing statistics on a sample size, but are instead doing so based on an entire population. Basically Google can do the same for auto insurance that Amazon has done for online retail. i.e. they can operate on razor thin margins that no one else will ever be able to match because they'll be operating on sample-based statistics and it will take them a while before they have a significantly large sample to properly price their product.

FWIW I posted the above comment in the other story submitted on this topic today on insurance. [0]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615346