Self Driving Car Insurance

https://www.lemonade.com/car/explained/self-driving-car-insurance/

by KellyCriterion • 6 months ago

147 331 6 months ago

One's first thought is that they ought to be running away from underwriting this as fast as they can go. But then one realizes that it is all profit -- they need never pay a claim, because in accidents involving autonomous vehicles, it will never be possible to establish fault; and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility.

nradov3• 6 months ago

You're not making any sense. In terms of civil liability, fault is attached to the vehicle regardless of what autonomous systems might have been in use at the time of a collision.

SoftTalker2• 6 months ago

Or even who was driving it, in the case of ordinary cars.

jgbuddy2• 6 months ago

and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility.

Are you saying that the investments in FSD by tesla have been with the goal of letting drivers get a way with accidents? The law is black and white

FrankWilhoit2• 6 months ago

What is the "driver"? Who wrote which line of the software? Who tested it? Who approved its deployment? The rest is lawyers.

tehwebguy• 6 months ago

One might imagine that lower courts won’t determine fault, one would be wrong.

deelayman• 6 months ago

I think there's a narrow unregulated space where this could be true. I'm exercising my creativity trying to imagine it - where automations are built with the outcome of obscured responsibility in mind. And I could understand profit as a possible driving factor for that outcome.

As an extreme end of a spectrum example, there's been worry and debate for decades over automating military capabilities to the point where it becomes "push button to win war". There used to be, and hopefully still is, lots of restraint towards heading in that direction - in recognition of the need for ethics validation in automated judgements. The topic comes up now and then around Tesla's, and impossible decisions that FSD will have to make.

So at a certain point, and it may be right around the point of serious physical harm, the design decision to have or not have human-in-the-middle accountability seems to run into ethical constraints. In reality it's the ruthless bottom line focused corps - that don't seem to be the norm, but may have an outsized impact - that actually push up against ethical constraints. But even then, I would be wary as an executive documenting a decision to disregard potential harms at one of them shops. That line is being tested, but it's still there.

In my actual experience with automations, they've always been derived from laziness / reducing effort for everyone, or "because we can", and sometimes a need to reduce human error.

sabareesh• 6 months ago

Tesla have their own Insurance product which is already very competitive compared to other providers. Not sure if lemonade can beat them . Tesla's insurance product has similar objective in place already where it rewards self driving over manual driving.

kjksf3• 6 months ago

Tesla is cooperating with Lemonade on this by providing them necessary user driving data.

If Tesla didn't want Lemonade to provide this, they could block them.

Strategically, Tesla doesn't want to be an insurer. They started the insurance product years ago, before Lemonade also offered this, to make FSD more attractive to buyers.

But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.

In conclusion: Tesla is happy that Lemonade offers this. It makes Tesla cars more attractive to buyers without Tesla doing the work of starting an insurance company in every state.

mullingitover2• 6 months ago

But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.

If the math was mathing, it would be malpractice not to expand it. I'm betting that their scheme simply wasn't workable, given the extremely high costs of claims (Tesla repairs aren't cheap) relative to the low rates that they were collecting on premiums. The cheap premiums are probably a form of market dumping to get people to buy their FSD product, the sales of which boosts their share price.

redanddead9• 6 months ago

You'd be very surprised. Distribution works wonders. You could have a large carrier taking over Tesla's own vehicles in markets they care about. The difference then would be loss ratios on the data collection, like does LIDAR data really beat Progressive Snapshot?

The two are measuring data for different sources of losses for carriers.

jasoncartwright4• 6 months ago

If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?

jgbuddy2• 6 months ago

Because the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?

throw202512206• 6 months ago

Who’s the “operator” of an “autonomous” car? If I sit in it and it drives me around, how am I an “operator”?

jasoncartwright4• 6 months ago

Sounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.

close04• 6 months ago

The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.

Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.

A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.

throw202512206• 6 months ago

It’s because you bought it. Don’t buy it if you don’t want to insure.

SoftTalker2• 6 months ago

Yep, you bought it, you own it, you choose to operate it on the public roads. Therefore your liability.

Rebelgecko2• 6 months ago

I don't think Tesla lets you buy FSD

davidhunter• 6 months ago

Seems like the role of the human operator in the age of AI is to be the entity they can throw in jail if the machine fails (e.g. driver, pilot)

taneq• 6 months ago

I’ve said for years that pragmatically, our definition of a “person” is an entity that can accept liability and take blame.

jimt1234• 6 months ago

Not an expert here, but I recall reading that certain European countries (Spain???) allow liability to be put on the autonomous driving system, not the person in the car. Does anyone know more about this?

bluGill8• 6 months ago

That is the case everywhere. It is common when buying a product for the contract to include who has liability for various things. The price often changes by a lot depending on who has liability.

Cars are traditionally sold as the customer has liability. Nothing stops a car maker (or even an individual dealer) from selling cars today taking all the insurance liability in any country I know of - they don't for what I hope are obvious reasons (bad drivers will be sure to buy those cars since it is a better deal for them an in turn a worse deal for good drivers), but they could.

Self driving is currently sold as customers has liability because that is how it has always been done. I doubt it will change, but it is only because I doubt there will ever be enough advantage as to be worth it for someone else to take on the liability - but I could be wrong.

kjksf3• 6 months ago

Because that's the law of the land currently.

The product you buy is called "FSD Supervised". It clearly states you're liable and must supervise the system.

I don't think there's law that would allow Tesla (or anyone else) to sell a passenger car with unsupervised system.

If you take Waymo or Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, you are not liable for accidents, Google or Tesla is.

That's because they operate on limited state laws that allow them to provide such service but the law doesn't allow selling such cars to people.

That's changing. Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.

jasoncartwright4• 6 months ago

I see. So not Tesla's product they are using to sell insurance around isn't "Full Self-Driving" or "Autonomous" like the page says.

rubyfan3• 6 months ago

Waymo is also a livery service which you normally aren’t liable for as a passenger of taxi or limousine unless you have deep pockets. /IANAL

AlotOfReading3• 6 months ago

You can sell autonomous vehicles to consumers all day long. There's no US federal law prohibiting that, as long as they're compliant with FMVSS as all consumer vehicles are required to be.

2III7• 6 months ago

Without LIDAR and/or additional sensors, Tesla will never be able to provide "real" FSD, no matter how wonderful their software controlling the car is.

Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property.

Waymo and others are providing a taxi service where the driver is not a human. You don't pay insurance when you ride Uber or Bolt or any other regular taxi service.

kolbe• 6 months ago

Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.

This is news to me. This context seems important to understanding Tesla's decision to stop selling FSD. If they're on the hook for insurance, then they will need to dynamically adjust what they charge to reflect insurance costs.

arijun2• 6 months ago

I imagine insurance would be split in two in that case. Carmakers would not want to be liable for e.g. someone striking you in a hit-and-run.

paulryanrogers5• 6 months ago

Tacking "Supervised" on the end of "Full Self Driving" is just contradictory. Perhaps if it was "Partial Self Driving" then it wouldn't be so confusing.

throwaway20372• 6 months ago

    > Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.

You raise an important point here. Is it economically feasible for system makers to bear the responsibility of self-driving car accidents? It seems impossible, unless the cars are much more expensive to cover the potential future costs. I'm very curious how Waymo insures their cars today. I assume they have a bespoke insurance contract negotiated with a major insurer. Also, do we know the initial cost of each Waymo car (to say nothing of ongoing costs from compute/mapping/etc.)? It must be very high (2x?) given all of the special navigation equipment that is added to each car.

gizmo6862• 6 months ago

Generally speaking, liability for a thing falls on the owner/operator. That person can sue the manufacturer to recover the damages if they want. At some point, I expect it to become somewhat routine for insurures to pay out, then sue the manufacturer to recover.

amelius4• 6 months ago

Or at some point subscribing to a service may be easier than owning the damn thing.

einpoklum4• 6 months ago

Ah, but could one not argue that the owner of the self-driving car is _not_ the operator, and it is the car, or perhaps Tesla, which operates it?

PunchyHamster3• 6 months ago

but tesla is the operator

loeg2• 6 months ago

It isn't fully autonomous yet. For any future system sold as level 5 (or level 4?), I agree with your contention -- the manufacturer of the level 5 autonomous system is the one who bears primary liability and therefore should insure. "FSD" isn't even level 3.

(Though, there is still an element of owner/operator maintenance for level 4/5 vehicles -- e.g., if the owner fails to replace tires below 4/32", continues to operate the vehicle, and it causes an injury, that is partially the owner/operator's fault.)

Night_Thastus• 6 months ago

Wouldn't that requirement completely kill any chance of a L5 system being profitable? If company X is making tons of self-driving cars, and now has to pay insurance for every single one, that's a mountain of cash. They'd go broke immediately.

I realize it would suck to be blamed for something the car did when you weren't driving it, but I'm not sure how else it could be financially feasible.

abtinf• 6 months ago

You insure the property, not the person.

redanddead9• 6 months ago

well it's the risk, the combination ..

it's why young drivers pay more for insurance

ck2• 6 months ago

The coder and sensor manufacturers need the insurance for wrongful death lawsuits

and Musk for removing lidar so it keeps jumping across high speed traffic at shadows because the visual cameras can't see true depth

99% of the people on this website are coders and know how even one small typo can cause random fails, yet you trust them to make you an alpha/beta tester at high speed?

djoldman• 6 months ago

That's probably the future; Mercedes currently does do this in limited form:

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...

jdminhbg• 6 months ago

Not "currently," "used to": https://www.theverge.com/transportation/860935/mercedes-driv...

It was way too limited to be useful to anyone.

charcircuit• 6 months ago

Not all insurance claims are based off of the choices of the driver.

JumpCrisscross6• 6 months ago

Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?

Why surely? Turning on cruise control doesn't absolve motorists of their insurance requirement.

And the premise is false. While Tesla does "not maintain as much insurance coverage as many other companies do," there are "policies that [they] do have" [1]. (What it insures is a separate question.)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...

forgetfreeman• 6 months ago

Cruise control is hardly relevant to a discussion of liability for autonomous vehicle operation.

seanmcdirmid5• 6 months ago

I think there is an even bigger insurance problem to worry about: if autonomous vehicles become common and are a lot safer than manual driven vehicles, insurance rates for human driven cars could wind up exploding as the risk pool becomes much smaller and statistically riskier. We could go from paying $200/month to $2000/month if robo taxis start dominating cities.

mavhc2• 6 months ago

The fact you think $200 per month is sane is amusing to people in other countries

AnthonyMouse5• 6 months ago

if autonomous vehicles become common and are a lot safer than manual driven vehicles, insurance rates for human driven cars could wind up exploding as the risk pool becomes much smaller and statistically riskier.

The assumption there is that the remaining human drivers would be the higher risk ones, but why would that be the case?

One of the primary movers of high risk driving is that someone goes to the bar, has too many drinks, then needs both themselves and their car to get home. Autonomous vehicles can obviously improve this by getting them home in their car without them driving it, but if they do, the risk profile of the remaining human drivers improves. At worst they're less likely to be hit by a drunk driver, at best the drunk drivers are the early adopters of autonomous vehicles and opt themselves out of the human drivers pool.

AnthonyMouse5• 6 months ago

If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?

Suppose ACME Corporation produces millions of self-driving cars and then goes out of business because the CEO was embezzling. They no longer exist. But the cars do. They work fine. Who insures them? The person who wants to keep operating them.

Which is the same as it is now. It's your car so you pay to insure it.

I mean think about it. If you buy an autonomous car, would the manufacturer have to keep paying to insure it forever as long as you can keep it on the road? The only real options for making the manufacturer carry the insurance are that the answer is no and then they turn off your car after e.g. 10 years, which is quite objectionable, or that the answer is "yes" but then you have to pay a "subscription fee" to the manufacturer which is really the insurance premium, which is also quite objectionable because then you're then locked into the OEM instead of having a competitive insurance market.

childintime• 6 months ago

I like your thesis, but what about this: all this self driving debate is nonsense if you require Tesla to pay all damages plus additional damages, "because you were hit by a robot!". That should make sure Tesla improves the system, and that it operates above human safety levels. Then one can forget about legislation and Tesla can do its job.

So to circle back to your thesis: when the car is operating autonomously, the manufacturer is responsible. If it goes broke then what? Then the owner will need to insure the car privately. So Tesla insurance might have to continue to operate (and be profitable).

The question this raises is if Tesla should sell any self-driving cars at all, or instead it should just drive them itself.

stubish2• 6 months ago

Risk gets passed along until someone accepts it, usually an insurance company or the operator. If the risk was accepted and paid for by Tesla, then the cost would simply be passed down to consumers. All consumers, including those that want to accept the risk themselves. In particular, if you have a fleet of cars it can be cheaper to accept the risk and only pay for mandatory insurance, because not all of your cars are going to crash at the same time, and even if they did, not all in the worst way possible. This is how insurance works, by amortizing lots of risk to make it highly improbable to make a loss in the long run.

ponector• 6 months ago

Why ship owner is paying for the insurance while it's a captain making all decisions?

zugi• 6 months ago

If your minor child breaks something, or your pet bites someone, you are liable.

This analogy may be more apt than Tesla would like to admit, but from a liability perspective it makes sense.

You could in turn try to sue Tesla for defective FSD, but the now-clearly-advertised "(supervised)" caveat, plus the lengthy agreement you clicked through, plus lots of lawyers, makes you unlikely to win.

paulryanrogers5• 6 months ago

Can a third party reprogram my dog or child at any moment? Or even take over and control them?

cebert• 6 months ago

I own a Model Y with hardware version 4. FSD prevented my from getting in an accident with a drunk driver. It reacted much faster to the situation than I could have. Ever since, I’m sold that in a lot of circumstances, machines can drive better than humans.

throw202512206• 6 months ago

So does AEB in any modern car.

fred_is_fred• 6 months ago

Tesla fans have not realized that every car made since 2021ish can do this.

1970-01-015• 6 months ago

A 50% discount is pretty damning empirical evidence for FSD being better at driving your Tesla than you are.

jerlam2• 6 months ago

We don't know if 50% makes it actually cheaper than other car insurance companies, or the coverage is comparable, or if they have comparable service. Or if they sell your location information to marketers.

dangus• 6 months ago

Or a price hike if the fleet API tattles on you for negative driving behaviors.

It may not be on the marketing copy but it’s almost certainly present in the contract.

_diyar• 6 months ago

Assuming this discount is offered broadly and indefinitely. Otherwise these might just be marketing dollars.

Veserv6• 6 months ago

No it does not. A 50% discount and the insurance still having industry average profit, or at least being profitable at all, would tell you that. Selling at a loss does not indicate your costs are actually lower. You need to wait until we learn if it is actually at a loss.

1970-01-015• 6 months ago

Sir, your bias is extreme.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Veserv

recursive6• 6 months ago

I will sell you a loaf of bread for $10 and a tortilla for $100.

Analysts saying tortilla industry in shambles.

crazygringo2• 6 months ago

Yeah I'm actually very curious about this, it's the first I've heard.

I'd like to know what data this is based on, and if Tesla is providing any kind of subsidy or guarantee.

There's also a big difference between the value of car damages and, well, death. E.g. what if FSD is much less likely to get into otherwise common fender benders that don't harm you, but more likely to occasionally accidentally drive you straight into a divider, killing you?

gwern• 6 months ago

A discount they get to set on a subset of miles of their choice may just be a marketing expense for an insurance startup which makes losses and relies on VC capital and needs growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade,_Inc.#2015%E2%80%9320... I was impressed by this until I looked Lemonade up.

stubish2• 6 months ago

A 50% discount when using FSD or just doubling insurance company profits when when not using FSD. The only evidence that actually matters is cost in comparison to other insurance companies. If this product is cheaper for you, then it probably does indicate FSD is better at driving than you (well, than the average driver in your demographic). Maybe this is damning with faint praise.

estearum• 6 months ago

I'm sure from an underwriting perspective, they could also offer a significant discount for miles driven with LKAS turned on for the same reason they can do it for FSD: you only do it in certain (lower risk) conditions.

FloatArtifact2• 6 months ago

Oh, you've totally forgotten about selling to third parties and making tons of money off of what you do and where you go.

t1234s4• 6 months ago

What happens if you have FSD turned off and like to drive fast on public roads. Will they see this telemetry and raise your rates?

jerlam2• 6 months ago

It seems the answer is yes. From their web site:

Fair prices, based on how you drive [...] Get a discount, and earn a lower premium as you drive better.

t1234s4• 6 months ago

Bummer.. its super fun to floor them off the line.

xnx• 6 months ago

Marketing stunt

rebelde• 6 months ago

99/month is more than I have been willing to pay for FSD, but if it lowers my insurance by 200/month, I could be convinced.

vel0city• 6 months ago

Lowering by $200? Full coverage on two recent model cars here and that's nearly three quarters of my monthly insurance bill. Insane what people are paying for insurance these days.

drnick1• 6 months ago

automatically tracking FSD miles versus manual miles through direct Tesla integration.

No thanks. I unplugged the cellular modem in my car precisely because I can't stand the idea that the manufacturer/dealer/insurance company or other unauthorized third parties could have access to my location and driving habits.

I also generally avoid dealers like the plague and only trust the kind of shops where the guy who answers the phone is the guy doing the work.

iknowstuff5• 6 months ago

And yet you have a phone on you, probably using its navigation too. You’re totally right so much safer to trust Google/Apple with your location and driving habits

hamdingers2• 6 months ago

The whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.

BarryMilo• 6 months ago

Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized...

Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS services so far.

Sayrus• 6 months ago

Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware.

Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

dfabulich2• 6 months ago

Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic.

nine_k3• 6 months ago

This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house.

The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.

Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.

Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.

boredatoms• 6 months ago

Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though

Efficient for who, is the problem

hamdingers2• 6 months ago

if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car

Maybe for you, I already don't own it and have not found that to be true. I pretty much order an uber whenever I don't feel like riding my bike or the bus, and that costs <$300 most months. Less than the average used car payment in the US before you even consider insurance, fuel, storage, maintenance, etc.

I also rent a car now and then for weekend trips, that also is a few hundred bucks at most.

I would be surprised if robotaxis were more expensive long term.

Larrikin2• 6 months ago

This is the nightmare scenario for me. A forever subscription for the usage of a car.

Subscription for self driving will almost be a given with so many bad actors in tech nowadays, but never even being allowed to own the car is even worse.

bluGill8• 6 months ago

Subscription for changes to maps and the law makes sense. I'd also pay for the latest safety improvements (but they better be real improvements). However they are likely to add a number of unrelated things and I object to those.

dddgghhbbfblk• 6 months ago

I think this is purely psychological. The notion of paying for usage of some resource that you don't own is really rather mundane when you get down to it.

bluGill8• 6 months ago

For the vast majority of people who own a car, continuing to own the car will remain the better deal. Most people need their car during "rush hour", so there isn't any savings from sharing, and worse some people have "high standards" and so will demand the rental be a clean car nicer than you would accept - thus raising the costs (particularly if you drive used cars) Any remaining argument for a shared car dies when you realize that you can leave your things in the car, and you never have to wait.

For the rest - many of them live in a place where not enough others will follow the same system and so they will be forced to own a car just like today. If you live in a not dense area but still manage to walk/bike almost everywhere (as I do), renting a car is on paper cheaper the few times when you need a car - but in practice you don't know about that need several weeks in advance and so they don't have one they can rent to you. Even if you know you will need the car weeks in advance, sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.

If you live in a very dense area such that you almost regularly use transit (but sometimes walk, bike), but need a car for something a few times per year, then not owning a car makes sense. In this case the density means shared cars can be a viable business model despite not being used very much.

In short what you say sound insightful, but reality of how cars are used means it won't happen for most car owners.

jtbayly2• 6 months ago

sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.

Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.

Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.

Hertz will hurts you.

starik36• 6 months ago

I think part of the issue in California at least is that you must have insurance. You gonna get a giant fine if you don't.

crazygringo2• 6 months ago

That's the point of self-driving fleets. Or maybe a special category of leased vehicles.

This is about a self-driving car you own.

FlyingBears• 6 months ago

Lemonade purchased Metromile and significantly increased prices. 2.5x if I recall correctly. This has forced me to move to Geico. Now, since prices have increased and new self driving car insurance is giving a discount, are you effectively paying same old rate?

redanddead9• 6 months ago

Just curious about this, this was Lemonade's integrated insurance to the Tesla right? How's Geico like for you? Probably just fine right? Any differences?

aanet• 6 months ago

It would be interesting to see if Lemonade requires a Driver Monitoring System (DMS) to see if the driver/operator is actually paying attention (or, like sleeping / watching Netflix / whatever) while at the driver's seat.

Anybody know??

Tesla FSD is still a supervised system (= ADAS), afaik.

rogerrogerr2• 6 months ago

FSD won’t stay engaged for very long if you’re not paying attention. It’s getting pretty smart about how much attention it wants you to pay in different situations, but there are no situations where it will let you just sleep.

sktb• 6 months ago

Hmmm. The source for the "FSD is safer" claim might not be wholly independent: "Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving"

gizmo6862• 6 months ago

I would be surprised if that was what they were actually looking at. They are an established insurance company with their own data and the actuaries to analyze it. I can't imagine them doing this without at least validating a substantial drop in claims relating to FSD capable cars.

Now that they are offering this program, they should start getting much better data by being able to correlate claims with actual FSD usage. They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future.

Veserv6• 6 months ago

They are a grossly unprofitable insurance company. Your actuaries can undervalue risk to the point you are losing money on every claim and still achieve that.

In fact, Tesla Insurance, the people who already have direct access to the data already loses money on every claim [1].

[1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...

redanddead9• 6 months ago

They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future

What do you mean?

ErroneousBosh3• 6 months ago

"Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving"

Teslas only do FSD on motorways where you tend to have far fewer accidents per mile.

Also, they switch to manual driving if they can't cope, and because the driver isn't paying attention this usually results in a crash. But hey, it's in manual driving, not FSD, so they get to claim FSD is safer.

FSD is not and never will be safer than a human driver.

Onavo2• 6 months ago

Teslas only do FSD on motorways where you tend to have far fewer accidents per mile.

They have been end to end street level for the past two years.

iknowstuff5• 6 months ago

Wrong in every count. You’re embarrassing yourself. Your identity is so tied up in this haha. Yes, it’s safer, no its not just freeways, and crashes after disengagements still count.

ex-aws-dude• 6 months ago

It doesn't really matter because the insurance company itself will learn if that is correct or not when the claims start coming in

Its their own bet to make

cs702• 6 months ago

TL;DR: 50% insurance discount for Tesla vehicles driven by Tesla FSD.

On the surface, this looks like an endorsement of Tesla's claims about FSD safety.

recursive6• 6 months ago

Assuming the non-discounted rates are market-competitive.

notahacker• 6 months ago

And that the sort of miles accrued when using FSD in Arizona aren't >50% less likely to result in a claim than the average mile driven regardless of who's driving

dmitrygr• 6 months ago

Fleet API gives location data, no? I bet this discount will be paid for by this location data

kittikitti• 6 months ago

I have Lemonade for my home insurance. It's been reliable for several years and the customer service is great. I don't have a self-driving car but I wouldn't hesitate to sign up. Their rates are very affordable.

ajcp2• 6 months ago

I've had their Home Insurance since they started up and grabbed their car insurance a couple years ago. Competitive price, excellent customer service, no notes.

culopatin• 6 months ago

Have you cashed a claim from them?

thewillowcat• 6 months ago

You're telling me this car insurance drives itself?

philip12092• 6 months ago

I was curious what the break-even is where the insurance discount covers the $99/mo FSD subscription. I got a Lemonade quote around $240/mo (12k mi/yr lease on a Model 3), so 50% off would save ~$120/mo - i.e. it would cover FSD and still leave ~$21/mo net. Or, "free FSD is you use it".

I believe, at the end of the day, insurance companies will be the ones driving FSD adoption. The media will sensationalize the outlier issues of FSD software, but insurance companies will set the incentives for humans to stop driving.

bmsleight_• 6 months ago

Yep - the way to get adoption, whilst the bar is too high for self-driving cars, the bar should be safer than the average person. An old greying socialist - saying that capitalism drive the right outcomes. Same with low-carbon, insurance will help with climate change mitigation.

IshKebab• 6 months ago

$240 per month? That's literally eight times what I pay in the UK. Ok I don't have a fancy electric car but still... what.

JumpCrisscross6• 6 months ago

$240 per month?

Are Teslas still ridiculously-expensive to repair? (I pay $1,100 a year (~$92/month) to insure my Subaru, which costs more than a Model 3.)

bradleyjg• 6 months ago

We have contingency fee personal injury lawyers and you have loser pays. Your system works better.

philip12092• 6 months ago

I don't have a car so I don't know what is normal. i just went through the lemonade quote process. (I have a license and my record is clean, though - so there shouldn't be any high-risk flags.)

microtherion3• 6 months ago

I'm quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims. But for exactly that reason, I welcome a company like Lemonade betting actual money on those claims. Either way, this is bound to generate some visibility into the actual accident rates.

JumpCrisscross6• 6 months ago

quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims

I'm sceptical of Robotaxi/Cybercab. I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.

misiti3780• 6 months ago

this ^^

madsmith• 6 months ago

Having handed over control of my vehicles to FSD many times, I’ve yet to come away from the experience feeling that my vehicle was operating in a safer regime for the general public than within my own control.

panopticon3• 6 months ago

Where I live isn't particularly challenging to drive (rural Washington), but I'm constantly disengaging FSD for doing silly and dangerous things.

Most notably my driveway meets the road at a blind y intersection, and my Model 3 just blasts out into the road even though you cannot see cross traffic.

FSD stresses me out. It's like I'm monitoring a teenager with their learners permit. I can probably count the number trips where I haven't had to take over on one hand.

bayarearefugee• 6 months ago

I'm less sceptical that FSD, supervised, is safer than fully-manual control.

I'm very skeptical that the average human driver properly supervises FSD or any other "full" self driving system.

rubyfan3• 6 months ago

Lemonade will have some actual claim data to support this already, not relying on the word of Tesla.

sfblah• 6 months ago

One thing that was unclear to me from the stats cited on the website is whether the quoted 52% reduction in crashes is when FSD is in use, or overall. This matters because people are much more likely to use FSD in situations where driving is easier. So, if the reduction is just during those times, I'm not even sure that would be better than a human driver.

As an example, let's say most people use FSD on straight US Interstate driving, which is very easy. That could artificially make FSD seem safer than it really is.

My prior on this is supervised FSD ought to be safer, so the 52% number kind of surprised me, however it's computed. I would have expected more like a 90-95% reduction in accidents.

wrsh07• 6 months ago

I think this might be right, but it does two interesting things:

1) it let's lemonade reward you for taking safer driving routes (or living in a safer area to drive, whatever that means)

2) it (for better or worse) encourages drivers to use it more. This will improve Tesla's training data but also might negatively impact the fsd safety record (an interesting experiment!)

benatkin• 6 months ago

betting actual money on those claims

Insurance companies can let marketing influence rates to some degree, with programs that tend to be tacked on after the initial rate is set. This self driving car program sounds an awful lot like safe driver programs like GEICO Clean Driving Record, State Farm Good Driver Discount, and Progressive Safe Driver, Progressive Snapshot, and Allstate Drivewise. The risk assessment seems to be less thorough than the general underwriting process, and to fall within some sort of risk margin, so to me it seems gimmicky and not a true innovation at this point.

DaedalusII2• 6 months ago

The insurance industry is a commercial prediction market.

It is often an indicator of true honesty, providing there is no government intervention. Governments intervene in insurance/risk markets when they do not like the truth.

I tried to arrange insurance for an obese western expatriate several years ago in an Asian country, and the (western) insurance company wrote a letter back saying the client was morbidly obese and statistically likely to die within 10 years, and they should lose x weight before they could consider having insurance.

croddin• 6 months ago

I could see prediction markets handing insurance in the future, it could probably get fairer prices but would have to be done right to avoid bad incentives, interesting to think about how that might work.

cucumber37328424• 6 months ago

providing there is no government intervention.

You mean like forcing people to buy it ad then shaping what product can ad cant be offered with a spiderweb of complex rules?

sMarsIntruder2• 6 months ago

They don’t bet money on just “I’m quite skeptical because I hate the man”, but on actual data provided by the company.

That’s the difference.

microtherion3• 6 months ago

The skepticism and hate is based on observing decades of shameless dishonesty, which is itself a form of data provided by the company: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

thegreatpeter• 6 months ago

Do you drive a HW4? I’m 90% FSD on my total car miles

justapassenger• 6 months ago

I'm 200% sure it's subsidized by Tesla and they have a deal that any losses they'd get Tesla is going to pay Lemonade for them.

einpoklum4• 6 months ago

Now all that's missing is a self-insuring car and we're set.

cptaj• 6 months ago

So, here's a thought...

If FSD is going to be a subscription and you will never own our fancy autopilot feature. Why should the user pay for insurance?

The user is paying for a service that they do not control and which workings are completely opaque. How can responsibility ever lie with the user in such a situation?

cesarvarela• 6 months ago

If you buy an autonomous killing robot and ask it to kill someone, who's responsible?

_ea1k• 6 months ago

You know what's weird? This is a company that has been using the fleet api for quite a while now to monitor non-professional drivers using FSD on their daily commute, often while distracted doing other things. The latest versions even allow some phone usage.

And yet people are skeptical. I mean, they should be skeptical, given that the company is using this for marketing purposes. It doesn't make sense to just believe them.

But it is strange to see this healthy skepticism juxtaposed with the many unskeptical comments attached to recent Electrek articles with outlandish claims.

FloatArtifact2• 6 months ago

Yes, this is giving away everything about your vehicles driving to a third party for sale or, manufacture. I don't like this personally and I don't like it for my vehicle either. Where I go in my vehicle and when I do it is my business. With vehicles being IoT connected, we are forced to surrender that data as there is no opt-out except for disconnecting the antenna. Not to mention going in to be serviced what kind of data is pulled off.

sergiotapia• 6 months ago

I wish this was available in Miami! I would switch in a heartbeat.

pcchristie• 6 months ago

Not directly related to the topic, I spose, but I have a Model 3, and absolutely love it, but the Smart Cruise Control/Driver Assist is, I hate to admit it, pretty annoying (I think it's gotten worse, too). It's incredibly "jumpy" and over-cautious. A car could pull out in your way 300m ahead of you, totally safely, and the car will shit itself and slam on the brakes to be over-cautious. Same thing with pedestrians who are walking alongside the road, posing no risk.

It's so jarring at times that I'll often omit to use the Cruise Control if I have my wife in the car (so as not to give her car sickness) or other passengers (so as not to make them think I'm a terrible driver!).

I now have developed a totally new skill which is to temporarily disengage it when I see a mistake incoming, then re-engaging it immediately after the moment passes.

NB I am in Australia and don't have FSD so this is all just using Adaptive Cruise Control. Perhaps the much harder challenge of FSD (or near-FSD) is executed a lot better, but you wouldn't assume so.

losvedir2• 6 months ago

FSD is way beyond AutoPilot (the free Traffic Aware Cruise Control + Lane Keep). Autopilot uses an entirely different, hand coded system from several years ago, which they haven't updated at all. FSD is a Deep Learning neutral network based system.

navigate83102• 6 months ago

Apologies for my novice question, does deep learning neural network give rise to hallucinated brakes and accelerations?

socalgal2• 6 months ago

This is the biggest scam I can think of. You are not driving the car. If it crashes while its "self driving" the company that made the self driving system should be at fault. The End!

Gees! Come on!

PS: I'm not talking about Tesla's fake FSD.

yencabulator• 6 months ago

And how much money will Lemonade make from tracking & selling your exact location?

mr_unmatched• 6 months ago

Lemonade Autonomous Car insurance is the first car insurance designed specifically for self-driving cars.

With their claims of it being the first one available designed for self-driving and driverless cars, I wonder how it differs to other options that have been available (albeit not in the US) for 10+ years.

https://www.adrianflux.co.uk/driverless-cars/driverless-car-...

Self Driving Car Insurance

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