Comment by beej71

1 year ago

I've avoided accidents by hard breaking twice in the last two years, once from deer bounding into the road, and once from a deaf old cat walking into the street.

I haven't been cited for anything in decades, and have never been in an at-fault accident. I drive the speed limit and have a dashcam. With the deer, I was actually 10 MPH under the limit.

So should my rates go up for these incidents where I successfully avoided hitting something? Insurers are unscrupulous and would use any excuse.

No, thanks. I'll share nothing.

8 comments

beej71

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nh23423fefe  1 year ago

Amen. It's their job to calculate risk. Not my job to be "transparent". The ratchet only goes in one direction.

I won't be an Amazon driver in my own car.

  • andrei_says_  1 year ago

    But they have the tech to collect the data and make extra cash by selling it and making you an Amazon driver in your own car. So if they can, they will. Unless there’s something to stop them. Which in the absence of their goodwill would be legislation.

    Unfortunately legislation representing anything other than big money interests is difficult and rare to pass.

brewdad  1 year ago

The insurance company would argue that you drive in an area with wildlife crossings. That makes you a higher risk even if you managed to avoid this deer. You are more likely than average to encounter another one in the future and may not be as fortunate.

tiltowait  1 year ago

I did pest control for a while, and my truck was equipped with a monitoring device that would beep if it detected unsafe driving. The thing was inconsistent enough to be nearly indistinguishible from random. It sometimes nagged me while driving straight at normal speeds, or going over a pot hole, or just stopping like normal at a stop light. At other times, it wouldn't go off for what should have been obvious "offenses"—hard stops, last-second swerves to avoid road debris, etc.

All in all, I think it was useless for actually policing driving behavior, but I did get identified (read: randomly selected) as the safest driver in the branch one month and got a bonus, so I guess that was nice?

  • rurp  1 year ago

    I drove a newer Subaru for a couple days and it had a "feature" like this with a camera pointed at the driver that would beep if it thought you weren't paying enough attention. Just like the pest control truck it was innacurate to the point of being totally useless and very annoying. The stupidest part was that it couldn't be disabled. I was a happy Subaru owner for many years but the driver camera and a few other modern owner-hostile features totally turned me off to the company.