Yahoo Finance Insurance warning: Is your car spying on you? It could cost you
Barefoot Investor Scott Pape is concerned about how much data modern high-tech cars can collect from drivers.
The Barefoot Investor has sounded the alarm about owning a high-tech car and how it could soon make your insurance cost a lot more.
The cars of today boast incredible features designed to make you as safe as possible on the road. While seatbelts and airbags are great, some models now have lane-assist technology, devices that detect when your eyes are getting tired, as well as sensors to check for pedestrians and blind spots.
They’re all designed to keep you in your lane, on the road and away from any dangers that might leap out at you, however, Scott Pape has revealed the potential downside to all these fancy features.
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In a recent blog post, the Barefoot Investor said he was almost annoyed with all the alerts he was getting while driving a Haval Jolion SUV as a hire car.
“The Haval makes me feel like I’m 17 years old, back on my L-plates, with my hyper-anxious mother in the passenger seat ‘guiding’ me,” he wrote. “It dings if I don’t put on my seatbelt. It dings if I go anywhere near the middle lane. And, if I try to overtake a car, it completely freaks out and takes over the steering wheel.”
Pape explained that those alerts could stick around and haunt you down the road.
“In the US, internet-enabled cars are recording all those dings, swerves and sharp stops, and selling the data for millions to the insurance industry,” he said. “The result? People are often pinged with higher insurance premiums.”
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He stressed that this was only happening in the US at the moment, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t appear in Australia at some point.
Finder insurance expert Gary Ross Hunter told Yahoo Finance this would “become more and more of an issue” in the future.
He believes some of the big-name companies might avoid collecting large amounts of data on customers and will instead “spread that risk, rather than get more specific with it”. But he said some start-up insurance companies would likely dig into the data and adjust premiums accordingly.
Hunter said while it was unclear exactly what would happen in Australia, he revealed an easy tip on how to keep your premiums as low as possible.
“The main thing we can do is make sure to not auto-renew,” he told Yahoo Finance. “Make sure that you're checking [your premiums] at least once a year and look at a bunch of quotes from multiple providers.
“What you will often get is a sign-up discount for 12 months - like, 10 to 15 per cent off - and then your insurance [company] will just increase the prices so that they make up for that.”
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