Car insurance is a tricky market to operate in, because companies are forced to go with only the broadest strokes of information in trying to work out how risky a customer is – age, career, and, despite the ECHR ruling it illegal last year, gender – so that they can correctly price premiums. For older drivers, they also have information about previous claims, but when it comes to insuring new drivers that isn’t available. As a result, premiums for young drivers tend to be high across the board, with little option but to buy the cheapest car available and wait for them to come down.
Insurance company Young Marmalade tries another way around the problem: by monitoring the driving habits of customers. TotalInvestor reports:
When you purchase a low-powered car from Young Marmalade, the free installation of a black box can cut your insurance premiums into half. By monitoring the driving behaviour such as acceleration, braking, what time of the day the car was driven and at what speed, Young Marmalade provides affordable telematic insurance premiums.
The company calls the package “Intelligent Marmalade”, and it does seem to be an ingenious way around the catch-22 for young drivers, who can’t get low premiums until they can prove they’re safe, but can’t prove they’re safe until they pay for car insurance. The company claims it can save the riskiest group, young men, almost £4,500 a year.
The only downside is that, well, it’s a bit creepy. Despite growing awareness – and, amongst the age group Young Marmalade targets, acceptance – of the sort of tracking performed online by companies like Facebook and Google, for the most part that has yet to translate into a similar attitude offline. While services like Foursquare and Facebook Places allow users to “check-in” with their location, they are still required to actively opt-in. The information Young Marmalade use to determine whether or not a car is being driven safely is extremely close to what would be required to track its location at all times (depending on whether or not turns are picked up).
Yet this is representative of a growing trend in the insurance industry, because fundamentally, if a company can offer thousands of pounds for a little privacy invasion, then there are going to be people to take them up on it. Improving the quality of information available to both parties should improve the efficiency of the market, which would be good for everyone. Just cross your fingers and hope that the data is kept securely.
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