The latter, clearly. I also don't believe it. If it wasn't profitable at these prices, it wouldn't be this price. The article talks about the true social cost, but an insurer pays for the car and...
The latter, clearly.
I also don't believe it. If it wasn't profitable at these prices, it wouldn't be this price. The article talks about the true social cost, but an insurer pays for the car and maybe some healthcare depending on the liability.
They're not saying that car insurance isn't profitable – it's that the insurance doesn't cover the full damage caused by car accidents. Quibbles about healthcare costs aside, in the here and now...
They're not saying that car insurance isn't profitable – it's that the insurance doesn't cover the full damage caused by car accidents. Quibbles about healthcare costs aside, in the here and now driver liability should be much higher (in line with the damage car accidents can cause) and therefore allow proper compensation of victims.
They are saying both. This led to regulators sliding them to raise rates. If they don't, then eventually companies stop offering those policies in their state, e.g., Florida flood insurance.
They are saying both.
According to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), a trade association, last year insurers paid out $1.08 in claims for every $1 in premiums they took in.
This led to regulators sliding them to raise rates. If they don't, then eventually companies stop offering those policies in their state, e.g., Florida flood insurance.
The market is regulated; the companies can't set their prices without approval from regulators. It is very common for companies to lose money on one class of policies and make it up with other...
The market is regulated; the companies can't set their prices without approval from regulators. It is very common for companies to lose money on one class of policies and make it up with other types of coverage. If it gets bad enough, insurers stop offering those policies in that state, which forces regulators to change the rules. E.g., Florida and flood insurance.
According to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), a trade association, last year insurers paid out $1.08 in claims for every $1 in premiums they took in.
It states pretty clearly that the companies are paying out more on these policies than they take in.
The article then goes to say that they are losing money while not even paying out enough to cover direct economic costs, let alone social costs.
Most likely both. Medical care is a huge direct cost of car crashes, but it's certainly not the only one (and cars are getting more expensive, leading to higher property damage liabilities), and...
Most likely both.
Medical care is a huge direct cost of car crashes, but it's certainly not the only one (and cars are getting more expensive, leading to higher property damage liabilities), and indirect costs can easily dwarf even that. Putting a dollar amount on the value of a human life is of course an exercise fraught with peril, but no plausible methodology is going to come up with less than a six-figure amount.
Perhaps insurance companies stiffing victims can act as a perverse forcing function to coerce customers away from SUVs. Once knowledge gets around that you will not be compensated properly if you...
Perhaps insurance companies stiffing victims can act as a perverse forcing function to coerce customers away from SUVs. Once knowledge gets around that you will not be compensated properly if you are the victim in a large expensive car, that could be a back-of-mind consideration for new car buyers. Perhaps it could also lead to voters selecting representatives who promise deflationary monetary policy.
People don't think that deeply about it. And why would they vote against their interests by voting for deflation? That effectively makes the value of their debt increase.
People don't think that deeply about it. And why would they vote against their interests by voting for deflation? That effectively makes the value of their debt increase.
You're assuming that people care that much about the cost of their vehicles. Giant SUVs are already way more expensive than modest passenger vehicles. A Chevy Tahoe is more than 2x the cost of a...
You're assuming that people care that much about the cost of their vehicles. Giant SUVs are already way more expensive than modest passenger vehicles. A Chevy Tahoe is more than 2x the cost of a Toyota Camry. The insurance is also already way more expensive because of the increased repair and replacement costs. They pay more for gas too. People buying huge SUVs are already paying a premium. Doubling their insurance isn't going to do anything to dissuade that.
The risk is that a heavier car will do more damage that might not be covered by the liability you have, so you need more liability insurance. However, the cost of an accident will depend on a lot...
The risk is that a heavier car will do more damage that might not be covered by the liability you have, so you need more liability insurance. However, the cost of an accident will depend on a lot of other things like speed, what sort of collision it was, what specifically got hit, and so on, many of which can’t be predicted, so I doubt this is how most people think about liability coverage?
Also, when do people tell stories about getting into an accident and having insufficient liability coverage? It seems like it comes up as a hypothetical when buying insurance, and there’s a tendency to see it as a self-interested sales pitch.
It may make sense to set minimums based on weight, but a lot of people will be buying more than the minimum anyway, unless they go up quite a bit.
I also wonder if raising minimums would increase the prevalence of uninsured motorists. You can think of laws as saying what’s required, but in some sense they are voluntary if you consider that breaking the law is a choice.
I still think minimums should be raised, but those are some complications to think about.
An increase in minimums should also include some mandatory uninsured/hit-and-run coverage in the increase to compensate. Some people may be able to self-bank and accept the risks, but it'd be less...
I also wonder if raising minimums would increase the prevalence of uninsured motorists.
An increase in minimums should also include some mandatory uninsured/hit-and-run coverage in the increase to compensate. Some people may be able to self-bank and accept the risks, but it'd be less deadweight loss on the societal level if those who are insured were also mandated to have insurance that covered damage from the illegally uninsured (instead of taking them as writeoffs).
minimums should be raised
Both here and, especially, on the orange site, the headline caused the majority of the comments to be tangential at best to the actual content of the article.
If we're talking about societal dead weight, and not corporate profits, we should just have greater enforcement for carrying minimums because those not carrying the proper insurance are the...
it'd be less deadweight loss on the societal level if those who are insured were also mandated to have insurance that covered damage from the illegally uninsured (instead of taking them as writeoffs).
If we're talking about societal dead weight, and not corporate profits, we should just have greater enforcement for carrying minimums because those not carrying the proper insurance are the societal ill.
The people carrying insurance, even if it is the minimum, are at least paying into the pool.
Yes. I'd say the healthcare problem is exacerbated by the fact you can't opt out of your employer's insurance, drastically reducing any chance of proper competition. But also many auto insurance...
Yes. I'd say the healthcare problem is exacerbated by the fact you can't opt out of your employer's insurance, drastically reducing any chance of proper competition.
But also many auto insurance companies prey on the poor, offering 'just enough to be legal' plans that basically cover nothing (because they don't really scale payout requirements to inflation). So now everyone also should opt in to 'underinsured deiver coverage' so you aren't liable if the other driver doesn't have proper doverage.
Car insurance in America is getting far more expensive. In the year to December 2023, prices paid for it, as measured by the consumer-price index, rose by 20%, even as inflation overall moderated. Prices are often controlled at state level, but regulators are approving the increases because the industry is losing money hand over fist. According to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (apcia), a trade association, last year insurers paid out $1.08 in claims for every $1 in premiums they took in.
And yet what Ms DuBarry’s story shows is that, in fact, American car insurance is still far too cheap. As much as drivers may resent paying higher premiums, insurance covers only a small fraction of the costs inflicted in car crashes. Instead, health insurers, government and drivers involved in crashes shoulder the burden, and victims are rarely fully compensated.
According to a study published last year by the nhtsa, America’s highway-safety regulator, the direct economic costs of car crashes in 2019 was $340bn, or about 1.6% of gdp. Yet the nhtsa says insurance—and not just car insurance—covered just 54% of that. The agency put the true social cost, including lost life years, at nearly $1.4trn. In 2019, 9m people were involved in serious car crashes; around 4.5m people suffered injuries and 36,000 were killed.
Since then, the number of severe crashes has climbed. It is hard to say exactly why. New, heavier sports utility vehicles and pick-up trucks seem to be deadlier. Since the pandemic, traffic has spread out more evenly through the day, and so speeds have increased. Insurers also point to more people driving while looking at their phones. Whatever the cause of the spike, in 2022 nearly 43,000 people were killed in car crashes, including 7,500 pedestrians—the highest figure since 1981.
America’s spartan car insurance stands out in the rich world. Legal minimum bodily-injury coverage varies state by state, but nowhere does it pass $100,000 per accident. According to the Insurance Research Council (irc), an industry data group, 29% of claims nationally (and over 50% in several states) involve people insured at the state minimums. Few policies go beyond a few hundred thousand dollars of liability. The cost of a serious crash “is never going to be covered by that”, says Dale Porfilio, of the irc. By contrast, in Germany drivers are required to have €7.5m ($8.2m) of bodily-injury coverage, and in Britain liability is unlimited. And in those countries, going into hospital does not mean running up a life-altering bill.
The article talks about multiple types of cost and I wish the data was broken out. One clearly misaligned incentive for politicians to raise required premiums is that in the US excess accident...
The article talks about multiple types of cost and I wish the data was broken out. One clearly misaligned incentive for politicians to raise required premiums is that in the US excess accident costs are transferred to the healthcare system. In the countries the article mentioned that have a single payer health system, it's a government budget that gets raided for excess accident costs. If the states had to manage the healthcare budget for their state I can guarantee auto insurance requirements would go up. Until then, politicians can score political points by not acting in the public interest.
Edit: I wanted to play with some data despite being on my phone.
The article gives $340bn in direct economic costs of crashes, of which insurance covered 54%, or $183.6bn. The NHTSA puts the true social cost including life years lost at $1,400bn.
The moving 12 month average miles driven ended 2019 at about 3.26 trillion miles.
For insurance premium costs to fully cover each of the above costs, we would need:
$0.104294 per mile to capture $340bn.
$0.429447 per mile to capture $1,400bn.
assuming the insurers are breaking even now, of the $183.86bn paid out by insurers, we are capturing $0.056398.
There are 223 million drivers license holders in the US, but not all of them drive or drive equally. You could simply divide out the amount we need by the number of drivers, but that wouldn't fairly apportion risk or cost. You could divide out by number of registered vehicles, but again, not quite right.
Setting side individual risk, which would be partly managed by insurers dropping risky drivers, choosing my miles driven seems the best.
Most insurers I know use miles driven as a factor in setting rates, and we would ideally want to break apart the cost per mile across drivers weighted to the amount of the total miles driven. For example, I drive about 5,000 miles per year, or 1.55E-7% (0.000000155%) of the miles driven, so I should expect my contribution to be as follows:
to cover actual payouts $281.699
to cover economic costs: $521.47
to cover social costs: $2,147.235
My actual 12-month premium is ~$2,500 including discounts for paying a lump sum, ACH payment, and good driver discounts. I'm also paying far more than minimums to protect myself from underinsured drivers, so I'm partly subsidizing bad policies. I insure two vehicles, one older and one newer. On 20+ years I've been at fault in one claim where's I dented a neighbors car while backing out of a driveway.
Caveat: I'm on my phone so the calculations above are suspect and the sig figs are everywhere and wrong.
With regard to transferring money to healthcare, there is also this nugget: So not only did they not get made whole by the accident, their payouts get sucked up by corporations looking to get...
With regard to transferring money to healthcare, there is also this nugget:
She began campaigning for a change in the law in Oregon which had allowed hospitals and insurers to get the first bite of any settlement
So not only did they not get made whole by the accident, their payouts get sucked up by corporations looking to get paid. Change this, so that the individual gets paid first, and you'd have healthcare lobbyists campaigning for premium increases.
I agree. The article mentioned that she did get the law changed in Oregon, but it should be changed everywhere. Rather than leaving the individual to sue the other party for losses, let the...
I agree. The article mentioned that she did get the law changed in Oregon, but it should be changed everywhere. Rather than leaving the individual to sue the other party for losses, let the company with lawyers do it and have an incentive to lobby for changes.
They do, but it is a perverse incentive because it give the hospital a reason for your care to cost $100,000 if the policy paying has that limit, the individual's $10,000 in lost wages is peanuts...
They do, but
it is a perverse incentive because it give the hospital a reason for your care to cost $100,000 if the policy paying has that limit,
the individual's $10,000 in lost wages is peanuts compared to that cost, but could be the difference between the individual making their mortgage payment and filing for medical bankruptcy, and
the hospitals and insurance companies have the legal resources to duke it out in court as well as the clout to lobby for increased insurance minimums if their costs are truly not being met, while the individual does not.
As @krellor put it so eloquently in the sibling to your comment:
Rather than leaving the individual to sue the other party for losses, let the company with lawyers do it and have an incentive to lobby for changes.
It's unclear that all hospitals do have the resources, given that hospital bankruptcies are up. But there's a trend for hospitals to get bought out by larger companies because they don't have the...
It's unclear that all hospitals do have the resources, given that hospital bankruptcies are up. But there's a trend for hospitals to get bought out by larger companies because they don't have the resources alone.
This reminds me of an article about how large healthcare companies are using vertical integration to make money from the parts of the healthcare industry that aren't regulated (like insurance is).
I guess I am skewed because our area is dominated by an insurance system that became a healthcare provider and a hospital system that became an insurer. But I was definitely thinking of the...
I guess I am skewed because our area is dominated by an insurance system that became a healthcare provider and a hospital system that became an insurer. But I was definitely thinking of the vertically integrated hospitals when I made that statement.
Regarding bankruptcies, I wonder how much of that is simply financial maneuvering to manage debt load. I don't think corporate bankruptcy is quite the same as when a person files bankruptcy.
large healthcare companies are using vertical integration to make money from the parts of the healthcare industry that aren't regulated
I worked in insurance adjacent startup for a while, and learned a ton of interesting things about how insurance works. While it is a data driven industry in many senses, the data they have to work...
Exemplary
I worked in insurance adjacent startup for a while, and learned a ton of interesting things about how insurance works. While it is a data driven industry in many senses, the data they have to work with is mostly aggregated and not very detailed. For example, when you apply for coverage and say "I drive a 2017 Subaru Legacy", they don't know if it's the base model or the fancy one. There are some services that sell data to insurances that actually try to correlate things like VIN structure with features, but they are not really keeping up with changes like adaptive cruise and collision mitigation braking, which change driver behavior (but how is anyone's guess) and increase the cost of the vehicle repairs (sensors and cameras that get damaged in collisions, for example).
One of the constraints on innovation is the regulatory structure which requires insurance companies to determine and publish their rate structure ahead of time. For most policies, this structure must be backed by loss data. This might have worked okay when the new year model was mostly like the old one, but with things like automated and autonomous driving, they have a real chicken and egg problem. There are ways to try to innovate policy structure (go read about unadmitted policies), but they have their own caveats and limitations. Add in that each state (in the US) has its own regulations, and it's a pretty challenging maze to navigate.
Forays made into things like usage based insurance (UBI) which track both driver behavior and miles driven are attempts to get better information, but from what I've seen and heard, there hasn't been much success correlating that data with actual losses. (See footnote about OBD adapters for UBI tracking)
To be clear, I'm not saying this regulation is bad. It does important things like tie profits to actual losses and limits discrimination. It may just be that the model is fundamentally difficult.
There was a pretty interesting Freakonomics podcast called Insurance is sexy that explores the difficulties more. It's been a while since I listened to it, but key takeaway I recall is that voluntary insurance will always have an information asymmetry problem. You know more about your life, especially what you are planning to do in the future, than an insurance company, so you can select coverage based on those plans. This applies more to health insurance, where you know you are planning a major surgery and choose your health insurance plan for that year accordingly, but the fundamental need to have both winners and losers in the pool in order to be profitable is an existential problem for all voluntary insurers.
Technical aside: some companies offer a wireless adapter that plugs into your car's OBD port track usage and behavior. I would strongly advise against connecting a wireless device that is potentially hackable to your car's internal networks. Those networks have very little in the way of security or authentication beyond assuming that the things plugged in are going to do the right thing. Cars with cellular or bluetooth connection already potentially have this problem, but there's no good reason (IMO) to add another route of wireless ingress to your car. I have been told that UBI is moving to cellular phone apps anyway because that ties behavior data to the driver, not the vehicle, but I still see those adapters out there.
Is insurance too cheap, or is healthcare too expensive?
The latter, clearly.
I also don't believe it. If it wasn't profitable at these prices, it wouldn't be this price. The article talks about the true social cost, but an insurer pays for the car and maybe some healthcare depending on the liability.
They're not saying that car insurance isn't profitable – it's that the insurance doesn't cover the full damage caused by car accidents. Quibbles about healthcare costs aside, in the here and now driver liability should be much higher (in line with the damage car accidents can cause) and therefore allow proper compensation of victims.
They are saying both.
This led to regulators sliding them to raise rates. If they don't, then eventually companies stop offering those policies in their state, e.g., Florida flood insurance.
The market is regulated; the companies can't set their prices without approval from regulators. It is very common for companies to lose money on one class of policies and make it up with other types of coverage. If it gets bad enough, insurers stop offering those policies in that state, which forces regulators to change the rules. E.g., Florida and flood insurance.
It states pretty clearly that the companies are paying out more on these policies than they take in.
The article then goes to say that they are losing money while not even paying out enough to cover direct economic costs, let alone social costs.
Most likely both.
Medical care is a huge direct cost of car crashes, but it's certainly not the only one (and cars are getting more expensive, leading to higher property damage liabilities), and indirect costs can easily dwarf even that. Putting a dollar amount on the value of a human life is of course an exercise fraught with peril, but no plausible methodology is going to come up with less than a six-figure amount.
Perhaps insurance companies stiffing victims can act as a perverse forcing function to coerce customers away from SUVs. Once knowledge gets around that you will not be compensated properly if you are the victim in a large expensive car, that could be a back-of-mind consideration for new car buyers. Perhaps it could also lead to voters selecting representatives who promise deflationary monetary policy.
People don't think that deeply about it. And why would they vote against their interests by voting for deflation? That effectively makes the value of their debt increase.
You're assuming that people care that much about the cost of their vehicles. Giant SUVs are already way more expensive than modest passenger vehicles. A Chevy Tahoe is more than 2x the cost of a Toyota Camry. The insurance is also already way more expensive because of the increased repair and replacement costs. They pay more for gas too. People buying huge SUVs are already paying a premium. Doubling their insurance isn't going to do anything to dissuade that.
The risk is that a heavier car will do more damage that might not be covered by the liability you have, so you need more liability insurance. However, the cost of an accident will depend on a lot of other things like speed, what sort of collision it was, what specifically got hit, and so on, many of which can’t be predicted, so I doubt this is how most people think about liability coverage?
Also, when do people tell stories about getting into an accident and having insufficient liability coverage? It seems like it comes up as a hypothetical when buying insurance, and there’s a tendency to see it as a self-interested sales pitch.
It may make sense to set minimums based on weight, but a lot of people will be buying more than the minimum anyway, unless they go up quite a bit.
I also wonder if raising minimums would increase the prevalence of uninsured motorists. You can think of laws as saying what’s required, but in some sense they are voluntary if you consider that breaking the law is a choice.
I still think minimums should be raised, but those are some complications to think about.
An increase in minimums should also include some mandatory uninsured/hit-and-run coverage in the increase to compensate. Some people may be able to self-bank and accept the risks, but it'd be less deadweight loss on the societal level if those who are insured were also mandated to have insurance that covered damage from the illegally uninsured (instead of taking them as writeoffs).
Both here and, especially, on the orange site, the headline caused the majority of the comments to be tangential at best to the actual content of the article.
If we're talking about societal dead weight, and not corporate profits, we should just have greater enforcement for carrying minimums because those not carrying the proper insurance are the societal ill.
The people carrying insurance, even if it is the minimum, are at least paying into the pool.
I don't follow your reasoning on deadweight loss. It seems like regardless, the hit-and-run isn't being paid for by the person who did it?
Yes. I'd say the healthcare problem is exacerbated by the fact you can't opt out of your employer's insurance, drastically reducing any chance of proper competition.
But also many auto insurance companies prey on the poor, offering 'just enough to be legal' plans that basically cover nothing (because they don't really scale payout requirements to inflation). So now everyone also should opt in to 'underinsured deiver coverage' so you aren't liable if the other driver doesn't have proper doverage.
Not just health care. Property is also more expensive.
From the article (archive):
The article talks about multiple types of cost and I wish the data was broken out. One clearly misaligned incentive for politicians to raise required premiums is that in the US excess accident costs are transferred to the healthcare system. In the countries the article mentioned that have a single payer health system, it's a government budget that gets raided for excess accident costs. If the states had to manage the healthcare budget for their state I can guarantee auto insurance requirements would go up. Until then, politicians can score political points by not acting in the public interest.
Edit: I wanted to play with some data despite being on my phone.
The article gives $340bn in direct economic costs of crashes, of which insurance covered 54%, or $183.6bn. The NHTSA puts the true social cost including life years lost at $1,400bn.
The moving 12 month average miles driven ended 2019 at about 3.26 trillion miles.
For insurance premium costs to fully cover each of the above costs, we would need:
There are 223 million drivers license holders in the US, but not all of them drive or drive equally. You could simply divide out the amount we need by the number of drivers, but that wouldn't fairly apportion risk or cost. You could divide out by number of registered vehicles, but again, not quite right.
Setting side individual risk, which would be partly managed by insurers dropping risky drivers, choosing my miles driven seems the best.
Most insurers I know use miles driven as a factor in setting rates, and we would ideally want to break apart the cost per mile across drivers weighted to the amount of the total miles driven. For example, I drive about 5,000 miles per year, or 1.55E-7% (0.000000155%) of the miles driven, so I should expect my contribution to be as follows:
My actual 12-month premium is ~$2,500 including discounts for paying a lump sum, ACH payment, and good driver discounts. I'm also paying far more than minimums to protect myself from underinsured drivers, so I'm partly subsidizing bad policies. I insure two vehicles, one older and one newer. On 20+ years I've been at fault in one claim where's I dented a neighbors car while backing out of a driveway.
Caveat: I'm on my phone so the calculations above are suspect and the sig figs are everywhere and wrong.
With regard to transferring money to healthcare, there is also this nugget:
So not only did they not get made whole by the accident, their payouts get sucked up by corporations looking to get paid. Change this, so that the individual gets paid first, and you'd have healthcare lobbyists campaigning for premium increases.
I agree. The article mentioned that she did get the law changed in Oregon, but it should be changed everywhere. Rather than leaving the individual to sue the other party for losses, let the company with lawyers do it and have an incentive to lobby for changes.
Hospitals don't deserve to get paid for delivering care?
They do, but
As @krellor put it so eloquently in the sibling to your comment:
It's unclear that all hospitals do have the resources, given that hospital bankruptcies are up. But there's a trend for hospitals to get bought out by larger companies because they don't have the resources alone.
This reminds me of an article about how large healthcare companies are using vertical integration to make money from the parts of the healthcare industry that aren't regulated (like insurance is).
I guess I am skewed because our area is dominated by an insurance system that became a healthcare provider and a hospital system that became an insurer. But I was definitely thinking of the vertically integrated hospitals when I made that statement.
Regarding bankruptcies, I wonder how much of that is simply financial maneuvering to manage debt load. I don't think corporate bankruptcy is quite the same as when a person files bankruptcy.
yup. definitely infuriating. Here is a good podcast episode on pharmacy benefit managers:
https://congressionaldish.com/cd255-pharmacy-benefit-managers-pbms/
I worked in insurance adjacent startup for a while, and learned a ton of interesting things about how insurance works. While it is a data driven industry in many senses, the data they have to work with is mostly aggregated and not very detailed. For example, when you apply for coverage and say "I drive a 2017 Subaru Legacy", they don't know if it's the base model or the fancy one. There are some services that sell data to insurances that actually try to correlate things like VIN structure with features, but they are not really keeping up with changes like adaptive cruise and collision mitigation braking, which change driver behavior (but how is anyone's guess) and increase the cost of the vehicle repairs (sensors and cameras that get damaged in collisions, for example).
One of the constraints on innovation is the regulatory structure which requires insurance companies to determine and publish their rate structure ahead of time. For most policies, this structure must be backed by loss data. This might have worked okay when the new year model was mostly like the old one, but with things like automated and autonomous driving, they have a real chicken and egg problem. There are ways to try to innovate policy structure (go read about unadmitted policies), but they have their own caveats and limitations. Add in that each state (in the US) has its own regulations, and it's a pretty challenging maze to navigate.
Forays made into things like usage based insurance (UBI) which track both driver behavior and miles driven are attempts to get better information, but from what I've seen and heard, there hasn't been much success correlating that data with actual losses. (See footnote about OBD adapters for UBI tracking)
To be clear, I'm not saying this regulation is bad. It does important things like tie profits to actual losses and limits discrimination. It may just be that the model is fundamentally difficult.
There was a pretty interesting Freakonomics podcast called Insurance is sexy that explores the difficulties more. It's been a while since I listened to it, but key takeaway I recall is that voluntary insurance will always have an information asymmetry problem. You know more about your life, especially what you are planning to do in the future, than an insurance company, so you can select coverage based on those plans. This applies more to health insurance, where you know you are planning a major surgery and choose your health insurance plan for that year accordingly, but the fundamental need to have both winners and losers in the pool in order to be profitable is an existential problem for all voluntary insurers.
Technical aside: some companies offer a wireless adapter that plugs into your car's OBD port track usage and behavior. I would strongly advise against connecting a wireless device that is potentially hackable to your car's internal networks. Those networks have very little in the way of security or authentication beyond assuming that the things plugged in are going to do the right thing. Cars with cellular or bluetooth connection already potentially have this problem, but there's no good reason (IMO) to add another route of wireless ingress to your car. I have been told that UBI is moving to cellular phone apps anyway because that ties behavior data to the driver, not the vehicle, but I still see those adapters out there.