Car Insurance Companies Set for Bidding War

Wouldn’t it be nice to have car insurance companies bidding for your business? Well, this might soon be a reality thanks to a new App.

How does this work you might be wondering? It all has to do with telematics, which is offered by a number of insurance companies these days in order to monitor how their customers are driving.

If they drive well and obey the laws of the road they are rewarded with cheap car insurance. However, when they constantly drive badly then car insurance becomes more expensive.

Interestingly, one of the manufacturers of these telematics devices had the idea recently to take all of that data being recorded and make it available on their App, so that when a customer wants to renew their car insurance it effectively starts a bidding war between the insurance companies who can see the data and will then decide what quote to offer.

In my opinion this is definitely a good idea in theory, because ultimately it should give more power to the customer.

Imagine not having to spend hours of your time comparing car insurance and getting different quotes, and instead, all you have to do is sit back and relax while all the major companies have a bidding war for your business.

Not only that, but because the quote you will be offered is based on real data from telematics, it is going to be far more accurate, which helps them give you the cheapest quote possible.

While I am impressed with the idea there are some downsides to be considered. The obvious one of course is that not everybody will benefit from cheaper car insurance with this new App.

For people that don’t follow the rules of the road on a regular basis, the data from the telematics could mean that insurance companies don’t want to bid for their business. This could put the customer in a position of finding it difficult to find a reasonable quote.

You also have the issue of user privacy. I recently talked about an idea where companies would be able to access Facebook posts in order to give a more accurate insurance quote, but there have been many critics of this, with many arguing it is allowing too much access.

Facebook themselves seem to be not impressed the idea now, as they’ve since denied the car insurance companies the ability to access customers posts.

The same can be said about publishing telematics data onto an App where all these companies can see your data. Again, some will argue it is going too far and that we shouldn’t be so willing to allow them this kind of access.

At the end of the day though, I do believe that if you are willing to have your data published and then accessed by major companies with the goal of getting cheap car insurance, then it should be your decision


What do you think?

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