Because the market is plain broke.
Competition and evaporating profits should force the actors to innovate. Solely Progressive Insurance is ahead of this industry's antiquated curve, offering the no-brainer of plopping a small device onto my car's ODB that transmits data points that are actually relevant gauging my riskiness to Progressive via ubiquitous cell phone towers. How often do I brake hard? How often do I drive more than 75? How much do I drive, and is it during times that are more accident prone? I can pull this data up on the web, and see the percentage of savings that Progressive has calculated as appropriate based on these results. All they did was take a commodity part, a Davis Car Chip. With all due respect to them, not actually that hard.
Progressive claims they're not tracking your location with GPS. Everyone is entitled to disbelieve them, or for other reasons choose to maintain the privacy of their driving habits, naturally. But in this age of data crunching, it is intellectually lazy to hold on to the post office as a highly significant predictor of riskiness for car insurance, when it is simply a convention that dates back to an era of data scarcity [[and an inability to efficiently process large data sets).
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