Tesla Inc’s usage of every customer’s data, including vehicle camera footage and GPS, with the purpose to price its new insurance products, will depend on the authorization of the drivers and on the different state laws, a senior company executive said on Wednesday.
“The data is there, it’s all there, cameras in and all-around your car, all of the data points are there,” Matthew Edmonds, Tesla’s Head of Insurance, said at an auto insurance conference in Chicago.
“It really comes down to case law, and how much of the data we can utilize. It would have to be a state-by-state proposition,” Edmonds added.
Tesla launched the insurance service last week in order to give the drivers of California, which are the biggest portion of its market, lower rates because of safety features on its electric vehicles.
Although Tesla didn’t give a name of an insurance partner, The California Department of Insurance website showed that Tesla is licensed as a broker and available to conduct business on behalf of the State National Insurance Company Inc, a unit of Markel Corp (MKL.N).
Elon Musk, who is the Chief Executive of the company, was the strongest supporter of the idea that car insurance rates should drop as driver-assist and self-driving technology become standard.
Tesla is one of the rare companies that produce vehicles that are standard-equipped with advanced driver assistance features, such as cameras monitoring lane-keeping and recording vehicle surroundings.
California regulatory insurance filings said in May that Tesla’s insurance product might use “direct data feeds with customer permission.”
However, Tesla’s insurance website says it uses “anonymized, aggregated data” to inform insurance rates, and also that it does not use data from the vehicles at the moment, such as GPS or video footage.
Edmonds on Wednesday stated that they don’t use a lot of the data at the moment from the vehicles, except for the regular auto insurance pricing components, which include a driver’s age, years of driving experience, safety record, and annual mileage.
He did not say when the company will start using additional data to price insurance rates.
And when Edmonds was asked what states Tesla would expand its insurance program to next he said: “Find the states where the population is, those will be the states we’ll be going to.”
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