Deer-Car Collisions, on Rise, Peak in Mating Season

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These are fraught weeks for drivers, deer and the nation’s car insurers: costly auto-deer collisions make a special jump during the mating season, usually October through December, and peak each November.

“The bucks throw caution to the wind as they chase does during the breeding season,” said Billy Higginbotham, a wildlife specialist at Texas A & M University. “If this happens to carry them across a roadway, they don’t seem to care.”

State Farm Insurance estimates that deer collisions over the past two years reached 2.3 million, up 21 percent compared with five years ago, and still more encounters go unreported. The annual number of collisions may be as high as two million a year, according to Terry A. Messmer of Utah State University.

These crashes are usually most catastrophic for the animals, but they also account for billions of dollars in car repair and medical costs and hundreds of human deaths annually.

Collisions have risen with deer populations — mainly of white-tailed deer, which now number more than 30 million and have adapted well to suburban life — and with the spread of housing into woodlands and prairies.

The risk is greatest in West Virginia, where a driver’s odds of hitting a deer over 12 months are 1 in 42, according to calculations by State Farm. Iowa is second, with a 1-in-67 chance, and Michigan is third, at 1 in 70. A driver in Hawaii, on the other hand, has only a 1-in-13,011 chance of hitting a deer — “roughly equivalent to the odds of finding a pearl in an oyster shell,” State Farm noted in a report last month.

In a typical fall sequence, a driver may spot a bounding doe and brake for it, then speed up only to hit the chasing buck.

Feral hogs are adding to the hazards of dusk-to-dawn driving in many states, including Texas, Florida and California. The collisions are surging with the unchecked spread of the animals, which breed prolifically and can weigh up to 300 pounds.

Many deer are saved by their physiology: their eyes brightly reflect a car’s headlights, making them easier to spot in the darkness. Hog eyes do not reflect light that way, and the animals, low-slung and dark-hued, can be hard to spot on a cloudy night.

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Car Insurance Rate Forecast: Cloudy, Chance of Rises

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Many indicators that analysts typically use to forecast premiums have been in flux. Highway miles driven nationally have risenbut not as much as last year, and the millions of unemployed drivers are using their cars less than ever. The number of fatal accidents has steadily fallen, but the cost of medical care and car repairs has risen. Auto insurance-related fraud has made a comeback, but tort reform in some states has reduced the number of legal settlements stemming from accidents.

“There isn’t a nice clean trend,” said Brian Sullivan, editor of the Auto Insurance Report newsletter. “Instead, you have a churning sea,and companies have no idea what to do with it.”

Statistics on premiums are slow to be collected, which makes forecasting difficult. Through 2009, the average amount that families spent on auto insurance fell for five consecutive years, but rates in some parts of the country started to inch up in 2010.

Given the likelihood that rates will rise furtherin some regions, analysts say consumers should review policies to seek ways to offset any increases. A recent survey by Consumer Reports, for example, indicated that 14 percent of subscribers would have saved money if they had switched insurers.

But experiences vary widely. Unlike, say, the price of new cars, insurance premiums are based largely on the driving habits, financial wherewithal and the value of the car. States also regulate premiums, so rates differ widely among and within states. Drivers who live in areas where the car theft rate is high are likely to pay more than those who live in safer neighborhoods.

Kirstie Hague, who moderates forums at Edmunds.com, said that drivers who post online comments about their auto insurance premiums tend to say they are paying more for insurance these days, though a handful also say they have received deep discounts of late. Some drivers also complain that their rates went up with no warning or explanation from insurers.Though she considers the $85 a month she pays to insure her 2003 Infiniti G35 expensive, Ms. Hague has stuck with State Farm because she likes how the company has handled her claims.

“I’ve had this agent for 20 years,and I’m comfortable with him,” she said.

Her experience is not unusual. Ac- cording to Jeremy Bowler, an analyst at J. D. Power & Associates, 9 out of 10 customers renew their existing policies. Many consumers, he said, are willing to pay more for their coverage if they believe they are getting adequate service. Still, the economic downturn has had a notable impact on drivers, especially those who have lost jobs, said Robert P. Hartwig, president and chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute.

“The frequency of accidents has also fallen because people cut down on vacations, going out less to the mall and commuting less,” Mr. Hartwig said. Of course, “as soon as the economy recovers, people will get back in their cars.”

Still, consumers who are driving less can inquire about discounts, and they can ask about technology that lets in- surers monitor the miles they drive, a pay-as-you go insurance plan offered by Progressiveand other insurers.

Drivers are holding onto cars longer, and older cars cost less to insure. Over the last year, the average age of cars on the road rose by 4.5 months, to 64 months, according to R.L. Polk & Com- pany, which compiles automotive data.

Some drivers drop collision coverage because the cost of fixing old cars often exceeds their value. John Swigart, chief marketing officer of eSurance, said that since the economic downturn,the number of policyholders who carried only liability coverage had jumped 10 percent. “You can chop off 30 to 40 percent of your premiums by not covering your car when it gets damaged,” he said.

In addition to the growing number of older cars on the road, the percentage of uninsured drivers rose to 18.1 percent in 2009, from 17.4 percent a year earlier, according to CNW Research. The economy is a big reason: a percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to a rise of 0.75 percentage point in the number of uninsured drivers, said Michael McShane, a risk management professor at Old Dominion University.

The rise in the number of uninsured drivers has prompted more consumers to buy uninsured or underinsured mo- torist insurance, which covers medical costs and car repairs if the policyholder is struck by someone without coverage.

Another result of the economic downturn, analysts say, is that companies are increasingly using so-called insurance credit scores to help them determine a driver’s potential risk. These scores are determined using a blend of more than two dozen indicators, including financial credit scores — and for many people, these have dropped.

“Credit scores are a very large part of how they determine your credit-based insurance score and your rates,” said Jeff Blyskal, a senior editor at Consumer Reports, who said consumers should ask to be rescored by their insurers every year. “You’re talking about thousands of dollars of difference from the top to the bottom.”

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RelayRides Accident Raises Questions on Liabilities of Car Sharing

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You set and post the price on the company’s Web site, and the company handles the background checks on renters, the reservations and collecting the money. It, and similar peer-to-peer car-sharing companies, keep some of the money before handing over the rest to you.

Any prudent car owner would worry about the liability insurance implications here, and RelayRides provides $1 million of it to the owner of the car. The company does this because your own insurance company may not cover damage that occurs when you’re essentially running a business by renting out your car. Indeed, USAA and Allstate told me last month that they were troubled enough by the personal car-sharing movement that they might decline to renew policies if they found out that customers put their vehicles in a car-sharing pool.

In response, a RelayRides spokesman said in March that the company had been operating in Massachusetts, where the company began, “without any problems” related to people losing their insurance.

Here’s what RelayRides did not say, however, about a much bigger insurance problem it already had on its hands: a little more than a month before it sent me that statement, a RelayRides renter crashed into another car and died at the scene. The four young adults in the car that was hit were all injured badly enough (multiple facial fractures, no use of hands for weeks, injured hip) that their claims could exceed $1 million, putting the owner who had rented out her car at some financial risk.

So if you’re thinking of tossing your car keys to any random person who turns up on the Web, it’s worth learning a little more about the complicated case of that owner, a 24-year-old former Google systems administrator and a current M.I.T undergraduate (and still a part-time Googler) named Liz Fong-Jones. Her experience demonstrates that using the Web to share your car is nothing at all like sharing your vacation pictures or household tools, and that it may be wise to temper the collective lust for innovation by more carefully considering the need for protection in case something terrible happens.

THE OWNER Ms. Fong-Jones’s saga began in early February with a phone call from a RelayRides executive letting her know that her 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid had been in an accident in Boston and was damaged beyond repair.

She got a check to cover replacement costs and thought that was the end of it. “RelayRides was supposed to step in for any claims that happened,” she said.

Unfortunately, Patrick Fortuna, the man who had driven her vehicle, was dead and couldn’t tell the injured parties that he had rented the car (and had insurance) through RelayRides. So Ms. Fong-Jones eventually heard from her own insurance company, Commerce, which had heard about the accident from one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers who eventually became involved.

THE INJURIES Riding in a 2008 Honda early in the morning on Feb. 5 were Jessica Luisi, Veronica Hodges, Jenna Reilly and Kevan Knecht. According to a preliminary police report, their car was hit by an oncoming car that seemed to have been traveling south in their northbound lane. The report concluded that Mr. Fortuna would be found at fault.

Ms. Luisi had injuries to her right hip and left knee, among other areas of her body, according to an account that Mr. Knecht’s sister posted online, while Ms. Hodges had broken both wrists, one arm and one hand. Many of the bones in Mr. Knecht’s face had been broken, while Ms. Reilly needed stitches on her face and has suffered from concussion syndrome, according to her lawyer.

Besides seeking reimbursement for medical bills (Mr. Knecht’s alone are nearing $100,000, according to his lawyer, William Doyle Jr.), the injured people could also file pain-and-suffering suits. “If somebody crosses the center line and plows into your car, it does a number on you in terms of how you feel about getting into a car,” said Jonathan Karon, Ms. Hodges’s lawyer.

THE INSURANCE If there is any good news in this, it’s that there is a lot of insurance coverage. RelayRides has $1 million in coverage per incident (though not per person), while Ms. Fong-Jones has $300,000 in coverage.

Assuming that Mr. Fortuna was indeed at fault, the questions then revolve around how high the claims or legal judgments may go and which insurance company will pay. It is early to be estimating, though one of the lawyers for the victims has suggested that the claims may total somewhere around $1.2 million to $1.5 million.

Let’s assume that the lawyer is not exaggerating, and that the total amount exceeds RelayRides’ $1 million coverage. Who pays, and how much?

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Google’s Autonomous Vehicles Draw Skepticism at Legal Symposium

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What happens if a police officer wants to pull one of these vehicles over? When it stops at a four-way intersection, would it be too polite to take its turn ahead of aggressive human drivers (or equally polite robots)? What sort of insurance would it need?

These and other implications of what Google calls autonomous vehicles were debated by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars and government regulators last week at a daylong symposium sponsored by the Law Review and High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University.

As Google has demonstrated, computerized systems that replace human drivers are now largely workable and could greatly limit human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries that now occur each year on the nation’s roads.

Such vehicles also hold the potential for greater fuel efficiency and lower emissions — and, more broadly, for restoring the United States’ primacy in the global automobile industry.

But questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation have yet to be addressed, and an array of speakers suggested that such challenges might pose far more problems than the technological ones.

Today major automobile makers have already deployed advanced sensor-based safety systems that both assist and in some cases correct driver actions. But Google’s project goes much further, transforming human drivers into passengers and coexisting with conventional vehicles driven by people.

Last month, Sebastian Thrun, director of Google’s autonomous vehicle research program, wrote that the project had achieved 200,000 miles of driving without an accident while cars were under computer control.

Over the last two years, Google and automobile makers have been lobbying for legislative changes to permit autonomous vehicles on the nation’s roads.

Nevada became the first state to legalize driverless vehicles last year, and similar laws have now been introduced before legislatures in Florida and Hawaii. Several participants at the Santa Clara event said a similar bill would soon be introduced in California.

Yet simple questions, like whether the police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles, have yet to be answered, said Frank Douma, a research fellow at the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota.

“It’s a 21st-century Fourth Amendment seizure issue,” he said.

The federal government does not have enough information to determine how to regulate driverless technologies, said O. Kevin Vincent, chief counsel of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But he added:

“We think it’s a scary concept for the public. If you have two tons of steel going down the highway at 60 miles an hour a few feet away from two tons of steel going in the exact opposite direction at 60 miles an hour, the public is fully aware of what happens when those two hunks of metal collide and they’re inside one of those hunks of metal. They ought to be petrified of that concept.”

And despite Google’s early success, technological barriers remain. Some trivial tasks for human drivers — like recognizing an officer or safety worker motioning a driver to proceed in an alternate direction — await a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that may not come soon.

Moreover, even after intelligent cars match human capabilities, significant issues would remain, suggested Sven A. Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University. Today, human drivers frequently bend the rules by rolling through stop signs and driving above speed limits, he noted; how would a polite and law-abiding robot vehicle fare against such competition?

“Everybody might be bending the rules a little bit,” he said. “This is what the researchers are telling me — because the car is so polite it might be sitting at a four-way intersection forever, because no one else is coming to a stop.”

Because of the array of challenges, Dr. Beiker said he was wary about predicting when autonomous vehicles might arrive.

“Twenty years from now we might have completely autonomous vehicles,” he said, “maybe on limited roads.”

Questions of legal liability and insurance are also unknown territory.

Potential liabilities will be huge for the designers and manufacturers of autonomous vehicles, said Gary E. Marchant, director of the Center for Law, Science and Innovation at the Arizona State University law school.

“Why would you even put money into developing it?” he asked. “I see this as a huge barrier to this technology unless there are some policy ways around it” — though he noted that there were precedents for Congress adopting such policies.

For example, liability exemptions have been mandated for vaccines, which are believed to offer great value for the general health of the population, despite some risks.

There will also be unpredictable technological risks, several participants said. For example, future autonomous vehicles will rely heavily on global positioning satellite data and other systems, which are vulnerable to jamming by malicious computer hackers.

Although they did not participate in any of the panel discussions, several Google engineers and employees attended the event. The company has declined to discuss what it might be planning to do with its autonomous vehicle research, and several participants said privately that they did not believe the company planned to become a provider of autonomous navigation systems to the automobile industry.

Several people with knowledge of the company’s plans said that Google’s lobbying for state laws to permit autonomous driving indicated that it hoped to introduce such vehicles soon — driverless delivery vans or taxis, as early as 2013 or 2014.

Several participants suggested that in addition to technological and legal challenges, autonomous driving could use a more consumer-friendly name. Some called the definition itself into question.

“It won’t truly be an autonomous vehicle,” said Brad Templeton, a software designer and a consultant for the Google project, “until you instruct it to drive to work and it heads to the beach instead.”

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Before Driving a Zipcar, Consider Liability Insurance

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Paying customers are “members,” and they (mostly) watch out for one another by returning the rent-by-the-hour cars and trucks on time so the next user is not delayed. They clean up their takeout containers and fill the gas tank with Zipcar-paid fuel before dropping off the vehicle. Zipcar encourages members to look out for one another by fining those who don’t embrace this communal spirit.

But so far, it has paid no penalty for leaving customers exposed to enormous legal judgments if they get in a serious accident. It caps the liability insurance coverage it provides for members at $300,000 per incident, no matter how many people they may hurt.

Hertz’s copycat car-sharing service, Connect by Hertz, provides even less insurance: the pathetically low bare minimums that each state requires. And even though Hertz sells better coverage to traditional rental car customers on a daily basis, it does not do so for its Connect customers. Zipcar has no such offering, either.

Last week, Zipcar completed a successful initial public offering. Investors are presumably just fine with the fact that the company keeps its insurance costs down by not making the baseline offering, say, $1 million for everyone.

Zipcar and Hertz car-sharing drivers, however, ought to consider the worst case. That’s what insurance is supposed to be for, after all, and neither company’s coverage protects people from it. Would it be so hard to give customers the option to buy a lot more coverage for a bit more money?

Zipcar has known about this issue for many years. I first wrote about it in a Wall Street Journal column in 2005, when the liability coverage was identical to Hertz’s current offering. Felix Salmon, a blogger for Reuters, has periodically hammered away at Zipcar since that time, too.

In 2007, after merging its operations with those of a rival, Flexcar, Zipcar bolstered its coverage to match what Flexcar had been offering. Today, customers who are 21 or older have $300,000 of liability coverage per accident. That would have to cover mangled limbs, brain damage, pain and suffering and anything else that might befall all the people that a Zipcar vehicle mowed down or plowed into.

Drivers under 21 get much less coverage. Zipcar would have to pay a lot of money to provide $300,000 in coverage to less-experienced college-age drivers, and it figures that most of its users in this age group are covered by their parents’ auto policies anyway. So Zipcar does as little as possible here, offering each state’s minimum requirements and no more.

As for your own bodily injury, Zipcar offers the state-mandated minimum coverage here, too. If you have no health insurance, this could be a big problem.

Zipcar members who do not read the disclosures on the company’s Web site would never know about any of this. And many of them don’t, since the company has persisted with the claim elsewhere on its site that its insurance is “comprehensive.”

Wouldn’t a lawyer for an injured person or the family of an accident victim go after Zipcar first, since that’s where the money is? They could try, but a federal law shields rental car companies in many instances, and Zipcar has already cited it in at least one legal skirmish over someone injured in an accident involving a Zipcar.

Just in case, however, Zipcar still insures itself. In a filing accompanying its initial public offering, the company noted that in the event that it was responsible for an accident, say because it failed to maintain its cars, it had coverage up to $5 million in the United States. That is more than 16 times the maximum protection that it offers its members.

Other Zipcar members may assume that their credit card companies offer insurance coverage for rental cars. And the card issuers’ insurance feature may indeed help pay for damage to a vehicle, though Visa’s excludes car-sharing services like Zipcar. But none of these policies offer any liability coverage.

According to a Zipcar spokeswoman, Colleen McCormick, the $300,000 in coverage has been adequate for every accident since it began operations. She added that more than half of accidents involve only the Zipcar vehicle itself. When another car is involved, 93 percent of the accidents have resulted in claims of less than $10,000, and 99.3 percent result in claims of less than $50,000.

That makes the company pretty lucky. Sure, accidents with injuries are rare, but what happens when they do occur? According to ISO, a data provider to insurance companies, about 2 percent of bodily injury liability insurance claims in the United States are for more than $300,000; in the State of New York, it’s 3 percent.

For brain damage in a vehicular accident, the median jury award in 2008, the most recent year for which data was available, was $289,793, according to Jury Verdict Research, which compiles the data and publishes it. For leg injuries, the median was $192,775.

If you think this sort of thing would never happen to you, keep in mind that if you don’t own a car, you’re probably a bit out of practice as a driver. Even if you’re careful, there are scores of jaywalkers to dodge in New York, where Zipcar has a lot of cars. Many of them are quite well off and would want their salaries replaced if you injured them gravely.

And if you’re in or near Boston, another big Zipcar city, you’re contending with the region’s aggressive drivers, all while navigating a street grid that seems to have been laid out according to the paths made by meandering animals or the American Indian hunters who chased them hundreds of years ago.

So let’s say there’s a million-dollar judgment against you. Will the lawyer for the person you have hurt or the family of someone you have killed settle for the $300,000 that Zipcar covers and then simply go away?

They might if you have no assets and seem unlikely to acquire any. Otherwise, beware. “If you have a young Wall Street stockbroker or someone with a really nice six-figure income or has big future earning potential, it is going to be a different case,” said Steven M. Gursten, a lawyer who has won the largest jury verdict for auto accident victims in Michigan in four of the last eight years. “In 16 years of doing this every single day, I’ve had a handful of doctors and others with multimillion-dollar houses and $50,000 in policy limits.”

Sure, you could declare bankruptcy and hope that keeps a lawyer from garnishing your wages from here to kingdom come. “But at that point, you’ve given up control of the situation and your life is in someone else’s hands,” said David Deehl, a lawyer in Miami who has led American Bar Association seminars for other auto accident specialists. “The bottom line is that it is not safe to assume that people will all go away. Some lawyers are stubborn, zealous advocates.”

If you want more coverage, you can buy something called a nonowner’s auto policy. Campbell Solberg Associates, a New York insurance broker, gave me a $200 quote this week on a Travelers policy that would offer $500,000 of liability coverage. Higher limits from other companies that offer this sort of policy wouldn’t cost too much more.

It would be much simpler, however, if Zipcar and Connect by Hertz would let people buy the insurance on a per-trip basis. Zipcar, in fact, already allows members to pay a little bit extra to avoid the possibility of paying a deductible in the event they damage the vehicle. So why don’t they let members make the same choice to buy better liability coverage?

“Never in 10 million drives has a single person had to come out of pocket” for a liability claim, said Rob Weisberg, Zipcar’s chief marketing officer. “Our coverage is two times our next-largest competitor, and our coverage is greater than most Americans have who insure their personally owned vehicles.”

That doesn’t make those Americans adequately covered. And the logic here strikes me as backward. Insurance is supposed to be for things that would be financially catastrophic. To sell protection against a three-figure fee while leaving members exposed to a seven-figure judgment doesn’t make much sense.

So if you’re a Zipcar member, as I am, now you know what the worst case looks like. Still feeling comfortable with the company’s coverage?

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Esurance Campaign Equates Trust With Efficiency

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Esurance has started a new ad campaign, “Insurance for the Modern World,” with an emphasis on trust and savings. Gone is Erin, the pink-haired, animated character of prior ad campaigns. In her place is a commercial that asks viewers, “What makes you trust a car insurance company? A talking animal? A talking character?” The actor John Krasinski of NBC’s “The Office” narrates the spots to a soundtrack featuring “Jam Man” by Chet Atkins.

John Swigart, chief marketing officer of Esurance, said the company was aiming at “insurance do-it-yourselfers” who already were doing things like banking and shopping online. The campaign’s ideal target, he added, is middle class families and professionals ages 25 to 49. “They manage their lives for maximum efficiency,” he said.

Geico is a direct target in the spot on savings, which starts out by showing dollar bills in places like drawers, in a pile of leaves and in a washing machine. The voiceover begins, “If you had a dollar for every dollar car insurance companies say they’ll save you by switching, you’d have, like, a ton of dollars.” But, it asks, “How are they saving you those dollars?”

The Allstate Company acquired Esurance and Answer Financial for about $700 million earlier this year from the White Mountains Insurance Group. Esurance later chose Leo Burnett, Chicago, part of the Publicis Groupe, as its new advertising agency of record. Esurance had previously worked with Duncan/Channon, San Francisco. Leo Burnett also handles advertising for Allstate.

The difference with the new parent company is clear. Allstate is a “brand with consumers who prefer to work with an agent,” while Esurance is not, Mr. Swigart said. A company representative said in an e-mail that though many of Esurance’s customers looked to the Internet to buy their insurance, the company still had “just over 1,000 employees in claims and customer service” for those who wanted to talk to a real person.

•

While previous ad campaigns for Esurance highlighted “Technology when you want it, people when you don’t,” the new campaign is focused on the technology.

At the top of the company’s Facebook page is a box that reads “Keepin’ it real. Real customers. Real Comments. (Really.)” So real are the comments, that of three that were posted at the top of the page on Tuesday morning, two were complaints.

One was from a user saying that Esurance had prebilled his debit card $400 without permission. Another user called the company a “blight on humanity.” Both comments were followed by answers from Esurance customer service representatives offering the disgruntled users an e-mail address where they could have their complaints addressed.

Mr. Swigart said the most recent ad campaign, by Duncan/Channon, did “a reasonable job of keeping us on the map, but it wasn’t really moving us forward in terms of the direction we wanted to go in.” The Duncan campaign was an attempt to appeal to women and featured customer service representatives interacting with customers. Glimpses of the animated Erin character could be seen on computer screens and on knick-knacks throughout the office.

Susan Credle, the chief creative officer for the United States at Leo Burnett, said that ads for Esurance’s major competitors like Geico and Progressive had shifted from “coverage and making sure you’re insured to simply a price conversation and making sure what you were getting was the cheapest.” Leo Burnett is also the agency behind the popular “Mayhem” campaign for Allstate, which features the actor Dean Winters as the personification of different insurance disasters, and the “That’s Our Stand” campaign featuring Dennis Haysbert. “If ‘Mayhem’ is about value, we need to shift the perception of Esurance from being a cheap insurance company to being a smart insurance company,” Ms. Credle said. Esurance also is seeking to draw attention to its updated mobile phone application, which will not be directly featured in the new campaign, but will be rolled out simultaneously. As of mid-December, 22 percent of Esurance’s 525,000 customers had downloaded the current version of the app. The updated app will allow users to submit information about a car accident, including vehicle information, a description of the accident and up to four photos, directly from their phones.

•

The new ad campaign will begin appearing Saturday on CBS during the National Football League games, and will be available on Esurance’s Facebook page. Starting on Monday, television ads will be seen on approximately 45 cable networks including ESPN, HGTV, TNT and USA, during syndicated programs like “Big Bang Theory” and “Family Guy.” Digital video preroll ads will run on the Web sites for AOL, CNN, Google, YouTube and Yahoo.

Mr. Swigart would not disclose the cost of the campaign, other than to say the company would spend a “substantial increase” over 2011. According to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, the company spent $116.9 million on advertising in 2010 and $79 million from January to September 2011.

Allstate spent $405 million in 2010 and $376.4 million from January to September 2011, according to Kantar Media.

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Indifference as a Mode of Operation at China Schools

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AppId is over the quota

BEIJING — For several angry days last December, one of China’s top state elementary schools, Fangcaodi International School, nearly became a statistic in the rising number of “mass incidents” here.

That term includes petitions, demonstrations and strikes, both peaceful and violent, and there were about 280,000 in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a Tsinghua University sociologist. That was up from 87,000 in 2005, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

At a stormy meeting on Dec. 3, some parents threatened to demonstrate at the school gates unless the principal agreed to ban cars from driving throughout the campus, after a first grader was nearly killed in an accident involving a school car on the playground the month before.

On Nov. 15, a school driver had driven over what he apparently believed was just a pile of children’s coats.

But 6-year-old Julien Glauser, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss student, was lying on the coats. Dragged along the ground for more than 8 meters, or nearly 28 feet, underneath the black Toyota Camry, Julien suffered severe spine, lung and head injuries. He is expected to make a good recovery — a miracle, doctors in Switzerland later told the parents, Olivier Glauser and his wife, Hong Li.

“They told us they normally only see such injuries in autopsies,” Mr. Glauser said.

Six months later, Mr. Glauser and Ms. Li are accusing the school of a cover-up, lack of accountability, failing to voluntarily improve safety and refusing compensation for medical expenses. “They said, ‘Sue us,”’ Mr. Glauser said.

Contacted this week, however, the school said it would indeed compensate the victim’s family. A spokesman for the school, who gave his surname as Zhang, declined to provide details, saying internal investigations were continuing.

In interviews, parents, who requested anonymity because they have children at the school, called the incident typical of the lack of transparency and responsiveness at many state-run institutions in China, which are unaccustomed to any form of public scrutiny.

Speaking at a meeting with parents in March, Ms. Li said: “I’m fighting for school safety not just for my son, but for all children in China.”

For two weeks after the accident, “nothing changed at the school,” said Mr. Glauser, a venture capitalist. “Cars were still coming in and out.”

That was when parents got involved. As word spread, slowly — the school informed parents about the incident, in sketchy terms, only on Nov. 30, after some of them had read a blog by Mr. Glauser and demanded answers — the principal, Liu Fei, agreed to the meeting on Friday, Dec. 3.

He defended the school’s policy of allowing cars on campus. “Please understand the problems teachers have finding places to park their cars,” he said, according to several parents who attended.

According to a recording of the meeting, his words provoked fury and derision.

“Your parking problem is nothing to do with us,” parents are heard shouting. “What’s more important to you, cars or children?”

“We will come out on Monday morning and demonstrate at the school gates and ask all Beijing media to join us,” they threatened.

Mr. Liu said that, immediately after the accident, the school started looking for additional parking in the neighborhood, including at a paramilitary barracks opposite the school.

“It hasn’t been solved yet,” he said on the recording.

Ms. Li, in an interview in March, said, “I think it’s a disease of development,” referring to the pressures created by surging car ownership and high-speed construction accompanying China’s fast economic growth. But “at the end of the day, the problem is the state system.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 19, 2011

The Letter from China on Thursday misstated the number of ‘‘mass incidents’’ — demonstrations and strikes, both peaceful and violent — in China in 2010. It was about 180,000, not 280,000.

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Cars You Can Insure Cheaply

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AppId is over the quota

In a Bucks post earlier this year, ''The Most (and Least) Expensive Vehicles to Insure,'' I wrote about how Insure.com ranked the Porsche Carrera 911 GT2 two-door coupe the most expensive 2010 vehicle to insure, and that minivans and smaller sport utility vehicles tended to be least expensive to insure.

In recent weeks, a couple of other studies have come out that are also worth highlighting because they look at the subject from slightly different angles and could help car buyers decide which vehicle to buy.

Earlier this month, Edmunds.com released a rundown of the three vehicles with the lowest insurance costs in various vehicle categories.

According to Edmunds.com, the trucks with the lowest insurance costs are the Chevrolet Colorado, the GMC Canyon and the Ford Ranger. The least expensive to insure coupes, meanwhile, are the Kia Forte, Honda Civic and Chevrolet Cobalt. Among sedans, the Volkswagen Jetta, Chevrolet Aveo and Suzuki SX4 were the cheapest to insure. Vehicles that made the cut in other categories, including hatchbacks and crossovers, can be found on Edmunds.com.

Edmunds.com's ratings are based on the least expensive to insure trim level for each vehicle and on data about actual national average yearly premiums, projected out to five years, paid by customers.

Elsewhere, the online insurance comparison provider InsWeb Corporation recently released its own list of the least, and most, expensive 2010 vehicles to insure. While it found the Kia Sedona to be the least expensive vehicle to insure and the Acura ZDX (some models of which were recalled last year) to be the most expensive, its findings, in general, are similar to those of Insure.com.

Over all, in the studies from both InsWeb and Insure.com, performance vehicles tended to the most expensive vehicles to insure, while minivans, wagons and small SUVs tend to be the least expensive.

InsWeb based its analysis on car insurance rate quotes requested by its customers from January to September of this year for about 400 2010 model-year vehicles.

How do insurance costs play a role in your decision of which vehicle model to buy, if at all? If they do play a role, what are your strategies for comparing the insurance costs for various models and selecting a model?

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

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Car-Sharing Companies Link Owners With Renters

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Several car-sharing start-ups, including Getaround, RelayRides and JustShareIt, are eager to connect car owners with renters this way. The companies use different formulas, but participating owners receive, generally speaking, about two-thirds of the rental proceeds. RelayRides says an owner of a midsize, late-model sedan who rents out a car for 10 hours a week could expect to clear about $3,000 a year.

The hourly fee to rent a car, including insurance, averages $6 to $8. Older cars can run as little as $3 an hour. Fancier models can run much higher — Getaround says it has Tesla Roadsters that go for $50 to $75 an hour.

Peer-to-peer car sharing remains in the trial stage; it can be found in San Francisco and a few other places. It has a long way to go before it becomes the auto equivalent of Airbnb, the surprise success story for peer-to-peer sharing of space in apartments and houses.

Shelby Clark, founder of RelayRides, based in San Francisco, says prospective investors in his company have been concerned that owners will be afraid to hand their car over to strangers. To address that, he points to Airbnb, saying, “Letting people sleep in your living room is much more of an intrusion into your personal space than letting someone use your car.”

All of these companies offer their own insurance coverage for their renters, which is supposed to put owners’ minds at ease. But only two states — California and Oregon — have passed laws to clarify that an owner will not suffer any repercussions should a car-sharing renter have an accident, says Robert C. Passmore, senior director of personal lines policy at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

“In all the other states, legal ambiguity remains,” he says. “If a renter should be involved in a serious accident in those states, the victim can be expected to go after every party possible, including the car’s owner.”

Also to allay the worries of car owners, the driving records of renters are checked for recent serious violations.

Getaround makes it easy to start: participants use their Facebook log-ins, and owners can control who rents their cars.

“We have seen many owners get up right to the point of that first rental and hesitate, as if standing at the edge of a cliff,” says Sam Zaid, the company’s C.E.O. “We want people to be able to start gently, perhaps renting just to friends of friends and not requiring any technology.” The owner personally hands over the keys to the renter — a big inconvenience if the owner doesn’t care to meet every renter, every time — and renters pay for the gas.

RelayRides installs hardware in each car to control the door locks. A smartcard reader is mounted behind the windshield, and the renter presses the card against the glass to gain entry. The ignition keys are hanging by the ignition, so the car can be rented many times without troubling the owner. Gasoline is currently included in the rental fee, but the company says renters will pay for it in the future.

The RelayRides hardware also includes a GPS receiver and a cellular connection, so the company always knows the car’s location, as well as a remote off switch that prevents car theft.

The hardware costs RelayRides about $500, and the company installs it free. Mr. Clark looks forward to not having to install it in the future. RelayRides has announced a partnership with the OnStar division of General Motors, allowing renters to find, reserve and unlock G.M. cars with their cellphones via a factory-installed OnStar system.

JustShareIt, which started in January, requires most cars to have hardware like that of RelayRides, and offers a few other features for security monitoring of renters, like a sensor to detect sudden braking or signs of towing.

At JustShareIt, owners pay $249 for installation of the hardware required for most cars, as well as a $2.99 monthly fee for the bare-bones service that locks and unlocks the car. Both owners and renters can pay optional charges for extra reports and services.

Getaround says it has 536 active cars in San Francisco and San Diego and 80 beta users in Portland, Ore. RelayRides has 200 cars in San Francisco and Boston, and the newly opened JustShareIt has 60 cars and four motorcycles in the San Francisco Bay area.

Zipcar, a corporate version of car sharing that began in 2000, has a running start. It offers widely dispersed pickup locations to people who want to rent a car by the hour or the day. The company has more than 9,000 vehicles in the United States, Canada and Britain; many are on or near college campuses. But Zipcars are owned by the company, not by you or your neighbors. The company obtains new vehicles to be rented out, just as Hertz and Avis do.

THE newer start-ups say peer-to-peer sharing is an environmentally friendlier option because it allows an existing car to be used more fully. Of course, a car has a life span of only so many miles. Car sharing, which causes more miles to be clocked, necessarily hastens the day when a vehicle must be replaced.

The new companies also emphasize the way they transform an otherwise impersonal transaction into a personal one. “We want to remind renters that the car doesn’t belong to Hertz but to a person,” Shelby Clark at RelayRides says. “When a renter makes a reservation, they see a photo of the owner and the listing is ‘Shelby’s Mini.’ ”

Car sharing is just one form of “collaborative consumption,” the clunky catchphrase that encompasses Airbnb’s space sharing and is commonly used to suggest an ideological or moral imperative to share more things. Who knows? In the future, car sharing may become so accepted that we can eventually return to that bygone age when licensed drivers actually outnumbered licensed vehicles.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

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Enthusiastic About Car Sharing? Your Insurer Isn’t

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 People with idle cars (and most cars are idle most of the time) can make some money by renting them out to others who need a car sometimes but not often enough to own one. At some point, the world would ultimately need fewer cars and places to park them. It feels greener, and sharing is polite and all that.

 But then the grown-ups show up, in the form of insurance companies. I called them this week in the wake of an announcement by RelayRides, a company with venture capital backing from both Google Ventures and General Motors, that it was taking its car-sharing service national.

And the grown-ups are not pleased. They want you to know that RelayRides insurance won’t be adequate in the event of a catastrophic accident and that your own insurance company may take away your insurance if it even hears that you are lending your car to someone in exchange for a few dollars an hour.

So anyone considering this sort of thing has to ask: Is the insurance industry overstating the risk of playing along with this cutting-edge idea, is RelayRides underestimating your exposure, or both?

RelayRides is one of several car-sharing services to arrive on the scene in recent years. Getaround is another start-up, as are JustShareIt and Wheelz, a company that the car-sharing giant Zipcar invested in last month.

They’re all part of a larger “collaborative consumption” movement that has captured the imagination of a growing number of civic-minded, Web-addicted people who want to both save some money and use a bit less of the world’s resources. This includes home-sharing services like Airbnb, office-sharing services like Loosecubes and general sharing sites like NeighborGoods and Rentabilities.

The car-sharing services allow you, in effect, to turn your personal car into a Zipcar and rent it out by the hour or the day. You set the price, and the intermediary service lists your car online, connects you with people who want to rent it and takes a cut of the fee. Renters use a smart card to open your locks and get to the key, or you can exchange the key in person. G.M.’s investment in RelayRides holds out the promise of G.M.’s OnStar service opening the car for you, too.

For all of this to work, there are a few mental hurdles that car owners need to clear besides generalized fear of strangers and whatever cooties they leave on the steering wheel. Are they safe drivers? (Car-sharing services generally check driving records.) Will someone try to steal my car? (Yes, they will, if it’s expensive enough and the car-sharing company lacks proper controls; this problem has already put one company out of business.)

But the biggest challenge is insurance. Here’s the basic problem: Car insurance companies generally will not cover a claim that results from you putting your personal vehicle into commercial use, say by running a taxi service on the side — or making yourself into a one-person Hertz. RelayRides is well aware of this and provides $1 million of liability coverage in the event that a driver kills or maims somebody else while using your car. This is intended to fill the gap in coverage created by the fact that your own insurance company would refuse to pay this claim if the victim came after you.

This raises questions about three potential situations.

First, if some sort of catastrophic accident results in a claim of more than $1 million, what happens then? The answer is that you could be responsible for paying it. The odds of an injury this horrid and a legal judgment that blames you for renting your car to someone who crashes it are extremely low. I laid out the long odds in a column last year about Zipcar’s insurance coverage for renters (I link to it in the online version of this column.)

Only you can be the judge of how uncomfortable this makes you.

Second, do the rules change if you haven’t been taking good care of your car and that contributes to an accident? RelayRides’s terms of service seem to protect the company here, since it “disclaims” any “warranty” for “fitness for a particular purpose.” Meanwhile, a law in Oregon that relates to insurance coverage for car sharing quite specifically gives car-sharing companies the right to go after vehicle owners who engage in “material misrepresentation in the maintenance of the vehicle.”  

RelayRides and its general counsel counter with two points. First, they say that language elsewhere in the company’s terms supersedes the fitness disclaimer. Second, the Oregon statute and its presumably high bar for “material misrepresentation” aside, RelayRides’ insurance broker,  Bill Curtis, makes the following pledge: “I’m willing to raise my hand and say, ‘Yes,’ to the question of whether the owner will have protection in the event that they are sued and the allegation is that the car wasn’t maintained,” he said.

Third, there’s the question of what your insurance company thinks about all of this. I had a hard time finding out, frankly. Geico wouldn’t respond to any of my requests for comment.

An industry group, the Insurance Information Institute, meanwhile, is not pleased. “If the ‘renter’ were involved in an accident, most likely the insurer would non-renew or maybe even rescind the auto policy,” Loretta Worters, its spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. Translation: If someone wrecks your car and injures someone and a lawyer tries to reel in your insurer as well as the car-sharing company’s insurer, your insurer may take away your coverage.

RelayRides takes exception with this, given that the word “rescind” could make people think that insurance companies would take away coverage retroactively. “It’s ridiculous,” Mr. Curtis said.

USAA, which has always gotten high marks for customer service, takes an even sterner approach than the institute. I’m a USAA customer myself, and I asked the company what would happen if I or others called and confessed that we’d signed up for RelayRides.

“We would inform them that participating in such a program will generally result in non-renewal,” Roger Wildermuth, a USAA spokesman, said in an e-mail message.

Allstate took a similar tack. “The owner could put their current coverage for personal use of the vehicle in jeopardy as the act of making the vehicle available for rental purposes could inherently change the risk profile of the vehicle,” said Kevin Smith, a company spokesman.  “And by entering into commercial arrangements with their vehicle, the insured may risk being unable to secure auto coverage from our company in the future.” 

Ann Carrns contributed reporting.

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Want Better Car Insurance Rates? You Have to Make the Call - Your Money

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Most consumers know that they aren’t going to get a courtesy call from their service providers telling them they qualify for a better deal. Yet they still fail to review their policies or contracts each year to make sure they’re getting the lowest rates possible.

Well, Mr. Mitchell’s accidental victory may provide just the needed incentive.

After retiring last summer from a long career as a programmer, Mr. Mitchell said he knew he should review his expenses and try to trim whatever he could. His hefty auto insurance premium on his two cars — he was paying $2,537 a year — seemed a juicy potential target. But he said he “dillydallied,” and didn’t call his insurer, Liberty Mutual, until a couple of weeks ago, shortly after AARP contacted him by mail and urged him to call The Hartford for a free quote on his auto insurance.

And it was a good thing he decided to call. The Hartford told him it could offer him a policy with the same coverage for just half — yes, half — the amount he was paying Liberty Mutual, or about $1,267. Mr. Mitchell said he contacted Liberty Mutual with the news. And wouldn’t you know, the representative told him that it had revised its underwriting standards and he would now qualify for a premium of $1,207.

“I was happy to get the reduction, but I was dismayed to learn that the burden was on me, which means there are probably thousands of policy holders who are eligible for this but don’t know what they don’t know,” said Mr. Mitchell, who was insuring a 2002 GMC Envoy and a 2010 Toyota Prius. “It is a rip-off.”

Even more maddening, he said, was the conversation that ensued with a Liberty Mutual branch manager. Mr. Mitchell said he was really irked that the company was perfectly content to let him continue paying twice as much as he needed to, so he asked the manager if the company would have bothered to notify him of the “underwriting changes” when his policy came up for renewal this summer. “To my astonishment, he admitted that the premium reduction would not have been brought to my attention unless I asked for it,” he said.

Mr. Mitchell, who lives in Cave Creek, Ariz., is exactly the kind of customer you would expect Liberty Mutual would want to keep. A loyal client since 1973, he said he had a clean driving record with no accidents — just a few broken glass claims — and a credit score above the enviable 800 mark. Besides the auto coverage, he also has a homeowner’s insurance policy with the company, which Mr. Mitchell thought might have worked in his favor to secure the reduced rate, since insurers often offer multipolicy discounts.

Liberty Mutual, not surprisingly, declined to get into specifics with me about Mr. Mitchell’s situation, and provided a corporate-stamped response: “We continually refine and enhance our ability to most accurately price each customer to reflect their individual risk, based on a large number of factors, and as a result a customer’s price could move up or down,” Glenn Greenberg, a spokesman for Liberty Mutual, said in an e-mail. “We regularly advise our customers upon policy renewal that they may call us to discuss their coverage, benefits and discounts.”

And that drives home the point: the onus is always on you, the consumer, to do the heavy lifting, whether it’s a big-ticket item like auto insurance or smaller bills from your cellphone or cable provider. It’s a simple lesson, yes, but one that is worth remembering every so often. Of course, even when you make the time, finding the best deal isn’t necessarily easy.

J. Robert Hunter, the director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, an advocacy group, said he wasn’t at all surprised by Mr. Mitchell’s experience. After all, insurers aren’t required to let you know when you’re eligible for a lower rate, and it’s hard to know if you’re getting the best deal (though in California, insurers must sell their lowest-priced policies to those deemed “good drivers,” or people who have been driving for at least three years and have no more than one violation and no serious accidents on their record). “If you shop for insurance, it is quite easy for one insurer to be half the price of another, even in the same group of insurers,” Mr. Hunter said. “It is very difficult to be sure you have the best price,” he added, noting that many agents are working on commission, where higher premiums might translate into more income for the agent.

(Sales people typically collect roughly 8.5 percent of the premium, on average, said Robert Hartwig, president and economist at the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, but noted that direct-to-consumer companies often spend much more on advertising).

With the exception of New Hampshire, all states require drivers to have liability insurance, which pays for the other driver’s medical expenses, car repairs and other costs when the policyholder is at fault. (Florida requires drivers to buy insurance that covers the occupants in the driver’s car.) The minimum amount you must carry is set by state law, but many drivers choose to buy more coverage to protect their assets in the event of a costly accident.

Still, about 14 percent of drivers went uninsured in 2009, according to the Insurance Research Council, at least in part because some drivers cannot afford the insurance (Mississippi takes the prize for the state with the highest estimated rate of uninsured drivers at 28 percent, while Massachusetts and Maine have rates of only 4.5 percent. New York doesn’t trail too far behind, at 5 percent).

Your insurance rate is probably based on a variety of factors, including your age, gender, marital status, education level, occupation, the type of car you’re driving, where you live and your credit score. Of course, your driving record is also taken into account, as well as how much you drive. (A recent report, co-written by Mr. Hunter of the consumer group, contends that these pricing methods often work against lower-income drivers.)

As you shop around for a new (or better) quote, you should also consider factors beyond price alone, including the insurer’s rating and responsiveness to claims, Mr. Hartwig said. You can typically find that information, including price comparisons and local consumer guides, on your state’s insurance commissioner’s Web site. New York State’s Department of Financial Services, for instance, ranks 40 insurance companies by the number of complaints upheld against them as a percentage of their premium.

The average premium paid per car — for liability, comprehensive and collision coverage — was about $901 in 2009 (the latest figure available), according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. But judging from Mr. Mitchell’s situation, you’re likely to encounter a wide range of prices.

Mr. Hunter said that consumers should specifically ask the insurer — not the agent — whether they were being offered the lowest rate they qualify for, or they should ask the agent to ask the insurer. And he suggested asking for it in writing.

“I was working on the assumption that they were all the same,” Mr. Mitchell said.

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BUCKS; Texting, Driving and Insurance

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AppId is over the quota

Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board called for a nationwide ban on the use of cellphones and other ''portable electronic devices'' while driving.

''It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving,'' the board's chairman, Deborah A.P. Hersman, said in a statement.

It's uncertain whether the board's call will be heeded, given the public's addiction to instant electronic communication, any time and anywhere. But the proposal has generated discussion. One provocative idea was floated by a man from Boulder, Colo. He suggested, in a letter published in The Wall Street Journal, that insurance companies could curtail distracted driving if they simply refused to pay claims for accidents caused by texting. (Many states specifically ban texting while driving, but enforcement varies.)

That sounded like an intriguing proposal to us here at Bucks - one that could be applied to all sorts of bad driving behavior, including drunken driving.

The idea, though, seems to be a nonstarter. Insurance companies, and even a consumer advocate, make the point that coverage for injuries to yourself or others as a result of an accident - even one caused by careless or just plain stupid behavior - is one of the main reasons to buy insurance in the first place.

''An accident is an accident,'' says Mark Romano, an insurance specialist with the Consumer Federation of America. ''And if you're reckless enough to do things you shouldn't be doing, then your insurance is there to cover you.''

Dick Luedke, a spokesman for State Farm, said in an e-mail that the insurer typically pays for accidents, even if the driver is intoxicated. ''Generally speaking, we fulfill our promise even when the person to whom we make the promise violates the law, and we fulfill our promise to the person who texts while driving, whether or not that person is violating the law.''

''That's the point of insurance,'' Mr. Luedke said, in a follow-up phone call. He also noted that while the spotlight currently is on texting and cellphone use, there are all sorts of other ways drivers can become distracted, whether by disciplining children in the back seat, eating lunch or even fiddling with the radio: ''Where do you draw the line?''

There's also the problem of innocent parties who are injured. Say you are texting and not paying attention, and you strike a pedestrian, who incurs big medical bills. Typically, your insurance would pay for the victim's care, since you caused the accident. Would it be fair to tell the victim, ''Sorry, that's not covered? The driver was texting so we can't cover you?'' said Loretta Worters, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, in an e-mail. ''We have an obligation to pay that claim, to protect that innocent bystander, even if you were stupid.''

Of course, if drivers repeatedly get in accidents, whether due to drunken driving or texting or another reason, the insurer is likely to jack up their premiums, or cancel their coverage.

Ms. Worters noted that the industry is taking steps to educate the public about the dangers of texting while driving.

What do you think? Is there an argument to be made for not covering accidents caused by texting or other bad driving behavior?

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: The aftermath of an accident caused by texting while driving. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT COHEN/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS)

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More Consumers Are Letting Insurers Monitor Their Mileage

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AppId is over the quota

But a form of insurance that requires electronic verification of miles driven, in return for a discount, is gaining popularity. These so-called pay-as-you-drive policies — miles are often tracked through a GPS system in the car — are now offered in more than half of the states and are spreading, albeit slowly, despite privacy concerns.

Progressive Insurance, which began selling pay-as-you-drive policies in 1998 and now offers them in 27 states, said acceptance was strong among those eligible. “Approximately one in four customers are choosing this,” said Richard Hutchinson, Progressive’s general manager for usage-based insurance.

Several factors are driving the growth. One is that the cost of GPS systems and data devices has plunged, making tracking more economical. For less than $100 companies can buy trackers that simply plug into the diagnostic port required on cars made after 1996.

In addition, people are more comfortable being monitored, having grown accustomed to sharing information on Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, and through phone applications like Foursquare and Google Latitude that show where they are.

Insurers have also decided to collect less information than they once anticipated. GMAC Insurance, which offers pay-as-you-drive coverage in 35 states, uses the OnStar system in General Motors cars only to confirm miles driven. “Mileage is pretty innocuous,” said Tim Hogan, vice president for national accounts. “When you talk about time of day and speed, people become more concerned.”

Initially, the idea was that the insurers would collect data on what streets a driver takes, at what time of day and how aggressively he drives. Insurers would then determine risk based on behavior as well as mileage.

Progressive was at the forefront of this movement in the United States, but has reduced the scope of the data it uses to rate drivers — for instance, by excluding location and speed. And it has changed the name of its plan to Snapshot Discount because it sets a discount after 30 days of data collection. After monitoring a driver for six months, it removes the monitoring device.

At the nontech extreme of pay-as-you-drive is MileMeter, which requires only that drivers photograph their odometers when they buy the policy and then at six-month renewal intervals. Available only in Texas, MileMeter sells coverage for a specified number of miles. If the customer buys 5,000 miles but drives only 3,000, he gets a 2,000-mile credit on the renewal.

Some insurers expect drivers to let themselves be closely tracked — eventually. “There are lingering concerns about privacy,” said Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. “But that barrier is breaking down.” The Facebook generation, he said, sees it “as normal to have interactivity with companies that they buy products from.”

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BUCKS; Car Sharing And Insurance

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AppId is over the quota
Room for Debate asks: How can states address their concerns about illegal immigration without potentially clashing with federal law?

In watching the Anders Breivik trial in Norway, our task is to witness it and allow the weight of reality to break through.

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BUCKS; Cars That Cost Less to Insure

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AppId is over the quota

When shopping for car insurance, it's not just your driving record that determines your annual premium. The type of car you drive is also a big factor-and some cars are much more expensive to insure than others.

A variety of factors can affect a car's insurance quote, including the frequency of crashes for that model, the cost of repairs, the cost to insurers when a vehicle is declared a total loss and the cost of bodily injury claims, according to Web site Insure.com.

To give you an idea of what you might pay for a certain car, Insure.com annually produces lists of the 20 most expensive new cars to insure, and the 20 least expensive models.

To generate the 2012 lists, Insure.com used information on average rates provided by Quadrant Information Services. Rates were calculated using data from Allstate, Farmers, GEICO, Nationwide, Progressive and State Farm in ten ZIP codes per state. The rankings are based on coverage for a 2012 model with a ''representative'' driver (a single, 40-year-old male who commutes 12 miles to work each day); policy limits of $100,000 for injury liability for one person, $300,000 for all injuries and $50,000 for property damage in an accident; and a $500 deductible on collision and comprehensive coverage. The hypothetical driver has good credit and a clean driving record.

The least expensive model to insure, according to the analysis, is a minivan: the Toyota Sienna LE, with an average annual premium of just over $1,100. The list also includes 19 other cars with similar average premiums, all less than $1,200 a year. The least-expensive list tends to include lots of minivans, which have proven to be ''safe, economical'' vehicles, according to Insure.com.

At the other end of the spectrum is the 2012 Audi R8 Spyder Quattro, a two-seat convertible that is the most costly to insure, with an average annual premium of nearly $3,400. Also on the most expensive list are plenty of Mercedes, Porsches and BMWs.

Insure.com also provides a calculator that lets you get average rates for 900 different cars.

Did you consider the cost of insurance when you selected your car?

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: Insurance for a Toyota Sienna LE minivan is on the low end. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TOYOTA)

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Indifference as a Mode of Operation at China Schools

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.

BEIJING — For several angry days last December, one of China’s top state elementary schools, Fangcaodi International School, nearly became a statistic in the rising number of “mass incidents” here.

That term includes petitions, demonstrations and strikes, both peaceful and violent, and there were about 280,000 in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a Tsinghua University sociologist. That was up from 87,000 in 2005, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

At a stormy meeting on Dec. 3, some parents threatened to demonstrate at the school gates unless the principal agreed to ban cars from driving throughout the campus, after a first grader was nearly killed in an accident involving a school car on the playground the month before.

On Nov. 15, a school driver had driven over what he apparently believed was just a pile of children’s coats.

But 6-year-old Julien Glauser, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss student, was lying on the coats. Dragged along the ground for more than 8 meters, or nearly 28 feet, underneath the black Toyota Camry, Julien suffered severe spine, lung and head injuries. He is expected to make a good recovery — a miracle, doctors in Switzerland later told the parents, Olivier Glauser and his wife, Hong Li.

“They told us they normally only see such injuries in autopsies,” Mr. Glauser said.

Six months later, Mr. Glauser and Ms. Li are accusing the school of a cover-up, lack of accountability, failing to voluntarily improve safety and refusing compensation for medical expenses. “They said, ‘Sue us,”’ Mr. Glauser said.

Contacted this week, however, the school said it would indeed compensate the victim’s family. A spokesman for the school, who gave his surname as Zhang, declined to provide details, saying internal investigations were continuing.

In interviews, parents, who requested anonymity because they have children at the school, called the incident typical of the lack of transparency and responsiveness at many state-run institutions in China, which are unaccustomed to any form of public scrutiny.

Speaking at a meeting with parents in March, Ms. Li said: “I’m fighting for school safety not just for my son, but for all children in China.”

For two weeks after the accident, “nothing changed at the school,” said Mr. Glauser, a venture capitalist. “Cars were still coming in and out.”

That was when parents got involved. As word spread, slowly — the school informed parents about the incident, in sketchy terms, only on Nov. 30, after some of them had read a blog by Mr. Glauser and demanded answers — the principal, Liu Fei, agreed to the meeting on Friday, Dec. 3.

He defended the school’s policy of allowing cars on campus. “Please understand the problems teachers have finding places to park their cars,” he said, according to several parents who attended.

According to a recording of the meeting, his words provoked fury and derision.

“Your parking problem is nothing to do with us,” parents are heard shouting. “What’s more important to you, cars or children?”

“We will come out on Monday morning and demonstrate at the school gates and ask all Beijing media to join us,” they threatened.

Mr. Liu said that, immediately after the accident, the school started looking for additional parking in the neighborhood, including at a paramilitary barracks opposite the school.

“It hasn’t been solved yet,” he said on the recording.

Ms. Li, in an interview in March, said, “I think it’s a disease of development,” referring to the pressures created by surging car ownership and high-speed construction accompanying China’s fast economic growth. But “at the end of the day, the problem is the state system.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 19, 2011

The Letter from China on Thursday misstated the number of ‘‘mass incidents’’ — demonstrations and strikes, both peaceful and violent — in China in 2010. It was about 180,000, not 280,000.

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Esurance Campaign Equates Trust With Efficiency

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.

Esurance has started a new ad campaign, “Insurance for the Modern World,” with an emphasis on trust and savings. Gone is Erin, the pink-haired, animated character of prior ad campaigns. In her place is a commercial that asks viewers, “What makes you trust a car insurance company? A talking animal? A talking character?” The actor John Krasinski of NBC’s “The Office” narrates the spots to a soundtrack featuring “Jam Man” by Chet Atkins.

John Swigart, chief marketing officer of Esurance, said the company was aiming at “insurance do-it-yourselfers” who already were doing things like banking and shopping online. The campaign’s ideal target, he added, is middle class families and professionals ages 25 to 49. “They manage their lives for maximum efficiency,” he said.

Geico is a direct target in the spot on savings, which starts out by showing dollar bills in places like drawers, in a pile of leaves and in a washing machine. The voiceover begins, “If you had a dollar for every dollar car insurance companies say they’ll save you by switching, you’d have, like, a ton of dollars.” But, it asks, “How are they saving you those dollars?”

The Allstate Company acquired Esurance and Answer Financial for about $700 million earlier this year from the White Mountains Insurance Group. Esurance later chose Leo Burnett, Chicago, part of the Publicis Groupe, as its new advertising agency of record. Esurance had previously worked with Duncan/Channon, San Francisco. Leo Burnett also handles advertising for Allstate.

The difference with the new parent company is clear. Allstate is a “brand with consumers who prefer to work with an agent,” while Esurance is not, Mr. Swigart said. A company representative said in an e-mail that though many of Esurance’s customers looked to the Internet to buy their insurance, the company still had “just over 1,000 employees in claims and customer service” for those who wanted to talk to a real person.

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While previous ad campaigns for Esurance highlighted “Technology when you want it, people when you don’t,” the new campaign is focused on the technology.

At the top of the company’s Facebook page is a box that reads “Keepin’ it real. Real customers. Real Comments. (Really.)” So real are the comments, that of three that were posted at the top of the page on Tuesday morning, two were complaints.

One was from a user saying that Esurance had prebilled his debit card $400 without permission. Another user called the company a “blight on humanity.” Both comments were followed by answers from Esurance customer service representatives offering the disgruntled users an e-mail address where they could have their complaints addressed.

Mr. Swigart said the most recent ad campaign, by Duncan/Channon, did “a reasonable job of keeping us on the map, but it wasn’t really moving us forward in terms of the direction we wanted to go in.” The Duncan campaign was an attempt to appeal to women and featured customer service representatives interacting with customers. Glimpses of the animated Erin character could be seen on computer screens and on knick-knacks throughout the office.

Susan Credle, the chief creative officer for the United States at Leo Burnett, said that ads for Esurance’s major competitors like Geico and Progressive had shifted from “coverage and making sure you’re insured to simply a price conversation and making sure what you were getting was the cheapest.” Leo Burnett is also the agency behind the popular “Mayhem” campaign for Allstate, which features the actor Dean Winters as the personification of different insurance disasters, and the “That’s Our Stand” campaign featuring Dennis Haysbert. “If ‘Mayhem’ is about value, we need to shift the perception of Esurance from being a cheap insurance company to being a smart insurance company,” Ms. Credle said. Esurance also is seeking to draw attention to its updated mobile phone application, which will not be directly featured in the new campaign, but will be rolled out simultaneously. As of mid-December, 22 percent of Esurance’s 525,000 customers had downloaded the current version of the app. The updated app will allow users to submit information about a car accident, including vehicle information, a description of the accident and up to four photos, directly from their phones.

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The new ad campaign will begin appearing Saturday on CBS during the National Football League games, and will be available on Esurance’s Facebook page. Starting on Monday, television ads will be seen on approximately 45 cable networks including ESPN, HGTV, TNT and USA, during syndicated programs like “Big Bang Theory” and “Family Guy.” Digital video preroll ads will run on the Web sites for AOL, CNN, Google, YouTube and Yahoo.

Mr. Swigart would not disclose the cost of the campaign, other than to say the company would spend a “substantial increase” over 2011. According to the Kantar Media unit of WPP, the company spent $116.9 million on advertising in 2010 and $79 million from January to September 2011.

Allstate spent $405 million in 2010 and $376.4 million from January to September 2011, according to Kantar Media.

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Deer-Car Collisions, on Rise, Peak in Mating Season

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.

These are fraught weeks for drivers, deer and the nation’s car insurers: costly auto-deer collisions make a special jump during the mating season, usually October through December, and peak each November.

“The bucks throw caution to the wind as they chase does during the breeding season,” said Billy Higginbotham, a wildlife specialist at Texas A & M University. “If this happens to carry them across a roadway, they don’t seem to care.”

State Farm Insurance estimates that deer collisions over the past two years reached 2.3 million, up 21 percent compared with five years ago, and still more encounters go unreported. The annual number of collisions may be as high as two million a year, according to Terry A. Messmer of Utah State University.

These crashes are usually most catastrophic for the animals, but they also account for billions of dollars in car repair and medical costs and hundreds of human deaths annually.

Collisions have risen with deer populations — mainly of white-tailed deer, which now number more than 30 million and have adapted well to suburban life — and with the spread of housing into woodlands and prairies.

The risk is greatest in West Virginia, where a driver’s odds of hitting a deer over 12 months are 1 in 42, according to calculations by State Farm. Iowa is second, with a 1-in-67 chance, and Michigan is third, at 1 in 70. A driver in Hawaii, on the other hand, has only a 1-in-13,011 chance of hitting a deer — “roughly equivalent to the odds of finding a pearl in an oyster shell,” State Farm noted in a report last month.

In a typical fall sequence, a driver may spot a bounding doe and brake for it, then speed up only to hit the chasing buck.

Feral hogs are adding to the hazards of dusk-to-dawn driving in many states, including Texas, Florida and California. The collisions are surging with the unchecked spread of the animals, which breed prolifically and can weigh up to 300 pounds.

Many deer are saved by their physiology: their eyes brightly reflect a car’s headlights, making them easier to spot in the darkness. Hog eyes do not reflect light that way, and the animals, low-slung and dark-hued, can be hard to spot on a cloudy night.

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BUCKS; Car Sharing And Insurance

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.
The government should focus its deportation of immigrants on “violent offenders,” not struggling parents.

Poor cartography almost derailed George McClellan’s 1862 campaign.

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BUCKS; Cars That Cost Less to Insure

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.

When shopping for car insurance, it's not just your driving record that determines your annual premium. The type of car you drive is also a big factor-and some cars are much more expensive to insure than others.

A variety of factors can affect a car's insurance quote, including the frequency of crashes for that model, the cost of repairs, the cost to insurers when a vehicle is declared a total loss and the cost of bodily injury claims, according to Web site Insure.com.

To give you an idea of what you might pay for a certain car, Insure.com annually produces lists of the 20 most expensive new cars to insure, and the 20 least expensive models.

To generate the 2012 lists, Insure.com used information on average rates provided by Quadrant Information Services. Rates were calculated using data from Allstate, Farmers, GEICO, Nationwide, Progressive and State Farm in ten ZIP codes per state. The rankings are based on coverage for a 2012 model with a ''representative'' driver (a single, 40-year-old male who commutes 12 miles to work each day); policy limits of $100,000 for injury liability for one person, $300,000 for all injuries and $50,000 for property damage in an accident; and a $500 deductible on collision and comprehensive coverage. The hypothetical driver has good credit and a clean driving record.

The least expensive model to insure, according to the analysis, is a minivan: the Toyota Sienna LE, with an average annual premium of just over $1,100. The list also includes 19 other cars with similar average premiums, all less than $1,200 a year. The least-expensive list tends to include lots of minivans, which have proven to be ''safe, economical'' vehicles, according to Insure.com.

At the other end of the spectrum is the 2012 Audi R8 Spyder Quattro, a two-seat convertible that is the most costly to insure, with an average annual premium of nearly $3,400. Also on the most expensive list are plenty of Mercedes, Porsches and BMWs.

Insure.com also provides a calculator that lets you get average rates for 900 different cars.

Did you consider the cost of insurance when you selected your car?

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: Insurance for a Toyota Sienna LE minivan is on the low end. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TOYOTA)

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BUCKS; Texting, Driving and Insurance

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.

Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board called for a nationwide ban on the use of cellphones and other ''portable electronic devices'' while driving.

''It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving,'' the board's chairman, Deborah A.P. Hersman, said in a statement.

It's uncertain whether the board's call will be heeded, given the public's addiction to instant electronic communication, any time and anywhere. But the proposal has generated discussion. One provocative idea was floated by a man from Boulder, Colo. He suggested, in a letter published in The Wall Street Journal, that insurance companies could curtail distracted driving if they simply refused to pay claims for accidents caused by texting. (Many states specifically ban texting while driving, but enforcement varies.)

That sounded like an intriguing proposal to us here at Bucks - one that could be applied to all sorts of bad driving behavior, including drunken driving.

The idea, though, seems to be a nonstarter. Insurance companies, and even a consumer advocate, make the point that coverage for injuries to yourself or others as a result of an accident - even one caused by careless or just plain stupid behavior - is one of the main reasons to buy insurance in the first place.

''An accident is an accident,'' says Mark Romano, an insurance specialist with the Consumer Federation of America. ''And if you're reckless enough to do things you shouldn't be doing, then your insurance is there to cover you.''

Dick Luedke, a spokesman for State Farm, said in an e-mail that the insurer typically pays for accidents, even if the driver is intoxicated. ''Generally speaking, we fulfill our promise even when the person to whom we make the promise violates the law, and we fulfill our promise to the person who texts while driving, whether or not that person is violating the law.''

''That's the point of insurance,'' Mr. Luedke said, in a follow-up phone call. He also noted that while the spotlight currently is on texting and cellphone use, there are all sorts of other ways drivers can become distracted, whether by disciplining children in the back seat, eating lunch or even fiddling with the radio: ''Where do you draw the line?''

There's also the problem of innocent parties who are injured. Say you are texting and not paying attention, and you strike a pedestrian, who incurs big medical bills. Typically, your insurance would pay for the victim's care, since you caused the accident. Would it be fair to tell the victim, ''Sorry, that's not covered? The driver was texting so we can't cover you?'' said Loretta Worters, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group, in an e-mail. ''We have an obligation to pay that claim, to protect that innocent bystander, even if you were stupid.''

Of course, if drivers repeatedly get in accidents, whether due to drunken driving or texting or another reason, the insurer is likely to jack up their premiums, or cancel their coverage.

Ms. Worters noted that the industry is taking steps to educate the public about the dangers of texting while driving.

What do you think? Is there an argument to be made for not covering accidents caused by texting or other bad driving behavior?

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: The aftermath of an accident caused by texting while driving. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT COHEN/ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS)

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Enthusiastic About Car Sharing? Your Insurer Isn’t

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.
 People with idle cars (and most cars are idle most of the time) can make some money by renting them out to others who need a car sometimes but not often enough to own one. At some point, the world would ultimately need fewer cars and places to park them. It feels greener, and sharing is polite and all that.

 But then the grown-ups show up, in the form of insurance companies. I called them this week in the wake of an announcement by RelayRides, a company with venture capital backing from both Google Ventures and General Motors, that it was taking its car-sharing service national.

And the grown-ups are not pleased. They want you to know that RelayRides insurance won’t be adequate in the event of a catastrophic accident and that your own insurance company may take away your insurance if it even hears that you are lending your car to someone in exchange for a few dollars an hour.

So anyone considering this sort of thing has to ask: Is the insurance industry overstating the risk of playing along with this cutting-edge idea, is RelayRides underestimating your exposure, or both?

RelayRides is one of several car-sharing services to arrive on the scene in recent years. Getaround is another start-up, as are JustShareIt and Wheelz, a company that the car-sharing giant Zipcar invested in last month.

They’re all part of a larger “collaborative consumption” movement that has captured the imagination of a growing number of civic-minded, Web-addicted people who want to both save some money and use a bit less of the world’s resources. This includes home-sharing services like Airbnb, office-sharing services like Loosecubes and general sharing sites like NeighborGoods and Rentabilities.

The car-sharing services allow you, in effect, to turn your personal car into a Zipcar and rent it out by the hour or the day. You set the price, and the intermediary service lists your car online, connects you with people who want to rent it and takes a cut of the fee. Renters use a smart card to open your locks and get to the key, or you can exchange the key in person. G.M.’s investment in RelayRides holds out the promise of G.M.’s OnStar service opening the car for you, too.

For all of this to work, there are a few mental hurdles that car owners need to clear besides generalized fear of strangers and whatever cooties they leave on the steering wheel. Are they safe drivers? (Car-sharing services generally check driving records.) Will someone try to steal my car? (Yes, they will, if it’s expensive enough and the car-sharing company lacks proper controls; this problem has already put one company out of business.)

But the biggest challenge is insurance. Here’s the basic problem: Car insurance companies generally will not cover a claim that results from you putting your personal vehicle into commercial use, say by running a taxi service on the side — or making yourself into a one-person Hertz. RelayRides is well aware of this and provides $1 million of liability coverage in the event that a driver kills or maims somebody else while using your car. This is intended to fill the gap in coverage created by the fact that your own insurance company would refuse to pay this claim if the victim came after you.

This raises questions about three potential situations.

First, if some sort of catastrophic accident results in a claim of more than $1 million, what happens then? The answer is that you could be responsible for paying it. The odds of an injury this horrid and a legal judgment that blames you for renting your car to someone who crashes it are extremely low. I laid out the long odds in a column last year about Zipcar’s insurance coverage for renters (I link to it in the online version of this column.)

Only you can be the judge of how uncomfortable this makes you.

Second, do the rules change if you haven’t been taking good care of your car and that contributes to an accident? RelayRides’s terms of service seem to protect the company here, since it “disclaims” any “warranty” for “fitness for a particular purpose.” Meanwhile, a law in Oregon that relates to insurance coverage for car sharing quite specifically gives car-sharing companies the right to go after vehicle owners who engage in “material misrepresentation in the maintenance of the vehicle.”  

RelayRides and its general counsel counter with two points. First, they say that language elsewhere in the company’s terms supersedes the fitness disclaimer. Second, the Oregon statute and its presumably high bar for “material misrepresentation” aside, RelayRides’ insurance broker,  Bill Curtis, makes the following pledge: “I’m willing to raise my hand and say, ‘Yes,’ to the question of whether the owner will have protection in the event that they are sued and the allegation is that the car wasn’t maintained,” he said.

Third, there’s the question of what your insurance company thinks about all of this. I had a hard time finding out, frankly. Geico wouldn’t respond to any of my requests for comment.

An industry group, the Insurance Information Institute, meanwhile, is not pleased. “If the ‘renter’ were involved in an accident, most likely the insurer would non-renew or maybe even rescind the auto policy,” Loretta Worters, its spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. Translation: If someone wrecks your car and injures someone and a lawyer tries to reel in your insurer as well as the car-sharing company’s insurer, your insurer may take away your coverage.

RelayRides takes exception with this, given that the word “rescind” could make people think that insurance companies would take away coverage retroactively. “It’s ridiculous,” Mr. Curtis said.

USAA, which has always gotten high marks for customer service, takes an even sterner approach than the institute. I’m a USAA customer myself, and I asked the company what would happen if I or others called and confessed that we’d signed up for RelayRides.

“We would inform them that participating in such a program will generally result in non-renewal,” Roger Wildermuth, a USAA spokesman, said in an e-mail message.

Allstate took a similar tack. “The owner could put their current coverage for personal use of the vehicle in jeopardy as the act of making the vehicle available for rental purposes could inherently change the risk profile of the vehicle,” said Kevin Smith, a company spokesman.  “And by entering into commercial arrangements with their vehicle, the insured may risk being unable to secure auto coverage from our company in the future.” 

Ann Carrns contributed reporting.

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More Consumers Are Letting Insurers Monitor Their Mileage

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The remote server returned an unexpected response: (417) Expectation failed.

But a form of insurance that requires electronic verification of miles driven, in return for a discount, is gaining popularity. These so-called pay-as-you-drive policies — miles are often tracked through a GPS system in the car — are now offered in more than half of the states and are spreading, albeit slowly, despite privacy concerns.

Progressive Insurance, which began selling pay-as-you-drive policies in 1998 and now offers them in 27 states, said acceptance was strong among those eligible. “Approximately one in four customers are choosing this,” said Richard Hutchinson, Progressive’s general manager for usage-based insurance.

Several factors are driving the growth. One is that the cost of GPS systems and data devices has plunged, making tracking more economical. For less than $100 companies can buy trackers that simply plug into the diagnostic port required on cars made after 1996.

In addition, people are more comfortable being monitored, having grown accustomed to sharing information on Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, and through phone applications like Foursquare and Google Latitude that show where they are.

Insurers have also decided to collect less information than they once anticipated. GMAC Insurance, which offers pay-as-you-drive coverage in 35 states, uses the OnStar system in General Motors cars only to confirm miles driven. “Mileage is pretty innocuous,” said Tim Hogan, vice president for national accounts. “When you talk about time of day and speed, people become more concerned.”

Initially, the idea was that the insurers would collect data on what streets a driver takes, at what time of day and how aggressively he drives. Insurers would then determine risk based on behavior as well as mileage.

Progressive was at the forefront of this movement in the United States, but has reduced the scope of the data it uses to rate drivers — for instance, by excluding location and speed. And it has changed the name of its plan to Snapshot Discount because it sets a discount after 30 days of data collection. After monitoring a driver for six months, it removes the monitoring device.

At the nontech extreme of pay-as-you-drive is MileMeter, which requires only that drivers photograph their odometers when they buy the policy and then at six-month renewal intervals. Available only in Texas, MileMeter sells coverage for a specified number of miles. If the customer buys 5,000 miles but drives only 3,000, he gets a 2,000-mile credit on the renewal.

Some insurers expect drivers to let themselves be closely tracked — eventually. “There are lingering concerns about privacy,” said Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. “But that barrier is breaking down.” The Facebook generation, he said, sees it “as normal to have interactivity with companies that they buy products from.”

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