Tesla is working on driver ‘safety rating’ based on driving behaviors and Autopilot use to affect insurance cost

Tesla is currently integrating Autopilot usage and more driving habits into its insurance program to deliver more accurate pricing.

According to some new reverse engineering of the Tesla mobile app, you will now be able to see your live “safety rating” score in the app.

In 2019, Tesla launched its own insurance program, starting with availability in California, where the automaker claims up to 30% cheaper premiums than the competition.

It’s Tesla’s second entry in the insurance industry after its InsureMyTesla program in partnership with third-party insurers.

The new program is directly brokered by Tesla through State National Insurance, and the automaker is much more involved in the entire process – basically becoming an insurer itself.

Tesla claims that it is able to deliver better insurance products to its customers since it has access to so much data about its vehicles and how they are used.

It is currently limited to California, but as we recently reported, Tesla is looking to soon expand to more markets after it updates the insurance product to take better account of the use of Autopilot and Tesla’s other connectivity features.

Now we get a better idea of what that will look like thanks to Redditor /u/Callump01 who was able to do some reverse engineering on the Tesla mobile app to get a peek at the integration of Tesla Insurance.

They found that Tesla is going to track several metrics to come up with a “safety rating” that you will be able to see in the app:

“The safety rating page will track your vehicle and is linked directly to your insurance. It will show the number of hours you’ve driven, how often you use AutoPilot, ABS events, forward collision warnings, autosteer strikeouts, accelerator variance, and many other metrics on both a per-trip and monthly basis which you’ll be able to see in a neat graphical interface. You are given a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ rating (though it is unclear whether that rating will be visible to the end user) and, from what I can tell, appears to be exclusive to HW2 and above and software version 2021.4.12 is required.”

Here are the factors that Tesla will be tracking to determine your safety rating:

1. ABS Activation – Number of times ABS is activated
2. Hours Driven – Average daily driving time
3. Forced Autopilot Disengagements – Number of times Autopilot is disabled due to ignored alerts
4. Forward Collision Warnings – Number of times car detects a potential forward collision
5. Unsafe Following Time – Portion of time spent at an unsafe following distance
6. Intensity of Acceleration and Braking – Speed variance due to extreme acceleration and braking. Shown on a scale from 0-10 as measured against Tesla’s internal fleet.

This score is going to affect your premium by up to 50% on a monthly basis – meaning that it can increase or lower your insurance cost depending on how you drive.

Other insurers do use some of those factors to affect premium through tracking devices that customers can plug in their cars or even simply through a home app tracking your movements.

But Tesla’s application is going to track everything in-house using the connectivity features of its vehicles.

Callump01 did note that the integration of these new features in the mobile app appear to still be in early development.