Tesla debuts new car insurance that uses Texans’ real-time driving behavior

Tesla now offers car insurance in Texas, its new home state, a couple of years after launching the product in California. According to Electrek, though, the insurance available to Texans is quite different than the one owners can get in The Golden State: It calculates for a customer’s insurance premium using their real-time driving behavior. Their credit, age and gender that are typically used by other insurance providers apparently don’t matter to Tesla. The automaker says it won’t even look at customers’ claim history and driving records.

Instead, Tesla will look at their “safety scores,” which is a feature it introduced with the Full Self-Driving Beta version released in September. That could make things quite tricky, since the premium that needs to be paid can change every month based on the conditions the driver encounters on the road. Every forced collision warning and forced Autopilot disengagement will affect their score. Following other vehicles from an unsafe distance, braking too hard and turning corners aggressively could lower their score, as well. Safety score is still a beta feature at this point, and Tesla said it should improve over time.

Owners can now apply for a quote, wherein which …read more