Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.
So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.
LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car.
On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.
Do you get updates over the air?
Not that I know of no. For instance, to activate their navigation, you need to buy a $200 SD card. You can’t do anything remotely AFAIK with this car. Even “apps” for listening require them to be installed on your phone so it’s not doing it on its own, it’s using your phone and app and data to make it happen. Without your smartphone it the “infotainment” center is just an info center with FM/AM radio.
I don’t think any of that stuff started until the Mazda Connect app or whatever it’s called. A decade ago (my car is like 8 years old now) a lot of cars were in the “blackberry” phase where it’s not really browsing the internet and everyone was sort of testing new stuff. Now car manufacturers have a lot more sense of how valuable all that data is and they’ve “figured it out,” much to our collective chagrin.