Comment Re:Not the same, but tangentially related... (Score 2) 93
Insurance is a weird thing: it works because you pool a bunch of risk and spread the associated costs across all your insured. At the moment, Snapshot only gives discounts to those drivers that establish that they are in fact in the lowest risk pool: few miles driven, during "safe" times, in a "safe" manner (e.g., few hard stops). There's no incentive, currently, for otherwise safe drivers to participate -- such as those that drive too many miles.
However, I consider myself a safe driver but just have too many miles. Heck, I even have a dashcam (I don't live in Russia, either). But other than my clean driving record, I don't have any other driving behavior-based way to lower my risk profile or premium. I would LOVE if Progressive mandated Snapshot, increased rates of those that had poor overall driving techniques (fast acceleration, hard braking, etc.) and lowered the rates for the rest. People whose rates increased would likely flee Progressive, but the risk for the pool would go down (and with it my premiums). Mandated Snapshot won't happen of course for lots of non-obvious reasons, though.