“If you pay for car insurance, you’ve probably noticed that rates are really high lately. You’re not alone,” Marin Cogan writes over at Vox. “Last week’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) report — the government’s method for tracking what people are paying for goods and services and how that’s changing over time — noted that the price of car insurance was up more than 20 percent over the same time last year. What’s particularly painful is that rates were already rising: CPI reports have shown that, overall, car insurance rates are up more than 38 percent since January 2020. What’s going on? The big insurance companies have been relatively quiet about what’s driving rates up. Inflation is definitely a big part of the equation. … But industry insiders and experts I spoke with say there are a few under-the-radar trends also driving rates up, and they relate to the subjects I cover at Vox, so let’s dive in. One reason rates are up is that driving became much more dangerous during the pandemic. People started engaging in risky behaviors like speeding and using their phones while driving more. ‘Since Covid, we saw this incredible increase in distracted driving,’ says Ryan McMahon, senior vice president of strategy for Cambridge Mobile Telematics. ‘You could almost track it by the day schools started to shut down.’ He’s not just speculating: CMT has access to driver data for millions of drivers, who download apps via their insurance companies that measure things like speeding, hard braking, and cellphone use while driving. McMahon told me that the huge jump they saw in distracted behaviors during the pandemic hasn’t come down since.” Marin Cogan, “Why car insurance rates are so high,” Vox.
