- Lemonade is rolling out special insurance for semi-autonomous vehicles.
- It’s being launched on Tesla vehicles equipped with full-self driving.
- Customers could save up to 50% per mile while being driven by FSD.
Lemonade bills itself as a “digital insurance company powered by AI,” and they’re putting their money where their mouth is with a big bet on Tesla’s Full-Self Driving technology. In particular, they’re launching autonomous car insurance, a “first-of-its-kind policy” tailored specifically for vehicles that can drive themselves, at least part of the time.
More: Tesla’s Self-Driving Feature Just Became A Monthly Bill For Everyone
Buzzwords aside, the company said their new insurance offering will slash the per-mile insurance rate when Tesla vehicles are being driven by FSD. Customers can expect savings of approximately 50 percent and the company said this is because data shows there’s a “significantly reduced risk during autonomous operation.”
That’s a substantial difference, especially when compared to what Tesla Insurance offers. At most, Tesla drivers can get a 10 percent discount for using FSD more than half the time, and even then, it only applies to certain parts of the policy, not the full premium. So in practice, the overall savings may be even lower.
Betting on Better Code
While today’s semi-autonomous systems far from perfect, Lemonade believes the numbers will only improve. The company expects rates to drop even further as Tesla rolls out additional FSD software updates, which they claim will make vehicles safer over time.
That remains to be seen, but Lemonade said the new offering was the result of a “technical collaboration” with Tesla. This gave them access to vehicle data they claimed was previously unavailable.
While the idea is interesting, it sounds like you can wave goodbye to privacy. As Lemonade President Shai Wininger said, “Our existing pay-per-mile product has given us something no traditional insurer has: a unique tech stack designed to collect massive amounts of real driving data for precise, dynamic pricing.”
Wininger went on to claim “Traditional insurers treat a Tesla like any other car, and AI like any other driver, but a car that sees 360 degrees, never gets drowsy, and reacts in milliseconds can’t be compared to a human.”
Autonomy with an Asterisk or Two
Of course, it’s important to note full-self driving isn’t really fully autonomous, and Tesla has slapped “(Supervised)” onto the name. The company also puts out disclaimers saying the feature doesn’t “make your Tesla vehicle fully autonomous or replace you as the driver.”
The new insurance offering will be launched in Arizona on January 26, before rolling out in Oregon a month later. Whether the courts will have something to say about any of this remains to be seen, but odds are good that legal challenges will join the rollout in due time.
