There are 237.7 million licensed drivers in the US. That means there’s 0.026 police reported crashes per driver per year. (Crashes not reported to the police are usually also not reported to insurance and thus don’t matter in this discussion.)
Or to put it differently, that’s one crash per 39 years of driving per driver or on average 1.6 crashes in a lifetime.
Yes, every crash is one to many and every fatality of course as well. In that regard it’s far too many, but that’s not what we are talking about.
We are talking about insurances estimating the likelyhood of future crashes of a driver. That means, on average, insurance has 1 data point per driver, and for anyone younger than 35 likely 0 data points.
That’s not nearly enough to make any kind of statistically significant guess on how likely someone is to cause a crash.
For any statistically significant result you’d need at least a few dozen data points.
For that crashes are far, far too rare, so it makes sense to try to get better data that actually has some kind of significance.
There are 237.7 million licensed drivers in the US. That means there’s 0.026 police reported crashes per driver per year. (Crashes not reported to the police are usually also not reported to insurance and thus don’t matter in this discussion.)
Or to put it differently, that’s one crash per 39 years of driving per driver or on average 1.6 crashes in a lifetime.
Yes, every crash is one to many and every fatality of course as well. In that regard it’s far too many, but that’s not what we are talking about.
We are talking about insurances estimating the likelyhood of future crashes of a driver. That means, on average, insurance has 1 data point per driver, and for anyone younger than 35 likely 0 data points.
That’s not nearly enough to make any kind of statistically significant guess on how likely someone is to cause a crash.
For any statistically significant result you’d need at least a few dozen data points.
For that crashes are far, far too rare, so it makes sense to try to get better data that actually has some kind of significance.