GEICO, the second-largest vehicle insurance underwriter in the US, has decided it will no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks. The company is terminating current Cybertruck policies and says the truck “doesn’t meet our underwriting guidelines.”
GEICO, the second-largest vehicle insurance underwriter in the US, has decided it will no longer cover Tesla Cybertrucks. The company is terminating current Cybertruck policies and says the truck “doesn’t meet our underwriting guidelines.”
God, I hope other places follow. I work in insurance and not only is everything about the cybertruck an absolute fucking nightmare to source, let alone find a shop for, every single goddamn owner is like the most insufferable chod. That goes for women too. Tesla drivers could already be a problem, but the truck owners are like regular Tesla owners gone feral.
Presumably, "other places" refers to other insurance companies. IOW, GEICO is (allegedly) denying them coverage. OP is hoping that Allstate, Progressive, etc will also deny coverage.
Pretty sure they were one of the last major companies that would...
Even if warranty pays for repairs to it, if it damages anything else the insurance still has to pay.
The article mentions multiple examples of them just randomly shutting down during operation. That's already bad. But this is going to be it's first winter, it's not surprising insurers don't want to deal with it. They deal with large numbers, it's not a question of "if" like an individual owner, its "when" for the insurer
Class action lawsuits are gonna be a mother fucker
Part of the purchase agreement of a Tesla agreeing to binding arbitration. This means no class action suit. You can opt out of this within the first 30 days, but you have to send a letter requesting it.
The go pedal and the steering wheel are equivalent to a keyboard/mouse and are not physically connected to anything. If the car shuts off, the wheels go where they feel like with absolutely no driver control.
More importantly, Anderson has eight vehicles. GEICO is only choosing to terminate the insurance coverage from Cybertruck and is actively pursuing renewal of his vehicle coverage for the rest. This leaves no doubt that GEICO’s issue is directly related to the Tesla Cybertruck and not to Anderson or other factors.
Why would someone own 8 vehicles?
Robert added, “It makes no sense, as there are other, riskier cars out there. Let me know if you recommend any insurer for the truck. I have eight cars with an amazing record. I will be canceling my entire Geico policy!! Bye-bye!”
I can't think of a vehicle that is more likely to be a risk to others than the Cybertruck. I'm sure insurance adjusters see how people use Tesla FSD in spite of its shortcomings. The truck is heavy as hell and breaks in all sorts of ways others vehicles don't.
Also, there have been no independent crash tests done so no insurance company can accurately assess the risk, so this is wholly unsurprising.
Tesla have allegedly done their own crash tests, but they still have not released the data. It's kinda what you'd expect when a government-regulation-hating techbro designs a "I got mine fuck you" vehicle.
If Geico, and presumably soon others, are angering the chuds by refusing to insure this, independent crash tests definitely occurred and they were not favorable.
You don't have to be an obnoxious YouTuber to crash a car.
I thought that was the sort of thing that the government mandated companies had to do in a controlled and transparent fashion. I wouldn't have thought that the NTSB would allow a vehicle to be registered without a thoroughly vetted crash testing procedure.
Honestly, a car collector is probably the best kind of person to have one I'd bet, given that they now exist out there. They don't seem terribly safe for pedestrians and others to have around, so it they're going to be out there in individuals hands, them being kept parked in some guys garage as some weird curiosity vehicle of the 2020s is probably better than being driven around on the daily as a pointy oversized commute vehicle
Kinda funny how it sneaks up on you when you get the space. I have 7 vehicles split between my wife and I. Most of them were bought at bottom of the market. People act like I must be wealthy as they drive a new suv worth $20 more than my fleet. I could replace the whole spread for like $30k. I'll add the qualifier that 2 are motorcycles and I'm totally, definitely, working on selling my prior daily. But $3k isn't exactly life-changing. I imagine this is a fuckcars zone but it's a hobby for people. Every hobby is destructive. It's not like car enthusiasts are driving multiple cars at a time, so the fuel consumption over time is normal. And the thirstier cars tend to be broken more often!
Just look at the front "bumper". It's triangular, and made of metal. If it hits a pedestrian, unlike other cars that try to bump and deflect the pedestrian up onto the hood, the Cybertruck will cut the pedestrian in half with that angle. Also, because it's metal, there is NO give. That could even be dangerous to other cars, let alone pedestrians and cyclists.
That's just one aspect, though. You got 3 others from another commenter, making the Cybertruck tonight's biggest loser.
My uncle was like that - he was a contractor and realtor. He had several work trucks, each for a specific purpose, plus one general purpose, and half of them had snowplows of various sizes. Most of them had something wrong with them that didn't interfere with their specific purpose, but would have been a pain to deal with daily. Only new one was a minivan for driving clients to sites... Then he bought a house closer to town that had a flatbed truck left on it...
No word from the insurance company itself? This whole article seems to be based on a single tweet by a cybertruck owner. For all we know his might be modded in a way that they dropped the insurance on it.
More specifically, the only source the article even gives is a link to a reddit post with a screenshot of the tweet, of which doesn't have a direct link to the tweet. This is half assed journalism at best, considering they even quoted the original screenshot wrong.
Edit: lol they couldn't even get the person's name straight. It changed from Robert Stevenson to Anderson after the email portion. Why's this article even here?
To top it all off the email/text had information redacted not by blurring it with paint, but by using characters in the same font with the same line breaks.
I mean seriously, who does that? Only time I've ever busted out inspector to modify a website or tweet or email is to elaborately troll someone with a sceenshot.
Did they really use inspector to redact info out an legit document about an allegedly widespread thing that no one else can produce, or did they draft the whole thing, used strings of 'x' to mark where to blur, and forget to blur? /shrug
Everyone in here like yay truck bad, I don't give a fuck about Teslas what's fucked is goddamn insurance companies can just arbitraryly drop your coverage for no fault of your own. It should be illegal. Like sorry but you agreed to cover this, with all its flaws and took my money for years.
I really wish car/home/health insurance were just federalized. These companies are the oldest con perpetrated on the general public tbh.
Yep, this is 'merica and a bunch of people are already driving this destruction derby without insurance. Do we really want to add a bunch of Cybertrucks to that terrifying demographic?
Why are insurance companies the ones making the rational decision about saying it's a dangerous piece of shit and not our transportation regulators? It needs to be banned.
I don't think insurance companies care of the trucks are dangerous per se. They care if they are expensive to repair, or prone to accidents which could attach liability to the policy holder and thereby the insurance company.
I keep telling conservatives this. It makes sense to have some form of suspicion around a message when some corporation has a profit motive behind it. For instance, climate change and companies selling solar panels (although I wish they wouldn't put SO much effort into that faint connection).
However, that also applies for the inverse - that when insurance drops coverage for Florida homes, it's because climate change is real and they know it will hurt their bottom line.
The weird thing about this claim is that these aren't deal breakers. It's possible to get insurance for exotics like McLaren or Bugatti (although no idea if GEICO does those); it just costs a lot.
I'd really like to hear more about those underwriting standards.
Because insurance companies are filled with bean-counters (not intended as an insult, I'm a bean-counter in a different field) who want to come out ahead. That's why the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) exists. You'd think organization that does crash tests and promotes new technology would be a government organization, but nope, it's insurance providers that want to minimize payouts.
I don't see anything in the article suggesting it's particularly dangerous, only that it's very expensive to fix, and in a collision will probably cause significant damage to the other vehicle (though that doesn't mean it'll necessarily cause injury).
The US doesn't exactly approve or deny vehicles in general; any vehicle that conforms to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards can be sold, as far as I know. And I don't see any section that covers safety of the other party in a collision, unfortunately. Maybe write your reps and suggest they add one.
"In an email to The Verge, Geico pushed back. “Geico has coverage available nationwide for the Tesla Cybertruck,” Geico spokesperson Ross Feinstein said. Feinstein did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about individual dropped policies. "
So maybe it was something VERY specific to this persons use of the truck?
True or not to this specific situation, in general, that is definitely the kind of reason you might get dropped if you didn't get the proper insurance.
That part about how they insured his other vehicles so that PROVES this is a cyber truck-specific policy was so dumb. Insurance will deny for a million reasons or combinations of reasons.
those things are very poorly made and all the most important parts are made of cheap plastic that an average person can literally rip off with his or her bare hands
Semi-unrelated but insurance as a whole is bonkers right now and I’m not sure how much the average person knows. I work on commercial real estate. The whole industry is having to review tons of insurance waiver requests because insurance in some properties is out of control. Business either can’t get it for can’t afford it. Especially, in flood zones. I’m actually kind of worried about the damage these hurricanes are doing in the US. Not just in the lives lost, which is devastating, but also the financial damage of all the uninsured losses.
If an event chance is too high the cost of insurance increase to a point where it stops making sense.
If every house in an area is 100% guaranteed to get at least one flood event over a 5 years period, that means that every 5 years the insurer need to get in enough money to rebuild all houses, so the cost of insurance will be more than 1/5th of value of a house per year (plus operating cost, profit, and so on). There's no other way, it's just maths.
Ok, the actuarial math is more complex but it boils down to getting enough cash in to pay for claims and pay the operating cost.
At a that point people need to realize that if the risk is too high they need to accept it, plan to rebuild every 5 years on their dime, or move.
The problem is people have gone and built entire cities in unsafe areas. If we were being sensible basically the entirety of Florida should not be occupied, the place is a disaster waiting to happen, or more accurately is a disaster that has already happened, but somehow nobody's learnt from it.
I agree! And, I know government was bailing these people out for a long time, which just makes them double down. I’m not worried about those people. I’m worried about the ones that don’t want to be there and can’t afford to relocate, or for some and even worse, evacuate.
That's not bonkers that's sanity. If you want to build your house in front of a dike don't expect to get insurance. The trick is to build in a place where there's a risk, not certainty, of damage.
It's absolutely bonkers. I don't get how Americans can build houses in leopard enclosures and then act all surprised when, inevitably, their faces get eaten. I know you're a settler country with little connection to the land but it's been long enough to know which parts get flooded and which don't, now hasn't it. Around here you don't even get building permits for lots of stuff in places even if you were willing to take on all financial risk yourself because it'd put unconscionable load on disaster relief, and thereby society at large.
So, there's two ways to go from where you are: a) Double-down on being Yanks and say "fuck you got mine sucks to be you", abolish disaster relief and let those rugged individuals fend for themselves, or b) fucking build where it fucking makes sense. It's not like you're Singapore or something, you've got more than enough land.
So I had to look online because I don't know where it is and North Carolina is nowhere near a coastline, so I'm not sure how much the people who live there are to blame.
You’re telling me. I just started a small construction company on the side and have to do it uninsured because it cost at a minimum $4,000 a year just for liability. Seems ridiculous
Edit: I’m in Iowa too so clearly away from any possible large disasters. I know liability insurance is different from homeowners but I think it having a large effect on insurance as a whole. Also when the derecho went though Iowa, everyone and their brother apparently became a contractor and collected insurance money and that ruined it for a lot of other people.
Now that little gecko who works for GEICO will probably tell you "You can save a load of money by switching to GEICO, and its so easy a caveman can do it, but we refuse to insure that abomination you call a Tesla Cybertruck that needs to be road illegal everywhere"
Wait, how is Warren Buffett nepotistic? He's giving the vast majority of his wealth to charity. He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills. But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).
I really don't see him as nepotistic, he's pretty much the best kind of billionaire.
Warren buffet is literally a senator's son... CCR has a song on the topic ;)
He gave his kids each $17.5M to start their organizations, and then donated like $5B total to their organizations once they proved their management skills.
Literally this what nepotism looks like... 17m is prolly just enough not to get eaten by estate tax.
You are confusing estate planning with charity.
But he pledged to give away most of the rest (almost $100B), and has already given away about $50B (latest pledge is 99% of his assets).
Without reviewing the structures, this is just a trust me bro
Use some critical thinking? And a bigger question why are you worshiping some gereatric nepo baby enough to try to defend him with propaganda that he paid a lot of money to get into your head.
There's an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, "nepo baby".
Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather's grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.
Elon's father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn't get you recognition from old money families.
Buffet went to public school.
They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.
“transparent metal” that breaks if it gets too hot, gets wiped with a microfiber cloth, or tapped by a wedding ring… 😂
I want to feel bad for cyber truck owners, but at the same time these problems are not new and not unknown. So if you know that something is known to have problems, and you still buy it, don’t be so shocked that it has problems for you too.
It was only a matter of time before insurance companies did something. I mean is it really that surprising that a company known for not wanting to pay out money if they can avoid it would want to not insure a rolling money pit?
As much as I want it to be true, I couldn't find the original tweet that the reddit post mentions. It's not on that users profile when looking on Nitter.
I have no solid source, but read comments suggesting Geico tends to not insure "exotic" $100K+ luxury vehicles.
...And I think this is important to remember this when talking about it. The Cybertruck is not a peer of a F-150, but a G-Wagon, a Maserati Levante or whatever.