Just Auto Insurance, Inc. (Just) and Smartcar, Inc. (Smartcar) are partnering to provide fair and affordable usage-based auto insurance in Arizona with rates based on driving safety instead of ZIP codes or credit ratings.
Smartcar’s technology allows vehicle owners to share their vehicle telemetry with specific apps and services. Using Smartcar’s APIs, Just is able to charge customers more accurately and to increase pricing precision.
For consumers, the benefits are clear, said Murray Macdonald, one of Just’s founders, “Just customers only pay when they use their insurance, and their price is based on how safely they drive. Smartcar’s fantastic APIs allow us to improve our offering by allowing us to retrieve a customer’s mileage directly from their car. The result is that our customers can expect even better prices and more convenience, and without the need for an expensive and hard-to-install dongle.”
Smartcar’s APIs allow Just to price risks more accurately while lowering costs and maintaining the Just app’s user experience. Customers can connect their vehicles with just three clicks from their phones. Just can then regularly retrieve the customer’s odometer reading directly from their car’s instrument cluster.
Just and Smartcar’s partnership comes at a time when increasing costs and unfairness call for a change in the auto insurance industry. Personal auto insurance prices are up nearly 30% since 2011, with increases as high as 86% in some states.
In addition to basic factors like driving history and car model, many insurers take into account so-called non-driving factors such as a driver’s credit score, marital status, level of education, and occupation.
Just co-founders Robert Smithson and Murray Macdonald noticed these unfair practices and set out to make auto insurance more accessible and affordable for everyone. Since then, Just has worked to save drivers money and to improve road safety. The company is particularly focused on insuring uninsured drivers from underserved and low-income communities, who are usually quoted higher premiums by insurance providers.
“We’re glad that Just is seeing and solving these problems,” said Smartcar CEO Sahas Katta. “A car owner’s insurance premium shouldn’t depend on non-driving factors like their credit score. Instead, they should be charged fairly based on their actual monthly mileage. Just is pioneering the affordable telematics-based insurance market, and it’s an honor for Smartcar to partake in this journey.”
Just Auto Insurance is available in Arizona, with plans to expand to other U.S. states in the near future.
Smartcar
Smartcar is the first and only car API for auto insurance providers. Founded in 2015, the company empowers developers to make mobility fairer, more affordable, and more environmentally friendly.
Smartcar’s platform allows insurers to verify the mileage, garaging locations, and VINs from their customers’ vehicles in order to improve pricing and underwriting as well as charge vehicle owners by the mile.
Smartcar’s technology is compatible across 17 different car brands without the need for any aftermarket hardware. By making it easy for insurance companies to integrate with vehicles, Smartcar allows them to focus on what’s important: building the future of mobility.
Just Auto Insurance
Just is on a mission to make auto insurance accessible and affordable for everyone, to save drivers money and to improve road safety. Just offers a month-to-month, pay by the mile, top up when you can, smartphone auto insurance app.
Safer drivers can see dramatically lower rates, as the Just model doesn’t use factors such as marital status or credit rating. It also encourages safer behavior on the roads; the better you drive, the lower your rates. And Just makes auto insurance easy and fair: you only pay for what you use, when you don’t drive you don’t pay.
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