I worked in the industry recently, with most leading carriers on how they generate LTVs for potential customers from expected frequency, severity, and lifetime.
During COVID shutdowns, there was a massive drop in frequency (obviously, hardly anyone was driving) but a significant uptick in severity. This was attributed to higher speeds with emptier roads.
After re-opening, frequency is significantly higher per driver than before. So is severity. Everyone I talked to in the industry was convinced this was due to loss of skill during shutdown as well as people driving much more aggressively. This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.
I find it strange that this isn't discussed in the article when it's a pretty widely-held belief in the industry.
It seems fairly silly to think that Covid really changed how people drive. You didn’t drive for a month and you just forgot, and then in the intervening three years did not relearn it? That isn’t how humans work. I don’t doubt you that it is widely believed, it just doesn’t make sense.
More likely is that due to distracted driver growth since the advent of smart phones, we’re all just getting a little worse every year, so every year is a new high watermark.
> It seems fairly silly to think that Covid really changed how people drive.
As someone who has driven before, during, and after I think it's silly to think Covid didn't change how people drive. It's a night and day difference from 2019 to 2023 (first year of "back to normal") that cannot be explained by a gradual shift of people becoming more immersed in technology.
The attitudes in society towards law and order and what is acceptable day to day have massively shifted. Enforcement (at least where I am from) seems to be nonexistent too - and I think COVID laid that fact bare. People realized no one is actually watching or caring about what they do. Why not drive 55mph on the shoulder to get around that traffic jam if you know there are zero social or legal ramifications?
I was driving quite a long time before Covid, and I drive about 50,000 miles a year. I’ve noticed a long, slow decrease in how well people drive, but I don’t think it has changed any more dramatically in the last three years. if you took the trendline prior to 2020 and drew it to 2023, it would get you to pretty much where we are today in terms of accidents and fatalities. They had already started increasing again before Covid.
And in any case, the plural of anecdote is not data. there’s just really no data to support the idea that everybody not driving for a month, and then driving less for a year or two, has made people worse at driving.
I wish I could find it, but I read a study recently about participation in the social contract that used a question like "would you run a rural red light with no one around?" as their metric. A lot more people say yes now than before 2020.
> Unless you're arguing that Covid had ramifications for everyone's brain
"Covid" can refer to either the worldwide pandemic, or the specific disease. "Covid", the event which was a world wide pandemic, did affect everyone's brain. You know how? Because that's where memories are stored. Memories are stored in the brain, and memories influence belief systems which affect behavior. What people remember, and what they have now learned, is that they can get away with a lot more illegal shit while driving than they are used to, and what they have learned through experience (which are formed through memory) is that people are super aggressive when driving after the worldwide pandemic, which causes them to change their behavior too.
> no reason to think that's anything but superstition.
Pretty ballsy to say that hard data of drivers getting more reckless (which is furnished in the article you're replying to) is superstition.
> had ramifications for everyone's brain, there's no reason to think that's anything but superstition.
Or people began driving differently when the roads were empty (even if less frequently) and continued doing that even the amount of traffic increased significantly
It was much more than a month my friend. Shutdowns started in March 2020, traffic in my metro area didn't return to pre-pandemic levels until at least mid 2021.
People who had to still had to drive through the pandemic could have gotten used to driving faster on emptier roads, and therefore are more frustrated and aggressive with the traffic/slowdowns today.
Or maybe it's because the population of drivers has shifted, there's still a lot of people working from home (either full time or part of the week)
Or maybe lowering of social empathy we've seen since the pandemic has bleed over into drivers' attitudes (people are notably more rude/less considerate in public)
I don’t believe people get significantly worse at driving after not driving for a month. I have gone on one month vacations where I did not drive, then I came back and gotten my car, and I don’t think I was any worse off, and even if I was, I was right back to where I started Very quickly.
I don’t think half as much for a year would make me any worse either. The average American is 40 years old and has been driving for 25 years. The average American who drives is even older. It’s hard to imagine them cutting their commute in half for a couple years. Will make them any worse than they had been before.
In instances, like this, there is neither nor logic, just subjective feeling, you can be pretty sure it is incorrect
Covid revealed a lot of things. Essential workers discovered they were disposable. That the rich would lock them into their jobs and out of public parks and spaces to protect themselves. Then to add insult to injury prices on all basic goods went up 30% so yeah poor people are angry and they are driving like they got nothing to loose. There is basically no hope of owning a house for anyone in the bottom 70% who doesn’t own one by now either.
Locally, I saw a marked difference in a small part of the population.
Roughly a quarter of drivers are maniacs, and drive until there is another car actually impeding their progress, or the get a ticket. Over covid, the empty roads taught these drivers to expect that that can drive 50 in a 30. Now that the traffic is back, these morons are still trying to drive 50 in a 30, and weaving around stopped or turning traffic to do it.
As in outsider of the auto industry this sounds like a classic blame-the-customer attitude that exists in many industries. The auto industry attributes the increase of severity and frequency of auto accidents to an external party so they share zero liability.
That doesn't seem like it follows though. Most people are driving the same car they were driving in 2019. It's not like the auto industry went and changed everyone's cars and repaved the roads or something. If this was some long term trend, then sure, easier to see how you could explain it with changes in headlights or ride height or some other factor of how cars are designed.
A dramatic increase in amount and severity of accidents after a major world-impacting event like the pandemic seems like exactly the sort of thing that would make sense to be some change in the way people drive. This isn't "Oh, the users just hate the new Slack design. What idiots." For 90+ percent of the US, nothing has changed about the cars or roads in the last 4 years any more than the 4 years before that, and yet the outcomes of driving have changed.
How do you imagine the auto insurance industry is driving this change in customer behavior and outcomes? I cannot imagine any way in which it's the fault of the insurers, but I know that this is merely a failure of my imagination.
Bear in mind that the auto insurance industry is quite distinct from the auto manufacturing industry.
Due to electrification, I imagine the average weight of a new car is increasing, which causes more damage. Previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.
Due to increasingly pedestrian-unfriendly designs, like "grr I'm a bad boy" grills on trucks, crashes becomes more damaging to what they crash into. More, previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.
The purported timeline is: Pandemic hits, people stop driving, incidents falls drastically. Pandemic stops, people starts driving again, but incidents and severity increase drastically compared to pre pandemic.
The companies are saying internally "people forgot how to drive properly", which granted, sounds weird. But it also sounds weird that people upgraded their cars, while not driving them, or that there was a huge spike in car sales as people upgraded post pandemic.
Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet [1]
>I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.
Well, first of all it doesn't need to be what any person is convinced is "large", it just needs to be nonzero. Second of all, it's not about customers, it's about manufacturers. As your own data indicates[0], a nonzero number of people replaced their car during that time period, just like in every other time period. If more people choose electric than did decades ago, there will be more electric cars than decades ago. And there are[1]! Electrification is increasing, therefore weight is increasing, therefore crash severity is increasing.
So the timeline is, each year, more and more people are buying electric cars, and it looks like severity increased, too. Do we have data on people's ability to drive over time? Maybe, but I haven't seen it, so that's what seems unconvincing so far. We definitely have data on vehicle weight over time, though.
[0]: "Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet" – by my viewing of the data, it shows that a lot of consumers, in fact, went out and bought a car during that period. Millions did, tens of millions even, and it only takes a single car difference to affect the population average.
Just anecdata, it really seems like drivers are significantly worse after COVID than before. Not just on main roads but on side streets and parking lots. I can't say if it's due to driving less during shutdowns or a confluence of other issues but people seem to drive shockingly worse.
Smartphone use. App use while driving, wearing airpods and the like, more vehicles with monitors, more integration between phone apps and car entertainment systems to fiddle around with?
I have defintely seen private drivers watching tiktok on the highway, and ride share drivers either trying to manage jobs across multiple smartphones, or spending their shift in a discord/group call with some friends.
I've driven in 3 major cities over the last decade (LA, SF, Seattle) and in all of them the local police departments have been ignoring a lot of traffic infractions that they would have pulled people over for before. The shift seemed to happen after there was that "Defund the Police" call and the BLM protests.
The same thing happened in Minneapolis, along with this:
‘The City Attorney’s Office will stop prosecuting tickets for driving after suspension when the only basis for the suspension was a failure to pay fines or fees and there was no accident or other egregious driving behavior that would impact public safety.’”
As someone who only drives in Minneapolis every few months the change that happened around 2020 was ridiculous. I regularly saw cars doing well over 100 in the city when I had never seen that before.
Disagree. BLM caused the politicians to throw the police under the bus before it was determined if they were actually in the wrong or not. Of course the police are going to be more interested in avoiding possible incidents and less interested in going after trouble.
BLM got what it "wanted"--there's a definite drop in police shootings where they were active. But it was a cat's paw result: The increase in criminal black deaths was far greater than the decrease in police black deaths.
Yeah Seattle I see so many people driving without plates now. Lack of enforcement is a real issue. They are simply not enough police as they all quit after the Riots
> Smartphone use. App use while driving, wearing airpods and the like, more vehicles with monitors, more integration between phone apps and car entertainment systems to fiddle around with?
These are all likely factors which is why I can't just claim everyone forgot how to drive during COVID shutdowns. At the same time the shocking incompetence I've seen (anecdata) the past year or two haven't seemed to involve people fiddling with distractions but just being hyper aggressive shitheads.
I don't feel there has been a difference where I live in Europe.
And my personal experience is that the driving culture in the US (east coast) is more aggressive to start with (except, maybe, sparsely populated remote areas).
I dont know. I only drive once every three months or so. and every once in a while Ill go on a huge roadtrip across the country. I have never noticed any loss in driving skill.
Assuming you are talking about a loss in your own skills, isn’t this exactly what the OP is describing? If people perceived a change in their own abilities, the problem would likely not exist.
Its a car. You turn the wheel and press the two buttons.
I've beaten spelunky 1, and 2. Im also sporty and coordinated. I know what good motor skills look and feel like, and what being bad at something feels like.
If there is a suspicion of skill loss in the population, i dont know why so many people in this thread would blindly accept that. We should all put our good boy skeptic scientist hats on.
Are the changes in chrash severity and frequency even for all types of people? Doubtful. In what age ranges and occupations are the biggest changes in.
"People crash more now because sudden population wide skill loss" doesnt even pass the basic sanity test. Im gonna need some evidence.
I don't think it's degradation any more than my skills at golf or basketball degrade in the 6 months between times I play either of them. I'm the baseline level of good enough that I'm competent, but I definitely don't have the skills of someone who practices either daily.
> definitely don't have the skills of someone who practices either daily
And that is exactly the premise of one proposed mechanism by which serious accident rates (and insured losses) may have increased during a period when a great many people who previously practiced something daily then did not do so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39247101
We get the concept, theres just no given evidence and it doesnt pass the smell test. I havent ridden a bike in years i bet im exactly as "skilled" as the last time i was on it. Driving is just not a skill you get worse at if you dont do it for two years. Ive done it, and felt no difference.
What do you mean you doubt that. Thats obnoxious. this is simply a fact. Ive got a bike downstairs I could go ride it, one handed, no handed, pop a wheelie just like 15 years ago. My dad is in his fifties and i bet the same applies for him but hed complain about his wrists.
If the skill level takes ten seconds to reachieve I dont really consider that skill loss. Same for driving. Americans spend an insane amount of time driving, tens of thousands of hours from a young age. This is just not a skill that obviously weakens in any meaningful way if you dont do it for a year.
I need hard evidence, not just your unreasonable contrarianism.
I mean, maybe you're just better at it, but I was a competitive mountain biker 10+ years ago and the last time I tried to ride a bike a couple years ago, if I'd taken my hands off the handlebars I probably would have crashed in seconds.
We're all just asserting anecdotes here about how easy/hard things are. I tend to agree that the act of driving a car isn't so hard that people forgot how to physically drive over the pandemic. What I think is the much more likely thing that changed is the habits of awareness of other drivers. The instincts of which corners have low visibility or your general sense of how fast people drive on various roads. Driving is ultimately a social activity in some way. Most people who get in accidents aren't just failing to "hit the right button" on their car, they're trying to drive well and avoid something unexpected.
It seems entirely reasonable to me that some number of people kept driving daily during the pandemic on mostly empty roads with mostly absent rules enforcement and picked up some bad habits. Maybe that's speeding, or running red lights, or being on their phone while driving because there's less risk of running into another car. Then as people who didn't do that started driving again, their memories from 6-18 months before didn't match the current driving culture any more. Different people adapted in different ways, but the bounds of what's "normal" has changed somewhat.
I don't think I'm worse at physically driving now, but I have definitely been surprised by drivers running red lights or being overly deferential to cross traffic a fair bit in the last couple years. I've adapted, but I'm definitely driving with a different mindset now than I used to.
could be phone use, could be drugs, we dont know but i guess im wrong while skeptically agnostic about the given assumed cause of the issue despite lack of evidence. How about aliens. How about ghosts. I think ghosts have been crashing peoples cars.
What that sounds implausable to you? Seems unlikely huh? You require hard evidence?
How dare you disagree with me im a pro ghost watcher for ten years.
Not convinced? Sounds ridiculous. Exactly.
Youre not gonna convince me people lose driving skill over a year. You can speculate to infinity.
We need real evidence. If you dont have it, weve got nothing.
Right, and you dont have to be a pro stunt driver to make it to work every day without dying. I honestly dont know what hes getting at.
Actually I think most people are significantly safer driving in a way that completely removes opportunity for skill expression. Waiting for other drivers, going normal speeds, not doing something else while driving, etc. Driving should be pretty unskillfull and boring if safe.
> This, and perhaps parent's driving skill has just been poor for a very long time now. No drop, just sitting at the bottom.
I'm not trying to be mean, but the adage in poker of spotting the fool at the table here applies. And as a person who rides bicycles, motorcycles as well as drives cars, and has driven in the EU with much stricter driving requirements I'd say there has been a massive drop in aptitude over all.
So much so that I just want to live a life that allows me to be car-free now. EVs are nice, but having everything I want within walking distance is much more preferable.
Isn't that just reflecting that you have the exact amount of skill of someone who drives every 3 months? What OP is talking about is people who likely drove for an hour or more every day suddenly barely driving more than a couple times a week for a year or more, and are now back to driving daily. That's completely different from just not driving much all the time.
I'd like to see slow trucks drive in the right lane rather than the left lane, and I'd like them to stay within the lane lines whenever possible rather than randomly drifting across them.
Stupid question, but to this day I can't get the idea of overtaking. Any given stretch of the road has a speed limit. That limit is well below the maximum capability of almost any car on the road. From the POV of traffic regulations, you'd expect drivers on either lane to drive at that limit. What is, then, the point of overtaking? The cars are swapping places back and forth, but otherwise are (supposed to be) moving at the same speed. Is it a way for some to work around speed limits (by always overtaking forward, never being overtaken), or just a pointless dance to keep drivers from being bored and falling asleep behind the wheel?
Drivers are supposed to keep right (outside/slower lanes) except to pass. That's the law in WA state and probably in most parts of the country. As far as I know it's also the law in other countries too; offhand on the Autobon.
In theory, the lanes further left should be at about the speed limit and the lanes to the right could be for slower long haul or dangerous loads driving, such as large and heavy trucks which might have a lower speed limit on some sections of road. In practice, please keep right except to pass and don't cause a traffic hazard trying to enforce slowness upon speeders with a rolling roadblock.
I would conceed that keeping drivers awake is understated, though, the speed limits are too slow for modern cars. I comfortably do 15 mph over (freeway driving when road conditions support, I dont speed on surface streets), and id do 20-25 if it didnt move the penalty to jailtime.
I do this to save time, it cuts ~25% from my commute. My only recommendations are that slow traffic keep right (which is still me, traffic moves fast here), and be mindful of the flow of traffic. The most dangerous aspect of speeding is the speed limit, some people are inclined to follow the speed limit whatever it is, and become a serious hazzard when people are trying to cut through traffic at twice (or faster) that speed.
Speed limits are 55, sorry, sometimes I have a case of shiftwork brain. Northern virginia, if you watch those "idiots in cars videos" then youve seen these roads.
Overtaking doesn't happen as much on long haul stretches of highway, in accordance with what you'd assume. Mostly it's either passing a truck that's going under the limit, or because a truck is slower going up an incline. Once you're in a more occupied area though, a lot of overtaking is people going at the speed limit passing local traffic that's merging on/off the highway at lower speeds.
> This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.
I understand you work in the insurance Industry, but I worked in the auto Industry before and after COVID and just went through 2 total loss claims with my insurance and handled a lot of these third party warranty policies for my customers and think I have a more nuanced perspective than your own as mine is multi-dimensional.
I can tell you that while it's true people may be driving more aggressively, not after but during COVID as police weren't pulling people as frequently due to fear of contamination coupled with emptier streets, but the real reason claims are being declared a total loss (resulting in higher costs) is exactly because of the disruption in the supply chain and the shortage of parts kept in inventory for even 5 year old vehicles.
After dieselgate, Mitsubishi US was absorbed by Nissan US, who has been undergoing a great deal of pain since the ousting of Carlos Ghosn who left it in economic shambles with bad financing policies that resulted in lots of cost cuts during and many more after the Renault feud. Trying to get parts for a 2017 Mitsubishi after 2020 in the US was futile as the two dealerships merged together.
It was often the case that you were better off purchasing parts from Hyundai for shared platforms as getting them from Japan were difficult if not impossible as they had severe COVID restrictions and the plants stopped and the catalogs/inventory seemingly vanished in a matter of months during the first year of COVID.
I have had many battles with submitting adjusted insurance claims for service/parts that made me think the burden of a owning an imperfect new car was best solved by selling it back to the dealership at the inflated offer they were paying back then and getting a 'good enough' used car from us or elsewhere given how much time was being wasted dealing with these policies. One customer I inherited had a 3 year old VW CC was using our loaner for over 6 months waiting for an ECU and a harness which was covered by parts and labour by VW, and this was in 2023!
My Italian motorcycle was broken into and it's main wiring loom was ripped apart in the process, and declared a total loss: the cost to repair and replace was projected to be about $1500, which is reasonable but the problem there was over a 2 year waiting list and it was unlikely to ever be found since the part was made by Ducati before it was absorbed by VW Audi Group and was impossible to be found in even the HQ in Bologna according to owners because demand for it was low as it was known to be a defective part and best to solve by swapping out with parts from more widely available Suzuki models but meant changing everything from the stator onward to work reliably which easily tripled the initial estimate. Add to the fact that this bike had low sales figures outside of Italy and I took the settlement offer and gave up on ever owning one again.
The same thing happened to my much less rare Japanese motorcycle, which was much older and less expensive but the same thing occurred: deemed fixable but no parts can be found so is declared a total loss.
My insurance rates just went up by 25% 2 months ago, despite them not having gone up during these two events (over 6 months ago and months after my policy renewal) or even after 2 tickets several years back as I have an otherwise clean record and I'm beyond the risk age.
The response given to me by my insurer was that 'everything is going up' and that servicing my policy was naturally also subject to a price increase but was not a direct result of the aforementioned reasons which makes me think that in fact no... insurance in the US is not too cheap but incredibly convoluted and subject to arbitrary price increases.
> I understand you work in the insurance Industry, but I worked in the auto Industry before and after COVID and just went through 2 total loss claims with my insurance and handled a lot of these third party warranty policies for my customers and think I have a more nuanced perspective than your own as mine is multi-dimensional.
I'm a dilettante who passes through industries for a few years at a time, so I have no doubt your perspective is more nuanced! I may have understated how much impact that supply chain issues are, I'm going through a similar issue.
Huge missing variable is cognitive impairment from covid. It may affect up to ~20-30% of people several months after getting it [1][2][3], but whatever the exact rate, it's an amount that is orders of magnitude more than the accident rate.
"The most frequent symptoms seem to affect memory, attention, and concentration" [4].
We generally suck at assessing our level of impairment (see drunk drivers), so if we're used to driving a certain way and no longer have the capacity to do so safely, eventually something's going to happen to some of us.
Given the magnitude of ongoing covid infections and the still very low per capita accident rate, this could be the single best explanation of an uptick in accidents. It's not a surprise it's overlooked though, as statistically we don't really track cognitive abilities except in education contexts and individually we tend to downplay or ignore any changes in how we think. Cognition is largely invisible as a measure.
I hadn't thought of that aspect but I strongly suspect this is the cause.
If a change happens gradually you're not going to notice it until there's some glaring indication of it. And you often won't notice that things haven't returned to baseline when you know there was a deviation. (Observation: Long Covid is more common amongst athletes. Really? Or are they actually measuring a baseline and seeing they aren't what they used to be?)
This is purely anecdotal, but driver quality seemed to go down during the BLM protests of 2020. Kind of like the “f** the police” was being applied to traffic enforcement.
Do you know if the timing was significant? Did anything significant happen with driving stats happen in June of 2020?
Because, in my purely anecdotal experience, drivers got much much worse in early June of 2020.
Not April 2020. Not July 2020. June (and very late May) of 2020.
Part of the issue was that lots of roads were blocked. Both protestors and police were blocking roads. Large portions of downtown were shut down. Bus services were mostly canceled. And the police were very very stretched thin.
So there are reasons other than “attitude” why these protests might be affecting traffic.
But it was shocking how bad drivers got so quickly. It didn’t seem gradual.
During COVID shutdowns, there was a massive drop in frequency (obviously, hardly anyone was driving) but a significant uptick in severity. This was attributed to higher speeds with emptier roads.
After re-opening, frequency is significantly higher per driver than before. So is severity. Everyone I talked to in the industry was convinced this was due to loss of skill during shutdown as well as people driving much more aggressively. This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.
I find it strange that this isn't discussed in the article when it's a pretty widely-held belief in the industry.