Thread by @rice_fry

Got a sample of the Tesla Insurance telemetry data. The insurance records are on a per drive basis. Here's the fields:

* Unique Drive ID
* Record Version
* Car Firmware Version
* Driver Profile Name
* Start / End Time
* Drive Duration
* Start / End Odometer

(1/2)

* # of Autopilot Strikeouts
* # of Forward Collision Warnings
* # of Lane Departure Warnings
* # of ABS activations (All & User)
* Time spent within 1s of car in front
* Time spent within 3s of car in front
* Acceleration Variance
* Service Mode
* Delivered

(2/2)

There's lot of basic stuff which insurance companies can get via companion apps/dongles but there's a lot of deep insights into driver behavior which Tesla can get but others cannot.

I bet a lot of insurance companies would love to get their hands on this kind of data

There's a lot of strong signals on bad driving behavior. From this data it's easy to pull out behaviors like:

* tail gating - time to car in front, collision warnings, ABS activations
* inattention - autopilot strikeouts, warnings
* heavy throttle usage - acceleration variance

It's interesting that they track rapid acceleration considering that Tesla sells performance cars known for fast acceleration.

The driver profile name (which is often uniquely identifying) allows Tesla to know the # of different drivers as well as differentiate different driver behavior.

Notably there's no VIN logged in each record but that would be easy for Tesla to include on the server side.

This is just the initial data. The version field means that Tesla can easily add new data to be tracked later.

The service mode and delivered fields are presumably there to filter out drives not done by the owners. Though I wonder if Tesla can also use it to detect joy riding, etc by service centers. If they were just filtering they could do that before logging the drive.

There's two ABS fields one user and one not. Presumably this is to distinguish rapid braking due to inattention vs ABS kicking in from ice or snow though it's hard to say for certain

I also didn't see anything in the UI to indicate that Tesla is collecting this data -- but I may have missed it somewhere. Certainly wasn't any "opt-in" dialog like the driver monitoring

The forward collision warnings is very interesting since the user can adjust how sensitive the activation is. That seems like it would make it less strong of a signal since people who commonly tailgate would turn it off