Tired of paying for motorcycle insurance while your bike sits there, unridden, due to family or work commitments (or because you’re a lazy couch potato)?

VOOM says it has the answer: A new form of pay-as-you-go motorcycle insurance, aimed at reducing costs for occasional riders. VOOM’s website says that “Low milage riders can save up to 60% by switching to Pay-Per-Mile. No hardware. No tracking.” Wait, what? That almost sounds too good to be true.

If you watched the YouTube video above, you get a general idea of how the program works. Instead of a black box installed on your vehicle, VOOM pro-rates your insurance based on your odometer reading. Once a month, you take a photo of your odometer and send it in to VOOM.

From there, VOOM charges you based on your motorcycle’s usage, along with a base monthly fee. Hang on—so there’s still a monthly fee? Will riders actually save any money?

As I’m Canadian, I can’t say for sure, as I’m not eligible to start with. It does seem as if occasional riders might be able to save a few bucks with this new system.

However, VOOM’s program design raises several questions. First, is it smart business sense to assume motorcyclists who ride less are at less risk of crashing? While it’s true that less saddle time would equal less exposure to danger, the flip side is that an inexperienced rider who rides infrequently may also be a danger to themselves, if they don’t keep their skills up.

Plus, it seems likely that some unethical riders will disconnect their odometers or devise some method of rolling back their mileage, to reduce their insurance payments. No doubt VOOM’s thought this through, though, and has come up with a plan to fight insurance fraud.

For more details, visit VOOM’s website. While this is a bit of a far-out concept right now, it seems likely that programs like this will become more wide-spread, even as governments move towards mileage-based taxation, in an effort to extract revenue from EV drivers.

Vezi sursa