Ford Teams Up With Pay-Per-Mile Insurer Metromile

Ford Motor Co. has teamed up with Metromile, an insurer that offers pay-by-the-mile insurance plans geared toward drivers who spend relatively little time behind the wheel, the companies said on Thursday (Sept. 3) in an announcement.

“This is an important milestone for Metromile, and it’s even more important for drivers. That’s why I’m so excited about it,” Metromile CEO Dan Preston wrote on the Metromile blog. “It’s a tangible example of how car insurance can adapt more closely to how our lives are changing — where we live and work (for many of us, that’s the same place right now), how we drive, and where we drive. Connecting your car directly to your insurance is a big step toward making insurance much more personalized to your driving habits. We’ll see more convenience, customization and savings than ever before.

The arrangement will capitalize on technology developed by Ford and other major automakers that in sends real-time data to the companies about cars’ whereabouts and other information.

Metromile says on average, a customer saves $741 per year compared to paying for a traditional insurance plan.

Earlier this year, CEO Preston said of the nine-year-old Silicon Valley operation: “I think it’s really exciting, how you can build an insurance company from the ground up, with sensors now being applied as opposed to everything being manual. You start to think about how a company could service their customers differently. So I think we’ve become much more of a digital insurance company [that is] building an entirely different kind of way of doing business, which evolved out of that initial idea.”

While major auto insurers have yet to embrace pay-per-mile technology on any significant scale, many have responded to the substantial drop in driving caused by COVID-19 by offering discounts and, in some cases, refunds.

Metromile is currently available in Washington, California, Oregon, Illinois, Arizona, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.