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Introducing the New Metromile Dashboard

At Metromile, we believe that car insurance should never be a hassle. We even go the extra mile to make car ownership simple and seamless, with an app that has helpful features like street sweeping alerts and a car locator. Now, we are introducing a totally redesigned dashboard that makes it easier than ever to access the information you care about the most.

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Get a quick snapshot of your balance and trips.

If you are currently a Metromile customer, just log-in and your new dashboard will be waiting for you. At first glance, you’ll see your current balance, miles driven and overview of miles per day. If you have a bill that is due, you’ll also see that information, as well as a button that allows you to pay with one click. It’s never fun to pay bills, so we wanted to make it as painless as possible! Scroll down and you can view your car’s location and recent trips. If you have multiple cars on your policy, you will see information broken down by vehicle.

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Better understand your bill.

Want to get more detailed? Head to the new “billing” section, where you will see a graph that correlates daily mileage with your bill. You’ll also see a list of the trips you’ve taken in your billing cycle. Click on a date and an interactive map will appear, giving a visual snapshot of a day’s worth of driving. Again, if you have multiple vehicles on your policy, you can easily toggle between them to view detailed information for each. Now, you can see how each trip affects how much you pay. You might even be inspired to make adjustments to your commute to save more money!

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Easily access policy information.

In the “policy” section, you’ll see an overview of all of your insurance information. This has everything you could ever want to know about your policy and is also where you can access policy documents and your proof of insurance card. We wanted to add some fun to typically stagnant insurance information, so you’ll see a customizable avatar and illustration of your car (you can even pick the color).

The best part is that we’re only getting started. We have a lot of exciting updates in the coming months, so if you aren’t yet a Metromile customer, make sure to get a quote now so you can take advantage of everything we have in store!

Metromile Launches Pay-Per-Step Walking Insurance

Research has shown that our signature pay-per-mile car insurance offering has customers ditching their cars, many for their own two feet. Today, we’ve announced a new insurance offering to cover you from the disasters you could potentially face on foot: walking insurance.

Metromile’s walking insurance functions through its new smart walking app: the Metromile Pace. Several factors will be considered when creating your unique per-step rate, including broken bone history, clumsiness score and type of walking shoes.

Customers who sign up for the Metromile Pace will be covered in the event of:

  • Being caught in an unexpected rainstorm
  • Losing footing, tripping or falling
  • Worn out socks and shoes
  • Emergency walk-side assistance
  • And more!

It’s time to toss your pedometers! Users will see increased benefits with the walking insurance feature, including tracking number of steps, miles logged, shoe health and more. We’re especially excited about the “Walk Much?” feature that is able to gauge fall severity based on impact and immediately alerts emergency operators.

We’re offering a safe-walker discount for walkers who commit to not walk-and-text, use the handrail when available, and follow the safe route recommended by their Metromile Pace. There is also a bonus offer for adding a foot care package to your walking insurance, which includes a monthly pedicure and new pair of socks.

 

April Fools’! While we don’t actually offer pay-per-step walking insurance, we do offer pay-per-mile car insurance for low-mileage drivers. Get a free quote here.

Meet Raquel Rozas, Metromile’s New Head of Brand

We’re really making moves at Metromile and are excited to announce that Raquel Rozas is joining us as Head of Brand and Product Marketing. As we amplify our endeavors of disrupting the car insurance industry, Raquel will oversee all aspects of the Metromile brand, ensuring that the concept of affordable insurance for low-mileage drivers becomes synonymous with the Metromile name. A former Procter & Gamble executive, Raquel brings more than 10 years of brand experience from senior marketing roles, working with brands including Secret® and Tide®. We’re confident that this is exactly what we need to elevate the Metromile brand, and we’re also confident that Raquel’s answers to the questions below prove she will fit in perfectly with the Metromile team!

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What excites you the most about joining Metromile? The opportunity to provide consumers with a more transparent and fair pricing option for car insurance, while at the same time providing them with excellent service be it with claims, help in finding parking or car diagnostics.

How do you commute to work? I just moved to the Bay area, so I’m in the process of exploring all the options. There are so many choices: train, bus, carpooling or ferry! Tomorrow I’m going to try out the bus system. The idea of a guaranteed seat and free Wifi sounds appealing to me.

Where are you excited to road trip to? Oh my….so many things I’m excited about. I already have a girls trip planned to Napa, but I’m also excited about Tahoe, Yosemite, Half Moon Bay, Highway 1 and San Luis Obispo… truly the options feel endless.

Which Metromile app feature is most helpful to you and why? The street sweeping alert is definitely one of the coolest features, but for someone who constantly forgets where they parked, the car locator will definitely come in handy.

Metromile Just Made It Even Easier to Save Money

Here at Metromile, we’re all about providing a more fair and affordable insurance option for low-mileage drivers, but we don’t stop at just helping our customers save money. We also have a smart driving app that takes the hassle out of car ownership, with useful features like a car locator and street sweeping alerts (in select cities). Now, we are giving customers an even easier way to save with a new billing feature, which tracks mileage costs throughout the month.

save money

The inspiration for this feature came from our loyal customers. Since Metromile’s pay-per-mile insurance model is unique in that the monthly bill is based on mileage, pricing can change from month-to-month depending on how much is driven. Many of our customers said that they would find ways to drive less if they could track their bill throughout the month. That’s exactly what this new feature will allow them to do. Now, customers can see how each mile they drive affects how much they pay. By keeping tabs on monthly mileage, it’s easier than ever to stay in control of how much customers pay (and save).

If you are a Metromile customer, the new Billing feature is simple to use. Open our app and you will see the new Billing card appear on the overview screen, giving a quick glance at your charges to-date. You can then click to drill in deeper and see the breakdown of your current bill, as well as previous bills.

If you have an idea of how Metromile’s app could be even more helpful, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. You can reach us at [email protected]. Happy driving!

Making Moves: Metromile Receives Strategic Investment

We are thrilled to announce that Intact Financial Corporation, the largest provider of property and casualty insurance in Canada, has made a strategic investment in Metromile.

Metromile Investment

2015 was an exciting year for Metromile – we launched a partnership with Uber, expanded to the East Coast and added to our executive team. Funds from this investment will be used to continue on our exciting journey by accelerating Metromile’s growth and offerings nationwide. For our customers, this means a continued focus on the customer experience from sign up through day-to-day needs, improved app technology and updated features, further development of the claims experience and much more. You’ll also be seeing a lot more of us around town!

Intact Financial shares similar values in transparency, customer experience and a technology-driving approach to insurance. The venture represents an exciting opportunity for Intact Financial to expand its core competencies which will ultimately enhance the customer experience.

To see more announcements from Metromile, visit our Press page. And if you are interested in our pay-per-mile insurance offering, you can learn more here.

How We Got Here: A Brief History of Pay-per-mile Insurance

Here at Metromile, we pride ourselves on being pioneers of the pay-per-mile car insurance model, providing a fair and affordable insurance for low-mileage drivers. Technically, we weren’t the first to introduce this idea, but we were (and still are!) the leaders in making it seamless, scalable and easy for everyone. We were founded exactly five years ago, and now have customers in seven states, from California to New Jersey (with many more coming soon). In celebration of our 5th birthday, let’s take a step back and explore how we got to where we are today.

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One of the first times the per-mile insurance concept was introduced was in a report by William Vickrey in 1968, and later in a  report by the Brookings Institution in 2008. They hypothesized that if people paid for insurance by the mile, they would be incentivized to drive less since their bill would be based on mileage. The less someone drives, the less they would pay. To prove out the Brooking’s Institution’s theory, we recently ran a study with the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University and found that our customers are already driving 6% less after switching to Metromile. This seemingly small number can actually have a significant impact on our economy and environment, especially if everyone reduced their driving by this amount. The benefits to per-mile insurance are clear, but the major insurance companies have been wary to use this model since low-mileage drivers (65% of the US, to be exact) are subsidizing the small handful of people that drive the most.

There have been a few smaller companies that ventured to test a per-mile insurance model, but they required setup that wasn’t exactly user-friendly. One company required a mechanic to install a mysterious black box in the car, and another relied on consumer-submitted photos taken of the odometer reading. None of them made for a hassle-free experience, which is necessary for the person that only occasionally uses their car.

That’s where Metromile comes in. We knew there was a need for a more fair car insurance, but the solution couldn’t involve complicated setups or time-consuming reports. Technology would be an important factor to measure miles driven, and it needed to be plug-and-play. Your mechanic already uses your on-board diagnostics port (OBD) to obtain car health data, so why not use the same port to gather mileage data? We had a solution, and the catalyst was that the sensors we needed to do this become inexpensive and reliable. So in 2011, we introduced a simple way for low-mileage drivers to save money with pay-per-mile car insurance. Just plug a device (we call it the Pulse) into the OBD-port of your car, and it will automatically track mileage. On average, we are saving our customers $500 a year, so we are pretty confident in our solution.

So where are we off to next? There are a lot of exciting stops on our roadmap, from state launches to helpful new app features. If you are currently a Metromile customer, we could not have gotten here without you, so we thank you all for your support. And if you aren’t currently a customer and don’t drive much, you can learn more about our innovative pay-per-mile insurance offering here!

Introducing John Orta, General Counsel at Metromile

We’re rapidly growing at Metromile, so as we scale, we are excited to announce that John Orta has joined Metromile as General Counsel and will oversee our legal, HR and recruiting teams. Before Metromile, John was Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary at OpenTable (where you likely make all of your online restaurant reservations). In addition to serving on the executive team, he was responsible for all aspects of the company’s legal, HR, recruiting, fraud and risk teams, as well as the Chief Compliance Officer. John led the legal team during the company’s IPO and Secondary Offering in 2009, and OpenTable’s purchase by The Priceline Group in 2014. He also received the GC Impact Award from The Recorder in 2014 (a leading legal publication), so he’s kind of a big deal. To get to know John a little better, we had him answer a few quick questions.

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What excites you the most about joining Metromile?
I honestly can’t limit it to one thing. First, I love companies that help people, and at Metromile not only do we provide a great insurance product that can provide substantial savings to our customers, but our app also has a suite of features that makes car ownership easier. That is a fantastic combination. Second, the people that work here are world-class and I could not be more excited to join this wonderful team and tackle the opportunity in front of us.

How do you commute to work?
I’m a BART guy. Even when it is crowded, I enjoy it. What I really need to do, however, is ride my bike to BART and burn some extra calories. That should be my new year’s resolution (but it isn’t).

The Metromile 2015 Year in Review

We’ve been making major moves this year, with an East Coast expansion ( Pennsylvania, Virginia AND New Jersey) and a shiny new update to our smart driving app. There was also a whole lot of driving less and saving more. We couldn’t have had such a momentous year without our amazing customers, so without further ado, here’s a recap of what 2015 looked like for our Metromilers!

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Cars, Turkeys and Bears (Oh My): Metromile Exhibits at the LA Auto Show

The LA Auto Show is one of the biggest automotive events in the US, so of course we had to participate and spread the word about how we are making car ownership easier and more affordable. Armed with a giant bear (one of our photo booth props) and ample excitement, we headed down to Los Angeles to show off our pay-per-mile insurance offering and smart driving app.

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The Metromile booth was located in the Tech Zone, where we joined other companies pioneering automotive innovations such as Honk (on-demand roadside assistance), Lyft (ridesharing services) and Luxe (on-demand valet). To make our exhibit fun and interactive, we had a giant photo booth where attendees could take photos with goofy glasses, turkey hats (in anticipation of Thanksgiving) and the cartoon characters you might have seen in recent Metromile ads. If you are wondering what a bear with a longboard has to do with an insurance company, well, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t drive much and could save a lot with pay-per-mile insurance.

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Our Director of Business Development, Katy Allen, also led a discussion at a networking lunch during the Connected Car Expo, an event running alongside the LA Auto Show. The discussion focused on the future of car insurance and unearthed some interesting insights about how technology is being used to make insurance more affordable (hint: like using the OBD-II port to measure exact mileage).

The show ran from November 20th to the 29th. If you are interested in checking it out next year, make sure to check out the LA Auto Show website for more information.

Metromile Brings Pay-per-mile Car Insurance to New Jersey

Driving in New Jersey is expensive. In fact, it’s the fifth most expensive state to own a car in! Residents of the Garden State – you’re in luck because we’re here to make car ownership more affordable. Metromile is bringing the first and only pay-per-mile car insurance offering to New Jersey, so if you don’t drive much, you likely won’t have to pay much for car insurance.

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With this revolutionary pricing model, your monthly bill will be determined by the miles you drive each month*. That means that the less you drive, the less you pay. On average, we are saving our low-mileage customers $500 annually. An increasing number of New Jerseyans are choosing to ride bikes, take trains or buses, or even walk instead of drive, so we expect to see a lot of people that will save money with per-mile insurance. Here at Metromile, we like to think of ourselves as the “uninsurance” company, making car ownership easy and affordable for low-mileage drivers.

We also alleviate many of the hassles of car ownership with our free smart driving app, which we just totally redesigned and gave a fresh coat of paint. Features include the ability to locate a missing car, view trip details, and decode those pesky check engine lights. The key to all of this is the Metromile Pulse, a device given to all per-mile insurance customers that plugs into the car’s OBD-II port to deliver useful data and insights.

New Jersey marks the third state on the East Coast where Metromile’s per-mile insurance is offered, and joins California, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, Virginia and Pennsylvania. We have more planned for 2016, so sign up for our waitlist to get notified when we arrive in your state!

*Insurance rates are determined by driving history and record, car make and model. Mileage does not determine the base rate or per-mile rate.