I think coverage by the mile or the hour for primary drivers would be of interest to a lot of car owners in US urban areas. An existing player, Metro Mile, markets their product as pay-per-mile, but the majority of the cost actually comes from a fixed per-month fee. Of course that might be because what I want makes no actuarial sense...
Most US states require that a car be continuously insured as a condition of its registration, so I think a fixed per-month fee is inevitable.
Each US state also regulates insurance completely differently, so trying to break into "the US market" with an insurance company is really trying to break into 50 different legal areas. Very similar to the other article on the HN frontpage today about US "FinTech" / money transmittal companies.
> ...require that a car be continuously insured...
This doesn't seem like an issue, maybe I'm missing something. You just model it as continuous insurance based off mileage rather than insurance that's only active when driving. Metromile et al are conventional insurers except that they use actual rather than estimated mileage in their pricing.
I think the real reason that there's a monthly fee is that actuarial risk isn't linear with mileage.
