The direct-to-consumer car insurer will make available to 15 states in February and more throughout 2012 a new function on its mobile app that allows users to get quotes just by taking pictures of pertinent documents and supplying a little additional information.

The technology is called Image Capture, and it will be integrated right into the mobile quoting process.

Instead of manually inputting personal data–like address, driver’s license number, and vehicle make, model and year–users can just take a photo of their driver’s license and VIN bar code or current insurance card, and the data fields on the app will autopopulate.

“The number you get through our mobile app is a valid quote, not a ballpark,” said Matt Lehman, Progressive’s mobile business leader. “We think it’s important to give consumers an accurate rate, and this technology helps them get that rate quickly.”

After going through the quoting process, users have the option to buy the policy they’ve been quoted for.

The new Image Capture function adds to Progressive’s mobile app capabilities, which already included its cost-to-insure rating function.

That function allows users to punch in up to three vehicles’ make, model and year–or to automatically input that information by taking a photo of their VINs–and they get back a comparison of the cost to insure those vehicles on a scale of 1 to 10.

Although the function didn’t deliver actual quotes, it provides what could be helpful information to shoppers who are looking for a new car and don’t want to be shocked when they see the cost to insure it after driving off the lot.

Insurance-Friendly Car Sharing

Following similar legislative moves in California and Oregon, lawmakers in Washington are pushing to eliminate the negative coverage implications of participating in car-sharing programs.

Currently, auto owners in the Evergreen State would likely see their personal Washington car insurance policies invalidated if they lent their cars out in exchange for money, since the vehicle is being used commercially.

House Bill 2384 fixes that by transferring liability from the car owner to the car-sharing service when the automobile is being used by people other than the owner. So any damages that occur while the car is being rented would be covered by the service’s policy, not the owner’s.

Policies provided by the sharing service would have to provide at least $180,000 worth of total liability coverage–three times the minimum required by the state–as well as comprehensive and collision coverage.

Paving the Way for Usage-Based Programs

There has been rapid growth over the past few years in demand and supply of usage-based insurance options.

Usage-based options often involve an insurer providing a small electronic device that plugs into a diagnostic port on a car. That device then sends policyholder driving data back to the insurer, showing how many miles are put in behind the wheel, how often drivers of the insured car brake hard, and where and at what times of day the car’s driven, among other factors.

These programs in theory reward drivers who put in fewer miles behind the wheel and display safer driving habits.

House Bill 2361 would allow insurers to keep from public inspection the rating methodology used when incorporating usage-based information in pricing formulas. It also states that location data recorded by the devices cannot be collected without the user’s consent and that “individually indentifiable usage information” that’s collected may not be used in any way other than in premium calculations.

Public testimony summarized in a report from the House Business and Financial Services Committee indicate that the legislation would help only one company: Progressive Insurance.

Progressive championed usage-based coverage options with its Snapshot Discount, which is available in nearly every state in the country. But Washington remains one of the few where Snapshot is still not available.

According to a summary of public testimony include in the committee report, a supporter said, “The concerns raised about this bill appear to be based on an inability to compete with a product that is available in most of the country. That product will not be sold in this state without some type of confidentiality protections.”

Progressive owns a handful of patents regarding usage-based coverage, but supporters of the bill noted that the rate filings would be open to public inspections, which would expose the company’s information and possibly lead to the company’s having to defend its patent in court.

The summary of the testimony from individuals “with concerns” said that Progressive–although the company is not named outright in the testimony–is suing other insurers who have tried to develop similar products, and it “should not be given even more protection than their existing patents.”

All Pennsylvania car insurance policies by default include uninsured/underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) coverage, which provides coverage when the policyholder is injured in a car accident caused by an uninsured, underinsured, or hit-and-run driver.

But drivers can reject this coverage by signing a form contained in the pages of their auto policies. The language of that form is dictated by law so that this section of all Pennsylvania policies reads the same way.

Unitrin, however, added an extra 20 words to the statement policyholders sign to reject the coverage.

The extra sentence seemed innocuous enough to Unitrin and the trial court that ruled in the insurer’s favor: “By rejecting this coverage, I am also signing the waiver on P. 13 rejecting stacked limits of underinsured motorist coverage.”

The opinion of both Unitrin and the lower court was that the additional sentence was “clarifying” language that did not affect the terms of the rejection.

But a majority of state Superior Court judges who reviewed one Unitrin policyholder’s appeal said the fact that the language deviated from what had been prescribed in the state’s financial responsibility law is enough to make the Unitrin UM/UIM rejection void.

The lower court’s decision was reversed.

Decision Could Be Significant for Unitrin Policyholders Who Have Made UIM Claims

The case originated in July 2009 when Unitrin policyholder Lee Jones was injured in an accident while riding as a passenger.

After being treated for injuries, it turned out that Jones’s damages exceeded the limits of the at-fault driver’s bodily injury liability policy–a scenario in which underinsured motorist coverage would kick in and cover the remaining damages.

But Jones had signed the UIM rejection form, meaning she would likely have to pay for the remaining damages out of pocket.

After Unitrin denied her claim, the two parties went to court over whether the rejection form Jones had signed complied with state statutes and, in effect, whether she was covered under the policy. The trial court said the language did not negate the policy and sided with Unitrin in the end, but the Superior Court ruling reversed that decision.

This may not be the end of the Unitrin case. But if the Superior Court’s decision is upheld, it could mean drivers who were denied UIM benefits because they had rejected the coverage may still be able to collect for their damages.

One of the bills would broaden the situations in which police could tow a resident’s car for being uninsured, while the second would make it so that police could stop motorists if a state database indicates that they’re driving an uninsured auto.

The Sooner state has one of the worst uninsured motorist problems in the nation. According to Insurance Research Council reports that used data from 2007 and 2009, about 24 percent of drivers in the state were on the road without any Oklahoma car insurance coverage.

That’s double the nationwide average of about 14 percent.

In an effort to better identify uninsured cars, the state established a database that matches vehicle registrations up with policy information supplied by car insurance companies issuing policies in the state. When a car in the database is registered but has no matching policy, it’s likely to be uninsured.

But police currently cannot pull a driver over simply because that driver appears in the database to be driving an uninsured vehicle.

Rather, Oklahoma law dictates that driving without a policy is a secondary offense, meaning that you can only be cited if you’re already stopped for another type of infraction.

House Bill 2525 would change that.

If the bill passes, police would be legally allowed to run the license plate numbers of a vehicle on the road to see if it come up as a no-match on the database. And if it did, they’d be able to pull over the offending motorist and cite them for that reason alone.

Last year, lawmakers passed a bill that barred certain recovery rights for drivers who were uninsured at the time of an accident.

Under the so-called “no pay, no play” law, which took effect in November 2011, uninsured drivers injured in a crash cannot collect for pain and suffering damages that were the result of the accident, regardless of who was at fault.

Supporters of the law said it would discourage motorists from getting behind the wheel without a policy.

A first-time offense for driving uninsured in the Sooner State brings with it a $250 fine, and offenders can have their licenses suspended until they pay the fine and can prove that coverage are in place. Police were also authorized by the Legislature in 2010 to seize and tow any uninsured vehicles.

The company’s fourth-quarter profits came in at about $79.5 million.

Yearly profits rose for Mercury between 2010 and 2011. Profits for 2010 came in at $152.2 million, while last year saw the company making $191.2 million. That represents a year-to-year increase of more than 25 percent.

The company fared well in the fourth quarter despite a small dip in investment income–which saw a 3.3 percent drop–and the presence of a handful of events that inflicted significant losses.

Windstorms and severe rainstorms in California led to an estimated $25 million in pre-tax losses, and homeowners sinkhole claims in Florida cost the company $19 million pre-tax.

Mercury saw a 0.8 percent increase in net premiums written between 2010 and 2011.

Mercury stock was down 4.5 percent for the day at approximately 2 p.m. EST.

With the latest financial report, Mercury becomes one of a growing group of homeowners and car insurance companies recovering from huge losses caused by summer weather events that destroyed tens of billions of dollars’ worth of property and gouged insurers’ bottom lines.

Allstate reported at the beginning of the month that its quarterly profits rose 340 percent between the third and fourth quarters of last year. And Progressive reported that it made $76.3 million in December 2011–which was down from the month before but still up 73 percent from August, when the insurer saw the lowest profits in two years.

An Insurance Information Institute survey indicated that the majority of executives at the major property-casualty insurers believe that the industry is on the road to recovery.

Mercury currently has the 13th largest share of the American private passenger coverage market, according to the latest data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The company had $2.07 billion in premiums written at that time.

About a third of the company’s auto premiums were collected from California drivers.

All nine committee members voted to approve the bill, which would limit the types of care provided under personal injury protection (PIP), require service providers getting paid under PIP to be licensed and set new safeguards in place to help prevent fraud, among other things.

There has been an overwhelming push this session by the governor, insurance companies  and other legislators to get new laws on the books that would fundamentally change the state’s no-fault insurance system.

Proponents of reform say that the size of average Florida car insurance quotes has been going up every year because of inflated claims and unsustainable abuse of the system. Many say that the $10,000 PIP limit has become a dollar target for unscrupulous medical providers and residents seeking to cash in on the system.

By enacting a major overhaul, supporters of the bills say premiums will come down for Florida drivers.

The following are some of the major changes included in Senate Bill 1860, which was submitted by Sen. Joe Negron:

• Eliminate coverage under PIP policies for rehabilitative massage and acupuncture
• Require long-form crash reports for crashes in which any party claims physical discomfort
• Authorize police who investigate a crash to provide testimony or affidavits to supplement crash reports
• Require all health care entities providing services to be licensed clinics in order to be reimbursed under PIP policies, except for certain types of entities that are licensed otherwise
• Step up operations related to investigating abuse of auto policies
• Require insurers to repay within 30 days of notice all of the benefits paid by the state Medicaid program
• Requires insurers to explain to claimants why they are denying a claim
• Enacts a medical fee schedule

Senate Bill Less Radical than House Bill

Negron’s bill is significantly less sweeping than Rep. Jim Boyd’s House Bill 119, which was passed by a second committee last week along party lines.

Instead of barring reimbursement for unlicensed clinics and acupuncture and massage services, HB 119 would go a step further and virtually change the state’s no-fault system entirely, replacing PIP with emergency care coverage (ECC).

Under ECC, only treatment of emergency conditions would be covered. And even then those emergency conditions would need to be diagnosed by a doctor in the emergency room of a hospital or a hospital-licensed emergency clinic to be eligible for coverage, and they would need to be diagnosed within the first 72 hours after a crash.

According to court documents, the case originally began in 2008, when John Robins was performing construction work on Steven and Cathy Ivey’s house in Virginia.

Robins had been working on the house for several weeks and was using his Ford Econoline van basically as a storage shed for tools and equipment, powering his equipment with a battery charger and electric splitter that he kept in the van.

He had his van parked there for about a month, driving to and from the house in a separate vehicle.

Robins left the work site for the weekend on Friday, August 15. On Sunday, a fire started in the van that spread to the house and caused nearly $293,000 in damages.

A handful of fire investigators all concluded that the fire had started as the result of “malfunction of equipment kept in the rear of the van, most likely an electrical problem with an extension cord or battery charger,” according to court documents.

After the fire, the company insuring the house paid the Iveys for the fire damage and sought reimbursement from Robins, saying that the incident was a result of his negligence.

Robins then sought coverage from State Farm, the provider of his Virginia car insurance policy, and Nationwide, the provider of his commercial general liability policy.

Each of the companies said the other should cover the damages.

Nationwide said that it should not have to pay the claim because it excluded coverage that was the result of Robins’s use of a vehicle. And State Farm said that it should not have to pay the claim because Robins was not technically using the vehicle at the time of the accident.

The 4th U.S. Court of Appeals found in favor of State Farm. The court noted that Virginia law says for a car insurer to cover the damages caused by a vehicle in an accident, it must be used “as a vehicle.”

The court wrote in its opinion that Robins was using the vehicle as a storage shed, not as a vehicle, and therefore fell out of the jurisdiction of an auto insurance policy.

The court reversed the district court’s ruling that State Farm pay for the damages, and the case was sent back to the district court for further proceedings.

At issue in both is whether insurers should be able to give discounts or surcharges based on whether a driver was uninsured in the past five years.

The secretary of state already announced that Californians will vote on a measure that would give insurers more versatility in setting rates based on consumers’ prior coverage history. That proposal–virtually identical to Proposition 17, which voters rejected in 2010–qualified last month for inclusion on the ballot and has gained a large amount of support from coverage providers in the state.

But backers of newer, proposed initiative are now soliciting signatures from Californians in the hopes that they will get voters to bar auto insurers from raising rates or denying coverage to people who lacked prior coverage, which would effectively cancel out the insurer-backed initiative already on the ballot.

The change to auto insurance regulations is actually just part of a larger initiative that mostly has to do with requiring health insurers to get approval from state regulators before implementing rate formulas.

It’s being heavily supported by Consumer Watchdog, which was a vehement opponent of Proposition 17.

To get on the ballot, supporters will have to collect 504,760 valid signatures and turn them in to state officials.

Insurance Industry’s Discount Is Consumer Watchdog’s Surcharge

Supporters of the initiative that would give insurers more options in pricing coverage say that allowing companies to base rates on coverage history–regardless of who provided that coverage–would help them provide cheap insurance in California to those who have consistently obeyed financial responsibility laws.

On the other hand, Consumer Watchdog focuses on the fact that while some Californians would benefit from the measure, many others would see higher rates simply because they were unemployed and couldn’t find coverage, moved away to college or went car-less for a period of time.

Consumer Watchdog and other supporters of the nascent initiative say they want to uphold the provisions of voter-approved Proposition 103, which took effect in the late 1980s and heavily regulated the variables insurers can take into account when setting car insurance rates.

Proposition 103 made it so that insurers can give policyholders a discount if they are renewing a policy, but it cannot give a discount solely because it is the first time the policyholder is buying coverage from them.

The total number of cars stolen in the state dropped from about 29,650 to 26,875 during that period.

While the 9 percent year-to-year drop is impressive, the data also show that thefts actually dropped a whopping 50 percent between 2000 and 2010.

The state saw double or near double-digit decreases every year since 2007.

The ATPA attributed the decline to the 110 workers in the state who are funded with anti-theft grants from the ATPA, which was first established in 1986. At that time, Michigan was the state with the highest volume of car thefts in the country, with more than 72,000 vehicles stolen that year.

In 2010, the state had the 6th-highest volume and the 10th-highest theft rate.

Since then, there have been huge advances in antitheft technology–like automatic disabling devices and GPS tracking–that have significantly reduced the theft rate.

According to the ATPA, 6 of the 10 most-stolen vehicles in Michigan in 2010 were Dodge Ram pickups that were manufactured between 1997 and 2003.

The other vehicles on the top-10 list were Ford and Chevrolet pickups.

The largest share of thefts took place in Detroit, which accounted for 47 percent of the statewide total.

The ATPA is funded by a $1-per-vehicle assessment that’s paid by insurance companies and the returns on investments of those funds. Those funds then go to produce grants that help law enforcement agencies combat the theft problem. The Authority reported that it issued more than $6 million in grants between October 2010 and September 2011.

The ATPA says those grants resulted in $27.5 million worth of vehicles and equipment being recovered and more than 2,280 arrests being made.

In addition to law enforcement agencies, grants are issued to county prosecutors as well as nonprofits that provide VIN-etching services to residents. According to the ATPA’s latest report, etched vehicles are 29 percent less likely to be stolen when compared with non-etched cars.

Possible Insurance Implications of Lower Theft Rates

While Michiganders aren’t likely to see an immediate price cut while searching for the cheapest auto insurance in Michigan following the latest ATPA report, significant long-term drops in theft could help drivers get cheaper comprehensive coverage, which is the only type that provides protection after a car’s stolen.

When insurers have to pay fewer claims on a certain type of coverage, they generally lower the price.

However, insurers usually look at the local level, not statewide, and at the types of cars that are being stolen.

If there are drops in thefts in a policyholder’s area, or if they get a new car that has a better history with thefts or is equipped with effective antitheft devices, they could expect a drop in rates. But theft reductions at the statewide level likely won’t have any immediate effect on prices.

The amount of catastrophic losses suffered by the company plummeted 94 percent between the third and fourth quarters, dropping from $1.08 billion down to $66 million. Insurance companies generally consider catastrophic losses to be events that cause $25 million or more in insured losses.

Allstate’s fourth quarter profits were $724 million, which is up considerably from the $165 million in third-quarter profits and the $296 million in profits the company reaped in the fourth quarter of 2010.

But the catastrophic weather events still took their toll on the year-end numbers.

Between 2010 and 2011, yearly profits for the insurer dropped 15 percent, to $788 million.

That reverses the trend seen between 2009 and 2010, when the company saw an increase in yearly profits of 8.7 percent.

Allstate remains one of the top rated auto insurance companies in the country. As of March 2011, it had the second-largest share of the private passenger coverage market with nearly $17 billion in premiums written–a 10.2 percent market share.

State Farm is the only car insurer with a larger share of the market.

While the industry saw gargantuan losses from tornadoes in the Midwest, storms on the East Coast and wind storms on the West Coast last year, many experts say the industry is on the road to recovery.

To read the experiences of current and former Allstate policyholders, readers can find user-submitted Allstate auto insurance reviews online.