The electric carmaker’s own coverage is launching a new business unit outside the US.
The Tesla car insurance program is beginning its business expansion beyond California and is taking its firs steps into China.
The electric automaker launched the coverage in California last year to make policies cheaper.
The Tesla car insurance program has remained available exclusively to drivers of the brand’s own vehicles who reside in California. The goal at the launch of the policies was to make premiums 30 percent cheaper than the competition. The company is now ready to move beyond the state and into a new market. Instead of expanding into another state within the US, however, it will be taking InsureMyTesla into China.
The coverage was originally available through the automaker’s partnerships with third-party insurers. It is now brokered directly by Tesla through State National Insurance, placing the company in a far stronger position of control over the entire coverage process. The automaker is now, in essence, an insurance company.
Details of a new and improved version of the Tesla car insurance program were discussed in July.
Zachary Kirkhorn, the company’s chief financial officer, talked about the improvements being made to the coverage product. “We’re working now on what we call Version 2 or we can call it the first version of our telematics product. And so really ultimately where we want to get to with Tesla Insurance is to be able to use the data that’s captured in the car, in the driving profile of the person in the car to be able to assess correlations and probabilities of crash and be able then to assess a premium on a monthly basis for that customer.”
Kirkhorn went on to describe why that is beneficial, as the quantity of data collected with the customer’s permission isn’t available by way of any other vehicle or program in the world. “So this gives us a unique advantage in terms of information.”
He also added that though there was the potential to simply launch the product outside 
California, they have chosen to wait until the new version of the Tesla car insurance program was complete with its upgraded telematics before taking things to the next level.
