Comment by lotsofpulp
6 hours ago
Liability insurance premiums would reflect higher risk of Tesla vehicles causing collisions, regardless if Tesla is at fault or if the driver is at fault. The insurance company still has to pay, which means the Tesla owners have to pay.
> Liability insurance premiums would reflect higher risk of Tesla vehicles causing collisions, regardless if Tesla is at fault or if the driver is at fault
Why? They only pay out if you’re at fault. And if there aren’t final judgements in a deep pipeline of cases, premiums wouldn’t have a reason to adjust yet.
I am assuming Tesla has been around long enough and driven enough miles to have a sufficiently representative data set for insurance companies to know. I cannot imagine the pipeline of cases to be so deep as people are waiting on payments from collisions from years ago.
I am also assuming that a collision involving a Tesla has at fault determinations that are more accurate than other brands, given the 6 or 7 cameras that are recording and should make determining fault easier.
Basically, if the Tesla was more dangerous to drive than a Toyota, because it was a Tesla, then insurance companies would be paying out more for insuring Teslas, and hence insurance companies would be charging higher liability only insurance premiums.
edit to respond to Forgeties79:
> The issue is they are potentially lying. It’s why we are even having this discussion. The numbers could be fraudulent
When your vehicle gets into a collision, no one contacts the auto manufacturer about who was at fault. Suppose two cars collide. The police write a report, collect evidence, maybe the drivers submit their video recordings to the insurer.
But no one is calling Tesla and asking them to determine who was at fault. And if they did, Tesla would say we never agreed to be liable, and the driver should have been paying attention. There is no way to escape that if it was costing insurers more to insure liability for a Tesla, they would be asking for higher premiums.
Whether or not Tesla is lying to the government or whoever is irrelevant for the goal of determining if Teslas cause more damage than other vehicle brands.
The entire point of these articles about mounting lawsuits is those assumptions may be wrong. The liabilities involved are higher. And given Tesla is potentially mucking with the data, the exculpatory value of having all those cameras is diminished.
> if the Tesla was more dangerous to drive than a Toyota, because it was a Tesla, then insurance companies would be paying out more for insuring Teslas
You may be over indexing how much work liability insurers do. I have an umbrella policy. It absolutely doesn’t take into account the fact that I ski and fly a plane, for example. At the end of the day, their liability is capped and it’s usually easier to weed out by claims history than running models on small premiums.
2 replies →
The issue is they are potentially lying. It’s why we are even having this discussion. The numbers could be fraudulent.
And unfortunately, musk has earned people’s default skeptical stance towards him.