Comment by jjordan
18 hours ago
There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
18 hours ago
There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
Why? Insurance companies use detailed risk data. If they discover that letting you drive your own car is a much higher risk than an auto-drive, why should they not be allowed to account for that?
Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
Yes, I definitely trust insurance companies to do the right thing here.
Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.
But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.
I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.
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>Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
Insurance companies you are required to interact with by law are absolutely political.
I meant they aren't political in their pricing. They don't charge less or more for something because it is considered liberal or conservative.
I agree with your first statement but certainly not with the second. Rates for human drivers should and will skyrocket. Individual states may try to push back with regulation but it won't succeed in the long-term
Rates for human drivers are currently at the correct level for insurance companies to pay for damage and make some profit.
If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
> If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
Wouldn't the accident rate for humans go down as well as the percentage of SDV increase? After all, the humans won't be exclusively having accidents with each other.
I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road.
We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.
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They have a reason: profit.
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Why should they skyrocket? As more autonomous vehicles appear on the roads, incidents with non-autonomous vehicles will go down. Driving will become inherently safer.
In the long-long-term, self-driving will get good enough and people will be relying on it so thoroughly that allowing people to drive on their own, with barely any practice, will probably be more risky than it's worth. In say, idk, 100 years (probably sooner), I doubt people will be able to drive their own cars in the way they do today.
The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving.
Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point where I'm not actually sure that robotaxis can reliably beat them yet.
Yeah, a hundred years from now fewer people will drive themselves, but considering how many people DESPISE driving and only do it because it's required of them, that isn't bad.
There should be laws taxing people who insist on driving themselves. And the money should be used to subsidize people who switch to self-driving or install automatic assisted systems on their old cars. That'd partially mitigate the externality generated by human drivers.
How about prison for attempted murder?
I've lost enough friends to drivers who made a mistake. If self driving is better in just that, but worse every other way: I'm for it.
That might be a big if above, but of true them I support it. Drive on a private track or a video game if you must. Leave the real world to safe.
Incumbent rent-seekers want regulatory capture to insulate them from externalities. Dog bites man.
No there should not. Human drivers kill a million people every year. WW1 killed 15-22M.
The law put into place would be that the people who put autonomous cars on the road would risk their freedom and safety just as much as a driver if that car causes an accident through their neglect.
This will never happen, because the entire purpose of the corporate structure is to avoid responsibility.
How selfish. Why should I, someone who wants a safer AV, subsidize those who are riskier drivers?
Extremely selfish.
Is this your first introduction to an insurance pool?
Not the same at all.
This happens in insurance all the time. Healthy people who eat right and exercise subsidize people with poor habits.
It appears to some degree that we as a society do not want risk priced optimally to each individual.
It is understandable that you think this is the case as someone who is not above the age of 50. You will see that health and life insurance premiums rise precipitously once you reach certain milestones. Once you reach 90 years old, you will find that car insurance companies will discontinue your policy based on a single traffic ticket.
We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.