Comment by jedberg

20 hours ago

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.

> Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.

If pricing risk was an exact science, you'd get the same quote from all providers (given similar coverage). Yet if you try that, you'll find that the quotes could vary as much as 2-3x. Therefore no, we shouldn't blindly trust "the algorithm".