"More" is the critical word here. I don't see any reason why insurance premiums should increase. Insurance premiums aren't sin taxes or some governmental incentive, they are offered by private firms.
I would expect premium levels to continue to be driven by liability pool payouts plus a profit margin. Autonomous vehicles don't increase driver risk or liability pool payouts. IF anything, they reduce them due to safer driving conditions for the humans.
Insurance always balances between cost pooling and making people pay for their increased risk. Car insurance has always been more expensive for riskier drivers: young men pay more, driving “high risk” cars pay more.
If the overall liability pool goes down but the human drivers become an outsized part of it, the insurance company will likely shift that cost to them. If they don’t, someone could set up an autonomous-only insurance company (or google could just insure itself) to take advantage of the lower risk, making the human insurance more expensive (even more so that the liability since the overall pool will be much smaller).
Yes, that is implicit in what I am saying. We have human only insurance pools today. I dont see a good reason why a human only insurance pool in the future would be more expensive than today.
Like the Borg, every Waymo is the same driver. So in column A, the insurance company has a meta-driver with many millions of miles of statistics. In column B, we have slow-reaction and non-lidar-equipped you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago.
I apologize if I gave the impression that I had personal knowledge of your driving record and traffic violations spanning over the last 36 months. I assure you, my intent in using the word "you" was merely to illustrate a general situation in which an individual (though surely not yourself, palata, specifically), will find themselves being penalized for a prior incident. As my comment was surely read by thousands of HN readers, one imagines that as each of them read the word "you", they pondered their own driving history in their lived experience.
Now that we have established the fact that you, palata, did not have a speeding ticket 3 years ago, I would encourage you to think about the application of my statement, to your actual situation. That is, you may substitute the words "speeding ticket 3 years ago" with any traffic violation or insurance claim where you were determined to be at fault, over any time period which might not be 3 years. Then the question is raised of whether you, palata, would incur higher insurance costs than Waymo.
Let me just try to understand your point. Someone says "you are objectively higher risk than an autonomous car, so it's normal that your insurance makes you pay more if you drive".
To which I answer: "how objective is that, when the claim comes from the company selling the autonomous car?"
Then you tell me something that I understand as: "well, you are objectively higher risk because if you look at your record, you have made mistakes that show that your are".
And when I say "actually, I haven't", you patronize me? Is that how it works?
No. I haven't killed more people than autonomous cars have. Before you can prove that over my life as a driver, I will cause more damage than an autonomous car would have, then you don't get to say that I am objectively higher risk and therefore should pay more insurance.
Now you can try to look at studies that try to prove that. And when I ask "how objective is that?" when the study comes from those who benefit from those results, you can stop for a minute and consider that maybe, I am allowed to ask.
That's initially true, but as the car ages, and maintenance is done (or not done, or done improperly) the car's aspects will change.
And as new cars are developed, obviously there are more "drivers". Essentially every year there'll be new drivers for every company that makes autonomous cars, possibly multiple.
Yeah, it's still a lot fewer than the individual humans, but it's definitely not just "one driver".
They should also ask for more money from sick people when it comes to health insurance, as they’re more prone to getting sick again and again and hence consume resources, after all how many Luigis can there be?
Which is to say that naked capitalism works until it doesn’t, and when it stops working big chances are that it won’t do it gracefully, see how present-day health insurance CEOs are now scared shitless of Big City streets.
If self-driving cars are widely available, and they can drive everywhere a normal car can go, then you're not driving manually because you need to do so, you're driving manually because you like it, and the society isn't there to pay for your hobbies.
They won't be "widely available" because of the higher prices, just look at the EV market right now. You won't get a self-driving $2,000 clunker, and when you drive a $2,000 clunker you don't do it because you "like it", but because that's all that you can afford.
Did it happen for EVs in the here and now? Where can I find a SH EV clunker for $2,000? I'm talking about an EV with performances similar to those of a gasoline-based $2,000 clunker.
Otherwise, believing in "technological progress" as a potential solution is just just that, an irrational belief.
Despite the law, driving in America is a necessity for many. That means our bar for taking it away is high. Quantify the safety delta and have an available alternative, and we can start lowering the bar for taking dangerous drivers off the road. (Frankly either >1 DUI or >1 at-fault crash should result in license revocation. We should also delay license issuance until 18 years old and have restrictions on the license until 20 [1].)
> Quantify the safety delta and have an available alternative
I would love it if these comparisons included "bus stats / average passengers". There are ways to just reduce the miles driven and the chances of collisions at the same time, without new tech improvements.
I assume such a change would heavily impact you as well? 40% of all seriously injured in the traffic are single-bike accidents. Here in Sweden that is.
yea I don't particularly trust a for profit corporation to take my safety as a cyclist more than the minimum viable consideration. I used to be really excited about self driving cars until I realized that in US culture, it would basically be used to further prioritize car dependent infrastructure at the expense of proper walkable spaces and alternative transportation.
we could have amazing and SAFE cycling infrastructure NOW if american culture wasn't so objectively trash.
What year would the EU* ban human driven cars on public roads?
That's it. Million different opinions ranging from "never" to "within a couple decades for sure", weak, strong opinions, and of course many interesting topics to branch out into.
*: sometimes I ask with US, or particular countries, it doesn't really matter for the sake of conversation.
Fun fact: people working in automotive tend to say within this century, people who like and owned many cars say never :-)
It's not a particularly interesting question as it's just random guesswork and gutfeeling until self-driving cars see actual widespread availability and rollout.
If at some point all new cars have full self-driving capabilities with widely accepted performance, then it's not impossible that after a decade of that as status quo, cars end up shipping with manual driving only being an override for specific maneuvering, and eventually having regular licenses lose rights to manual driving on public roads.
They were a leading cause of death when they were a common mode of transport.
Riding a horse is very dangerous. Its just regarded as an acceptable risk (its something many people encourage kids to do) for cultural and social reasons. A British government scientific advisor was fired for pointing out that riding a horse carries about 30 times the risk of a "serious adverse effect" as taking ecstasy.
>A British government scientific advisor was fired for pointing out that riding a horse carries about 30 times the risk of a "serious adverse effect" as taking ecstasy.
This comment shows exactly why I like this question.
Lot of related topics to branch out to! I actually wasn't ever interested in the "cut off date", but all these side topics, and why some people think differently about what the trajectory looks like today.
A change like this is entirely unpredictable from here, because it would be driven (pun intended) far more by political processes than any objective safety consideration.
I neither own nor really like cars, but I think a ban within the next 50 years is super unlikely, and anyone that disagrees is delusional :P
Just consider vintage cars: These are vastly more dangerous for both occupants and pedestrians/cyclists than existing cars and also pollute more. They have not been banned in the last century and no ban seems to be coming anytime soon.
If you are not gonna ban vintage cars, why would you ever ban manual driving (which is much less harmful in multiple ways)?
Once adoption picks up, a ban becomes useless anyway because the fraction of problematic cars decreases (and no longer really matters), while any decisive legislative action towards bans gets tons of pushback from enthusiasts (and no real political gain, because the average voter does not give a shit about single digit traffic accident rate reduction anyway).
It's already borderline happening with the satellite supervision.
Here in Italy insurance is 20% more expensive at the very least and the gap is widening if you don't put a tracking device on your car which checks position, speed, etc.
I have a hard time justifying why one would not want it (besides privacy), all people that complain about it are people that regularly drive above the speed limit or pull dangerous overtaking maneuvers.
We have tracking like this for an app where you can rent electric cars in the city short term. Problem is it sometimes flags you, banning you for a month because you went under a bridge or the road has a smaller side road separated by a ~1 meter island limited at 30 but the road you were on is a 70. When it's a rental car app you don't really care to argue but I definitely wouldn't want to deal with this bs with an insurance company. They'd have 0 incentive to resolve this.
It's a question if you put people's individual "privacy" (quotes because you're driving in public, on public roads paid for by the public, under public laws, and under the public's view - there's not really privacy as to how you're driving, everyone out there can see it) over people's collective right to live?
Road deaths are among the leading causes of death in multiple developed countries.
Roads are public but unless you have someone following around you can't know where everyone is at all times. But with tracker now you have mass surveillance!
We criticize chinese government but we do much worse.
I did write "besides privacy" because it is a valid concern indeed.
But considering that most people don't give two damns about their privacy (or at least act like it, keeping 24/7 a tracking device on them and sharing all of their lives non stop) what would be their valid reason to not have a tracking device for insurance purposes on their cars?
Will the data collection and interpretation be perfect? What if the map with the speed limits is inaccurate and my commute goes through a road where the limit is 70, traffic drives at 70, but the system thinks the limit is 30?
My car displays the speed limit in the dash, as a helper, and sometimes the above happens. If it had automatic braking for crossing the speed limit, it would be a disaster.
Also, if I drive 70 on a 70 road completely covered in snow, will the system know I'm doing something dangerous?
Automatic judgement of people is a bad idea, and it surprises me that anyone who is working in software development would think otherwise.
Yes, and of course you must pay because the autopilot doesn't work when there's snow or rain or sun on the horizon or it's too dark, or the volcano near you is throwing ash and there's wind so you're now in a sandstorm, or wind is carrying sand from the sahara all over the mediterranean to you.
(all of these regularly happen all in the same place)
> More recently, light snowfalls occurred on 9 February 2015, 6 January 2017 and 5 January 2019, but the last heavy snowfall dates back to 17 December 1988.
Says wikipedia. Yeah, I don't know what I expected. Of course there's no actual snow in the meditteranean. It "lightly snowed" 3 times in the last 10 years.
Highways seem like they're safer than other roads but if we had fully autonomous highways I imagine speed limits could be effectively removed drastically reducing travel time.
Well really it would be "you get a discount for the percentage of your mileage driven with a autopilot enabled." You can pay less if you drive in a setting that saves the insurance company money (on average).
