"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.
As it should. You’re objectively higher risk, particularly if you’ve ever been at fault for a crash or gotten a ticket.