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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.

by lelanthran1 days ago|

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> 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.

by intrasight1 days ago|

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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.

by structural1 days ago|

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Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today.

Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?

by intrasight1 days ago|

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Because traffic volume.

Autonomous cars won't panic and cause pileups.

by structural1 days ago|

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The way to prevent pileups is not to assume that everything will work correctly, including every system on every car.

It's to assume that every single thing that could break, will break, and design enough resiliency in that you have to stack up as many failures as possible before things truly go off the rails.

So to do this without killing people, you add the new systems with the same safety thresholds, then gather quite a few years of statistics, then, slowly let things become more efficient if that's both warranted by data and also warranted by simulation of events that you do not yet have data for.

Skipping steps in this because you want to put more cars on the road immediately is foolish and dangerous.

by intrasight1 days ago|

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I agree with all that. Robot cars will take time and we shouldn't skip steps. Tort lawyers will continue to keep companies inline.

by mossTechnician1 days ago|

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They have a reason: profit.

by FeloniousHam1 days ago|

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This is testable. The profits of car insurance companies should rise (let’s say substantially) in real dollars as accident payouts decrease as a result of the inevitable dominance of autonomous vehicles.

by jjordan1 days ago|

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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.

by alecbz1 days ago|

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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.

by SR2Z1 days ago|

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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.