Car insurance in America is too cheap | Hacker News Reader

Car insurance in America is too cheap

economist.com

285 pointsscythe847 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20240203134307/https://www.econom...

> Since then, the number of severe crashes has climbed. It is hard to say exactly why.

The article mentions some of the reasons but the one I find personally annoying the most are white LED headlights. What in the absolute seven hells is wrong with every manufacturers these days? White light may give you extra vision but it blinds everyone else. Eventually, everyone starts using it and then no one will be able to see properly at night anymore. Truly, a tragedy of the commons. A swift intervention at the Federal level seems like a must.

I see quite a few searing LED headlights that don't blind me because they're angled low enough, I think the biggest problem (so to speak) is when they're on towering pickups and SUVs. I suspect there's no good way to angle the beams on those to allow their drivers to see the road without also frying the retinas of normal-sized vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. There also seem to be quite a few iffy aftermarket LEDs, which apparently don't always allow for much fine-tuning when they replace halogens.

There was a big NYTimes article about this a few weeks ago, and somebody in the comments complain that the bright white LED headlights were ruining the proximity sensors on their Volvo and they couldn’t install optical filters without voiding the warranty. To me this seemed weird cause I thought those things worked on IR. I’m wondering if there’s some sort of CV solution to this? I don’t see how narrow color temperature of LEDs would affect IR sensors, etc.

Leds can output 275nm-950nm.

IR is between 780nm-1mm.

These aren’t exact numbers.

Probably something in that overlap was damaging them somehow. Or it might be something totally different and the person had misdiagnosed.

What I’m uncertain of, is if the led is intended to produce a certain color (white, blue) how much it would be emitting on the IT spectrum.

Example: https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/us/semiconductor/knowled...

LEDs are often straight swapped into housings designed for halogen bulbs. Doesn't matter if it's a tiny sports car or a huge F350 truck, replacing bulbs this way to going to throw light where it shouldn't be. For vehicles with headlights higher up from the road, they're more likely to end up shining in the eyes of other drivers, but it's still a problem of wrong bulb, wrong housing. Larger vehicles can have LEDs that have a beam pattern that casts light the appropriate area but this usually means a whole new headlight assembly instead of a bulb swap and even then, many of the aftermarket products aren't designed with property beam patterns in mind.

While there are guides available on adjusting headlights, they can only help so much when there's a bad combination of LED bulb, halogen housing, and high headlight height. Merely angling the housing downwards won't solve the problem of improper equipment combinations. Wish places like AutoZone offered free or inexpensive a beam pattern analysis service like they do with checking batteries and error codes. Lots of people don't even know their bulb swap is causing problems for others.

This is especially an issue with non projector housings.

Wait, are you saying aftermarket LEDs are road legal in US, no strings attached?

Throughout Europe it's either straight prohibited to retrofit LEDs in place of halogen bulbs, or it requires special certification where beam patterns are checked.

For things to be illegal the laws have to be enforced…

Sadly this is not the case with headlights and most of things in the US… unless youre a minority, then you cant even walk down the street without being worried.

To the best of my knowledge there are no DOT legal LED bulb retrofits. There are some entire housing units but not swapping just the bulb. Whether or not your local law enforcement / inspection scheme checks for this or not is another matter

Theoretically things like that are supposed to be restricted to code but in practice it seems like enforcement ended a couple of decades ago. In the 90s, I knew guys who got tickets for having window tinting which was too dark or off-brand headlights but those are incredibly common now, and it appears that DMVs stopped checking for them at inspections and the police ignore it unless they’re looking for an excuse to search the car. If you’re a white guy in a vehicle which doesn’t radiate poverty, you’re probably more likely to get hit by lightning than stopped.

The policy is probably the de facto assumption that driving is a right: the United States has been rebuilt around the need to drive everywhere and the entire system tends to implicitly assume that anything which would impede someone from driving is unconscionable unless you get to the point of a serious collision or fatality.

> DMVs stopped checking for them at inspections

The vast majority of states don't even have safety inspections, and some have recently discontinued them.

Yeah, it’s just wild to me that anyone can say that’s how you save money. Each serious accident costs more than a couple of full-time DMV employees.

It's not for the government to save money, it's to make transportation affordable for poor people. Some of the states that require inspections do it for almost free, because they delegate the task to private mechanics to do, and they charge for it.

It’s been explicitly billed as a cost savings in a few places I’ve lived (nothing is easier for a politician than bashing the DMV without mentioning that the parts voters don’t like are ensured by your legislative decisions) but if access to the poor is essential, driving is already so heavily subsidized that we could have some kind of assistance program. Most of the people benefiting from lax enforcement are not poor - those luxury trucks and tricked out cars are a middle-class hobby - and the resulting injuries aren’t free to treat.

Ehh, I feel like if I go to a poor neighborhood and I see a lot more minor inspection issues than I see lifted trucks in suburban areas. Rust perforation, bulbs out, bald tires, worn bushings, bad shocks, missing panels, etc.

This is the collective genius of everyone driving around looking at their phones. The government realizes that worrying about vehicles’ mechanical state is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

I mean, we’re a big country, we can do both. There’s also a strong correlation between people who are unsafe in one dimension making bad choices in others so things which are easy to enforce would be useful for re-establishing the idea that use of public roads is governed by laws.

"The policy is probably the de facto assumption that driving is a right: the United States has been rebuilt around the need to drive everywhere and the entire system tends to implicitly assume that anything which would impede someone from driving is unconscionable unless you get to the point of a serious collision or fatality."

They take away driver licenses all the time in the US though. DUIs being the most notable, but even getting enough tickets can result in losing your license, or having it suspended. I know at least a dozen people who lost their license at some point.

Auto repair stores sell a lot of 'offroad use only' equipment that people use on the roads. There's no effective enforcement for proper headlights. You're unlikely to be stopped because your lights are too bright or pourly aimed. Many (most?) states don't do a periodic safety inspection, and if they did, you could swap in stock headlamps for the day and then back to your super bright things.

> you could swap in stock headlamps for the day and then back to your super bright things.

That's why it is penalized by driving license cancellation in some countries. And people do get stopped for too bright headlights, because it's so easy to notice and check.

And most people who lift their trucks don't angle the headlights to downward compensate.

However, the lift is done to compensate for something else.

why can’t Hckrnews have a laugh react

It’s because headlamp housings are really expensive at like $500-$2,000 for mostly plastic.

So someone just trying to make it easier to see at night cheaps out and spends a fraction for a LED bulb replacement for a few hundies, tops.

You can buy brighter halogens but they burn out much faster.

I personally suggest everyone save up for the housing and do it proper if you’re gonna do anything. At least try replacing your current halogens first because they do dim over time.

Plus halogens melt snow with all that waste heat :)

> when they're on towering pickups and SUVs. I suspect there's no good way to angle the beams on those to allow their drivers to see the road

This is one of the main reason why I hate trucks. Their "I will walk on your face" makes their high mounted lights right at the level of my normal-sized car's rear view mirrors. When approached from the rear, this is blinding enough that I can't tell the difference between a truck and someone with full beams on. Same goes when crossing them. If it's raining or foggy, those new white lights are outright dangerous.

I'm wondering if they could simply mount them lower so that it's at a normal size car.

>I'm wondering if they could simply mount them lower so that it's at a normal size car.

They certainly could, but they're not going to because that's not the look that truck buyers want. They want to look and be intimidating.

Probably makes things worse but I've taken to shining my high beams back at those blinding white LED headlights. I need something to act as a photonic barrier just so I don't drive myself off the road some nights; there aren't too many street lights in my area so my eyes will be conditioned for relative darkness and then all of the sudden somebody comes barreling around a curve with their 6000 lumen tactical blinder headlights. My headlights are just old halogens so I barely stand a chance. I doubt my high beams even pierce through their LED headlights, to be honest. Those things need a dimmer switch.

Passing other cars with headlights has always been uncomfortable if you look at them. Trucks especially, if you’re in a car.

The trick is to briefly direct your gaze toward the right edge of your lane rather than the center, while you pass. You won’t be blinded that way.

> I need something to act as a photonic barrier just so I don't drive myself off the road some nights

> I doubt my high beams even pierce through their LED headlights, to be honest.

I don’t think this is how light works.

Pretty sure it is, but maybe you can tell me how I'm wrong. It's by these very principles that people into tactical guns would choose a tactical flashlight for their weapon. The higher the lumens, and more focused the beam, the less likely an assailant's tactical light will shine through yours. It's maybe not using some physics verbiage correctly, but it is basically how light works in practice. I'm confident that I'm at least correct enough to get actual concepts across in a layman's dialect, so perhaps you can correct anything I said that was accidentally misleading.

This is an experiment simple enough that you can do at your place to observe that this is wrong.

I would highly suggest you conduct the same experiment at home, as you said it's quite easy to put together the test environment. Though you can also just google "photonic barrier" and read about it without the experiment. Again, maybe I'm not using proper word choices for things, so someone with a stronger physics background looking at my words through a pedantic lens might find issues with them, which is fair. But basically, if someone shines a light at you, and you shine a light back at them, you are blinded if they hold a significantly stronger light source. You are not blinded if you are holding a significantly stronger light source. And there's an array of in-between states depending on the exact light output of each. This phenomena is referred to as a "photonic barrier." Please show a scientific study or anything that refutes this, because looking around, I find nothing. A large group of people with actual experience running these experiments all had the same observation about photonic barriers, and you just saying "do the experiment at home" doesn't negate them or their observations at all. But perhaps you're on the verge of a break through if you know something we all don't. And I'll go so far as to say that it's possible that you do, but so far my observations have been the same as theirs. In my opinion, that puts the onus on you, not me, to make your case.

Photonic barrier doesn't seem to be a widely standardized or accepted term. The closest to what you're referring to seems to be something to attenuate effect of light on night vision equipment.

But back on topic: light cannot block light. First result on google. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/456409/can-a-lig.... Though I'll concede you a point in that, if their pupils are contracted more because they're using a brighter source, then the impact of your beam on them will be lower than theirs on you. That being said, I'd wager to say that the difference would probably be marginal, given that we're talking about light reflected at night (which would leave you with a pretty big dilation in both LED and halogen) vs. looking directly at a light source.

It's baffling even the police don't care enough to enforce this.

They need equipment that makes objective measurements. Noise tickets and tint tickets are rarely issued anymore due to the social context of those most likely to attract such tickets. Police must use noise meters deployed at a standard distance from the source to issue tickets. That a vehicle's exhaust or radio is annoying isn't enough in the current environment. Same for tint, where a piece of equipment is required to determine a vehicle's light passthrough on its tinted windows. All of this equipment exists and most police have access to it but few want to bother with the hassle and the current social context even with objective measures. Headlights are just another one of these issues where being proactive creates too many troubles. They let the insurance companies fight it out in court over if an accident was caused by improper equipment.

The last part of your argument makes no sense. Even from a cynical view, it makes no sense for the police to condone something that inhibits their own operations by blinding them with light.

You can’t measure brightness objectively? You are right, though, about “social context”. If glaring headlights becomes a black-coded thing, the problem will get solved.

Did we read the same comment? The one I read posits that those are the problems that don’t get solved.

I was being flippant. Of course, I know that if superbright headlamps were identified as belonging to another "social context", that wouldn't solve the problem. It'd just lead to selective enforcement, the "right" people being let off with a warning, etc.

Again, is that what you see is happening with tinted windows and loud cars? We must live on different planets because the only thing I see happening with that is a whole lot of nothing. People just drive with tinted windows and loud cars, nothing happens, and the annoying/harmful circumstances of this just continue indefinitely.

True, because it's a characteristic of the privileged now. We both seem to agree that these laws are poorly enforced, but I'm saying that a bunch of these laws, whether headlights or tints, are not for safety but a pretext to stop people who weren't in a privileged class.

The whole point of the annual inspection the state makes me get is shit like window tints, and that's where it should be checked. I don't have a ready solution for aftermarket headlights (especially as I support right to repair), but a start would be regulating what the manufacturers do so it's not a safety issue by default.

In what way is it a characteristic of the privileged to use incorrectly aimed white/blue headlights, or to drive a loud car? There would be some small amount of argument for having tinted windows but in general fixing those things (removing them) costs money, not the other way around.

The problem is too far gone at this point to stop it via random stops. That would have been a good thing to do about 6 years ago. At this point the only solution is recalls and manufacturer regulation.

>but few want to bother with the hassle and the current social context even with objective measures

Did I just read what I think I read?

I’ve had police cruisers (Escalade/SUV) high-beam me from the oncoming lane and blind me for the last 50 feet because they didn’t like my (factory stock) low beams. It’s that normalized of a thing / that little of an issue here.

The police don’t enforce any traffic laws outside small town speedtrap, USA.

I mentioned this in another thread, but why can't we regulate headlight height? Why do SUVs and pickups trucks have to have headlights that are higher than buses and real trucks?

You could- That’s the case in Europe. But ‘Murica = Freedom so no interest to regulate.

Headlights are regulated between 24 and 54 inches in Texas.

54 inches is taller than the peak of the roof on a lot of small cars, to say nothing of the trunk lid.

Yeah, the brightness needs to be regulated. We’re all going to go night blind at this rate.

Is it legal to mount parabolic mirrors on the front of your car?

The good news is that its now legal for the US to have LED Matrix headlights. The new Model 3 has this (among others). You get the brightness of the headlights but it blocks only the area where oncoming cars can see it.

Also, for what you said to make sense you have to do better than speculating that brighter headlights allowing people to see further is outweighed by them causing glare for oncoming drivers. It's entirely possible this is a good safety tradeoff.

What about oncoming cyclists?

Pedestrians?

Lazy response. No reason that can't happen too. I don't know which systems support that. Research it and report back!

pedestrians and bikes need to be seen so they need to have light shine on them

that was my first thought too.

It's a whole different ballgame having a pedestrian blinded vs having a driver blinded. I'm not saying it's good for a pedestrian, but we have to consider the inherent risk of that vs t hem not being seen at all because the light gives no opportunity to reflect off of them.

I’ve researched it and I’m reporting back.

The answer is that the technology is advertised as not dazzling oncoming drivers only.

Further, the little explanation of the technology I could find stated it worked by detecting headlights and taillights of cars.

The remaining area will be lit with modern high-intensity beam.

Thus, I conclude that the pedestrians and cyclists will be blinded.

What do you suggest we do? Make the headlights dimmer? The current regulations seem to allow between 500-3000 candelas.

I suggest we make headlights be no higher off the ground than 2' and adjusted downwards. If your vehicle is so tall that your lights are under the grill, that's on you. People don't need to be blinded by bright white lights at eye level.

I haven't done a whole lot of research, but this [0] says

> matrix headlights, consist of numerous small LED elements and mirrors that can control a light beam in complex ways. This allows the lights to be more precisely aimed, illuminating what the driver needs to see without blinding other motorists, pedestrians, or cyclists.

[0] https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1135084_us-finally-allow...

> Thus, I conclude that the pedestrians and cyclists will be blinded.

That matches my lived experience in the UK. Not that every driver will dip for pedestrians, but matrix ones certainly don't

People playing with pogo sticks in the road?

That does sound like an improvement.

Still, from a very cursory bit of reading it seems that these are designed to detect other vehicle headlights only. How about pedestrians and cyclists (or even motorcyclists)? I'm really not convinced that these sorts of technical solutions are the best way to address the problem (in the same way that forward and reverse cameras - while helpful - aren't a proper solution to good old fashioned line of sight).

The only way to block line of sight is to erect a wall in the middle of the road so I'm not sure what you want. Pointing the lights is a tradeoff between seeing in front of you and shining the light on other people who are in front of you.

There's no reason matrix headlights can't block light for any reason, the Teslas and other ADAS systems see bikers and pedestrians so I don't see why that wouldn't be possible.

From their demonstration videos, I don’t think Tesla has proven particularly adept at detecting pedestrians.

And I don’t know that they’ve shown this for pedestrians on the pedestrian path, at distance, at night.

Tesla's can "see" humans, cyclists, cars, etc, independent of the headlights.

It's possible that this awareness is what's used as input for the matrix headlights. Either entirely, or in coordination with detecting oncoming headlights.

I'm confused about your mention of technical solutions. What would a non-technical solution look like?

I don't think it is that smart - matrix headlamps have been around for ages in "dumb" (albeit luxury) cars for years and years in europe

And they are awful, a significant number do not detect my (old) car, let alone pedestrians, cyclists and horses

> What would a non-technical solution look like?

Something like ensuring that headlights are lower. I'm not against technical improvements, but I think that simple, less error-prone improvements should be given higher priority.

If the headlights can see you, you can see the headlights.

I have used automatic highbeams in a toyota and they don’t work. They will think a sign reflected by the headlights is another car and will cut out. Just what you need to happen when you see that deer warning sign on a dark road…

I'm not talking about automatic highbeams.

But if they block for oncoming cars then they probably have the same or similar detector systems as the toyota unit I demoed.

They don't work. All the time I see what looks like flashing as the "clever" automatic headlight tries to work out if I'm there or not. Countless times I've had someone driving behind and hogging the lane to the right of mine and have their full beams shining through my mirrors. Moving into the same lane in front of them causes their headlights to dip, but I shouldn't have to do this (especially because being in that lane is against the highway code).

We live in a very rural area, and the most annoying thing is huge pickup trucks with giant light arrays over the cab or on the grill, especially the ones that just look like a wall of light. The blinding effect is tremendous, and it is doubly dangerous in our area because the deer population have exploded. I don’t know if these are legal or the cops just don’t care, either way people use them with impunity.

I think the use case is supposed to be hunting and camping, but these assholes seem to no blinding everyone around them!

Sounds like you need to install an even brighter one and turn yours on to remind them what it’s like

Photon pressure sufficient to curtail their forward progress..

Fuck it, show em what a Kubelblitz black hole can do to their chrome bumper.

I’ve always thought that we should have a reverse matrix LED headlight: it directs flashing high beam only to incoming cars with flood lights or high beam, while leaving those driving properly unaffected.

We can do this passively with corner cubes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector

This reminded me of a news story:

>A small city in New Zealand plagued by “siren battles” – cars decked out in loudspeakers commonly used in emergency warning systems and often blaring Céline Dion hits – is calling on authorities to step in and end the noise.

>The battles are part of a New Zealand subculture where music enthusiasts cover their cars in up to dozens of industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, then compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/24/porirua-siren-...

"The battles are part of a New Zealand subculture where music enthusiasts cover their cars in up to dozens of industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, then compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds."

Those people ain't "music enthusiasts", they are "noise enthusiasts". Music enthusiasts do not intentionally destroy their ears or those of others.

No, no, not Céline Dion!

Is that what the US military dished out to Noriega in the Panama invasion? No wonder he surrendered! It was alleged to be 'heavy metal', but is there acoustic evidence? I bet Celine would've got faster results.

Because the people who compensate for ??? by buying a humongous mall-crawler truck will totally understand and be sympathetic when having their outrageous "lookit me" type behavior reflected back at them.

AFAIK they're illegal on public roads. So is using fog lights unless there's actually fog.

This is a tricky one to research.

From what I can tell (in the USA) it's not necessarily illegal to drive with the fog lights on at all times. The main requirement for all headlights anywhere is that they're positioned and aimed correctly.

Specific states or regions may technically have restrictions, but it seems pointless to enforce if it's a stock vehicle that meets the requirements. High beams are way worse than the typical fog lights. I don't think most people should have to worry about their fog lights unless they're aftermarket.

Reminds me of those signs that say "no engine braking". They're specifically referring to jake brakes on commercial vehicles, not dropping a gear on a normal car or truck.

If you're going down a long incline, trucks should use jake brakes. It sucks being behind truckers who only use brakes and the thing overheats so much you can smell it --they're the truckers who end up on the runaway ramps.

I think your comment is attracting downvotes because unmuffled engine brakes are loud, and those signs are usually placed when people live near the road and find the noise obnoxious. I think it doesn't apply to trucks where the compression brake has a muffler.

High beams are infinitely more damaging to another driver's vision than fog lamps.

Fogs lamps are worse for the person using them than oncoming traffic. This is due to the way the light is focused. It's directed downwards to avoid the light reflecting straight back into your eyes off the fog or snow. This is what makes them different. However it affects your ability to see far even if you have your high beams on.

I remember reading about this in an article written by a rally driver in ADAC magazine maybe 20 years ago now.

I use my (factory installed) fog lights only when the conditions are bad enough that I need a downward facing light to be able to see the lanes or obstructions. mine turn off if I turn on high beams, which do not have the very close reflections. they make a significant difference in specific circumstances. why I see some people drive with them on under all conditions, I will never know.

I discovered the fog lights on my new-to-me vehicle recently and use the lower ones (the upper ones are burned out and need replacing) at night to illuminate the near road better and make it easier to see and avoid holes in the road.

If we're talking about our own vision rather than another driver's, yes, fog lamps might detract a bit from our night vision. The truth is, if you're using them in an actual fog, your distance vision is fucked anyway, and it's your regular headlights (which do not power off when the fog lamps are on) which are doing the damage to your night vision, since they're focused at eye level and reflecting back. The fog lamps aren't a big worry in that regard.

> I remember reading about this in an article written by a rally driver in ADAC magazine maybe 20 years ago now.

I've seen those arrays of fog lamps installed on rally cars, and I'm not sure what they're about but they're a pretty different paradigm than anything that comes installed by the factory on a passenger car.

Re: rally car lighting

They're not the same light pattern as fog lights (well, not all of them). Some are "pencil" beams that reach far, some are closer to fog beams for close-in. Coverage is the name of the game.

They need them because the goal is to be driving as fast as possible, so you need as much light as you can get onto and down the road.

The reason they're on pods on the hood is because they're removable. They only put them on when needed, because they're very expensive and you don't want them getting damaged when not in use.

Ah, this makes sense. I've heard about the phenomenon of drivers of regular (not rally) cars driving so fast that they outrun the range of the headlights, such that even with perfect reaction time they are not able to stop or react to something on the road ahead. Simply increasing the brightness of factory high-beams must only get you so far.

Rally car lighting systems have more in common with aircraft lights. The landing lights on a 757 are standard GE units with 600w, 28v, bulbs, costing $50, that produce 750k candle power. Narrow beam. As bright as the sun. Wider beamed taxi and runway turnoff lights still use 450w.

ACLs see some use in concert lighting as well. They're not just for aircraft! (and rally cars)

USA is a country of "freedom" where the cops pretty much never, ever enforce such rules, if they do exist.

it seems to depend on state - some are no more than 4 headlights at a time, where fog lights would be main headlights plus fog lights, as opposed to main headlights plus brights.

most laws appear to be based on direction and aim.

Many cars have both daytime running lights and fog lights in the same enclosure. And depending on settings (auto vs manual, etc), the DRLs might stay on at night. And cars vary a lot in configuration. It would take a lot for the police to accurately recognize and ticket people with fog lights on when there's no fog.

That's wild. I wonder if you just have a couple of jerks in your area. I grew up in a rural area and my parents still live out there, and I cannot ever remember someone driving on the road with their light bars on. I used to have one on my jeep. Anyone who has them knows they're being a jerk if they're driving with it on the road.

Judging by this behavior, some others I won’t go into, and local Facebook wars, we have a significant concentration of jerks without a doubt.

In the Rockies you see loads of vehicles with light bars. Never see them lit up on the road. Maybe it comes down to local policing? Cops around here aren’t likely to appreciate non-locals driving with lights on. Could just be culture though.

> Cops around here aren’t likely to appreciate non-locals driving with lights on.

I hope they equally don't appreciate it when locals do the same.

I don’t think the locals are likely to do it. Good way to get everyone in town to know you for being a tool.

That's a better set of locals than the ones around here, then!

Probably in that way alone!

I would like to think so but i saw the same crap driving through the middle of a Denver on I70 recently. I almost had to pull over it was so bright I couldn’t see but no one did anything as I have become accustomed to.

It's super common in the south nowadays. I grew up similarly, and had light bars on my trucks/all my friends did/etc. But we weren't driving around town with them on.

I was gonna mention the exact same thing. Wild times in big trucks. Their wheels and mirrors all stick out to the edge of the lane too.

I find the sales listings on these trucks hilarious tho. They are the ultimate custom McMansions, listed with extremely high premiums for all the custom work, that essentially never sell. If you are in the north a great description to add is “Texas truck” or really any state south of where you are. They also commonly have well over 200k miles. It’s a crazy phenomena.

The funny part is you can punch these truck owners right in the daddy issues just by pulling up next to them in a base model truck with actual dirt in the wheel wells and a ladder rack on. Using a truck to do actual work > aftermarket pageantry and they damn well know it.

Meh. I know blue collar mexicans who save up and get trucks like that because they like it. Some people just like it.

Forgetfreeman isn’t talking about the blue collar Mexicans…

I will say tho, the base model trucks and just about any trucks aren’t made for work anymore. The boxes are like 6ft long as opposed to 10. The tow power on base models isn’t great. Work vehicles today are becoming more and more those vans. Not saying work trucks are obsolete, just they aren’t what they used to be.

You aren't wrong. Those of us with work to do will be significantly better off when fashion moves on to some other type of vehicle.

Light bar money for on road use is misguided money - there isn’t a light solution that can beat night vision systems.

You get an infrared camera and on the screen a coloured bounding box is drawn over each identified pedestrian or animal etc. Green no threat, red sounds an audible alarm so you don’t need to drive looking at the screen to get benefit of it.

It sees things that just cannot be seen by projecting a light source from near you, no matter how bright.

EDIT: see from 2:25 in https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQqCDjxYFVc

Unlike sending engines for cryptographic cyphers across nation state lines, night vision is absolutely one of those things ITAR cares about. And the number of loops holes and exemptions Audi had to apply for made the project financially unprofitable to the point of moving to always on high beam DLP style headlights.

Retrofitting one system in my car which had the option code was a yak shave.

Most automotive systems get by this by limiting night vision to 8fps(!). Similar to how GPS was limited to 100m accuracy in the first civilian models.

What blows my mind is one can get Chinese models off Taobao with 60fps for 1/10th the price of US products like FLIR.

That last part would indicate that the restrictions are utterly moronic if one were to reason. At the very least they need to be relaxed so technology that's readily available to end consumers worldwide isn't restricted.

Yes and no.

A benefit of those same restrictions means TSMC is building foundries in the US for a change.

GaAs sensors are awesome. Combine those chips with ML optimized compute on a silicon interposer and drone warfare gets a hockey stick in adoption.

As civilians we get functional self driving cars via trickle down.

ITAR isn't, or shouldn't be about economic protectionism; it's for restricting the flow of weapons of war.

If the US government wants to encourage domestic chip production, it has other ways to incentivize that.

ITAR blocks export, not import. It has nothing to do with TSMC building fabs here. $50B in incentives might have something to do with that.

And like sister comment says, ITAR is not about industrial or economic policy. It’s about maintaining a qualitative edge in weaponry. How is there a qualitative edge when you can buy the restricted components freely from China?

Just noticed the other comment on GP saying they’re restricted through a different list (EAR). It serves the same purpose so I’m leaving my response as is.

https://youtu.be/UAeJHAFjwPM

There are three types of night vision, and the consumer grade active illumination stuff using infrared light is covered by EAR (Department of Commerce’s Export Administration Regulations) instead of ITAR (which is still significant, but less strict). Which doesn't detract from your point, which is that night vision is hamstrung by regulations. With all the advances in technology, the consumer grade stuff should really be more accessible because it would save lives if drivers could see better in the dark.

Just FYI you can embed a timestamp in youtube url's. For your example, note the end of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=kQqCDjxYFVc&t=2m...

That's amazing, if they could project this on a HUD you'd have solved the problem basically.

> You get an infrared camera and on the screen a coloured bounding box is drawn over each identified pedestrian or animal etc.

This might be a good use for that new transparent TV technology.. Infared HUD in 4K.

The main issue with huge pickups is that the headlights are so high compared to other cars that aiming them down is less useful than cars.

> cops just don’t care

ding ding ding. Not much revenue there, and it's not protecting rich people's wealth, so...

I’m sure more funding will solve the issue

I was blinded to the point of nearly driving off the road by one of these over the holidays here in rural Iowa. It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered someone actually using the light bar at night while driving 60mph down the road. To say that I couldn’t see anything at all is an understatement. I tried to keep my eyes on the road, look down and to the right to avoid the lights, but the closer it got the more my field of view it took up. I genuinely thought he was going to hit us because I couldn’t tell where the truck was at or where my car was at, it was like a train coming down a tunnel.

Those are for navigating 4x4 trails in the dark, and are illegal to use on public roads. Where I live many vehicles have them, but I have never once seen them used on a public road.

What I hate most are the misaligned retro fits. But honestly I completely agree with you.

The retrofits (probably completely unapproved chinese-made garbage purchased on Amazon) are awful, but the stock LED lighting on newer cars is too bright as well. Even if it's normally directed down, if you're approaching a car as it crests a hill you'll get a dazzling blinding flash. Older halogen headlights don't do this.

Some places also require that bright headlights are auto-leveling to mitigate this. But many headlights in the US are fixed, and don't move.

More car crashes, more broken lights - more sales for white head lights! Profit!

In the early-2010s I was driving a budget car from 1995 (a ford escort). When white LEDs became the norm, I’d often be in the situation of trying to drive into the shadow cast by my car from the headlights of the other car.

I’m still shocked that regulations haven’t put lower limits on headlight brightness.

> Since then, the number of severe crashes has climbed. It is hard to say exactly why.

I (unfortunately) have been doing a lot of driving on highways at night during the last four years. There is a noticeable trend in people watching video while driving. It is really obvious at night. This has expected outcomes.

Exactly, even a Tesla doesn't drive worse than a driver on social media.

I was sitting at a stoplight and looked over at the car next door and saw there was some video playing on the dashboard in front of the instrument cluster. I thought it was one of those completely digital dashboards that was doing some kind of animation, but the dude just propped his cell phone in front of it and was watching some kind of content.

At least he was stopped. I've seen people watching Netflix on their phones on a mount or something while driving. Unbelievable.

This is a regulatory issue. There are far better lighting used in EU and from the same auto manufacturers. They have pushed for these in the US but the regulations are slow.

Right now, emergency vehicles seem to be in some competition to get the most and brightest lights on them. It's near impossible to see while driving past them.

And yes, you should be driving past them slowly, but with everyone slowing down at once, that presents its own problem of trying to avoid slow downs and merges while being blinded by the emergency vehicles.

Or being blinded by them in a parking lot.

Lately, I've noticed a few turning from flashing into solid light, which is somewhat better.

I worked in the industry recently, with most leading carriers on how they generate LTVs for potential customers from expected frequency, severity, and lifetime.

During COVID shutdowns, there was a massive drop in frequency (obviously, hardly anyone was driving) but a significant uptick in severity. This was attributed to higher speeds with emptier roads.

After re-opening, frequency is significantly higher per driver than before. So is severity. Everyone I talked to in the industry was convinced this was due to loss of skill during shutdown as well as people driving much more aggressively. This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.

I find it strange that this isn't discussed in the article when it's a pretty widely-held belief in the industry.

I dont know. I only drive once every three months or so. and every once in a while Ill go on a huge roadtrip across the country. I have never noticed any loss in driving skill.

Assuming you are talking about a loss in your own skills, isn’t this exactly what the OP is describing? If people perceived a change in their own abilities, the problem would likely not exist.

This, and perhaps parent's driving skill has just been poor for a very long time now. No drop, just sitting at the bottom.

> This, and perhaps parent's driving skill has just been poor for a very long time now. No drop, just sitting at the bottom.

I'm not trying to be mean, but the adage in poker of spotting the fool at the table here applies. And as a person who rides bicycles, motorcycles as well as drives cars, and has driven in the EU with much stricter driving requirements I'd say there has been a massive drop in aptitude over all.

So much so that I just want to live a life that allows me to be car-free now. EVs are nice, but having everything I want within walking distance is much more preferable.

> EVs are nice, but having everything I want within walking distance is much more preferable.

Come back to Europe.. ;-)

that's not been my experience, maybe you just live amongst morons?

Its a car. You turn the wheel and press the two buttons.

I've beaten spelunky 1, and 2. Im also sporty and coordinated. I know what good motor skills look and feel like, and what being bad at something feels like.

If there is a suspicion of skill loss in the population, i dont know why so many people in this thread would blindly accept that. We should all put our good boy skeptic scientist hats on.

Are the changes in chrash severity and frequency even for all types of people? Doubtful. In what age ranges and occupations are the biggest changes in.

"People crash more now because sudden population wide skill loss" doesnt even pass the basic sanity test. Im gonna need some evidence.

> Its a car. You turn the wheel and press the two buttons.

Given that summary, I'm not surprised that you cannot detect any degradation in your driving skill during a period of not practicing.

I don't think it's degradation any more than my skills at golf or basketball degrade in the 6 months between times I play either of them. I'm the baseline level of good enough that I'm competent, but I definitely don't have the skills of someone who practices either daily.

Right, and you dont have to be a pro stunt driver to make it to work every day without dying. I honestly dont know what hes getting at.

Actually I think most people are significantly safer driving in a way that completely removes opportunity for skill expression. Waiting for other drivers, going normal speeds, not doing something else while driving, etc. Driving should be pretty unskillfull and boring if safe.

> definitely don't have the skills of someone who practices either daily

And that is exactly the premise of one proposed mechanism by which serious accident rates (and insured losses) may have increased during a period when a great many people who previously practiced something daily then did not do so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39247101

We get the concept, theres just no given evidence and it doesnt pass the smell test. I havent ridden a bike in years i bet im exactly as "skilled" as the last time i was on it. Driving is just not a skill you get worse at if you dont do it for two years. Ive done it, and felt no difference.

> I havent ridden a bike in years i bet im exactly as "skilled" as the last time i was on it.

I doubt that but the question is whether or not you're competent enough to ride a bike and how quickly can you get back to that level of skill.

We all know the answer is that it wouldn't take long at all, it's literally why the phrase "just like riding a bike" exists.

What do you mean you doubt that. Thats obnoxious. this is simply a fact. Ive got a bike downstairs I could go ride it, one handed, no handed, pop a wheelie just like 15 years ago. My dad is in his fifties and i bet the same applies for him but hed complain about his wrists.

If the skill level takes ten seconds to reachieve I dont really consider that skill loss. Same for driving. Americans spend an insane amount of time driving, tens of thousands of hours from a young age. This is just not a skill that obviously weakens in any meaningful way if you dont do it for a year.

I need hard evidence, not just your unreasonable contrarianism.

I mean, maybe you're just better at it, but I was a competitive mountain biker 10+ years ago and the last time I tried to ride a bike a couple years ago, if I'd taken my hands off the handlebars I probably would have crashed in seconds.

We're all just asserting anecdotes here about how easy/hard things are. I tend to agree that the act of driving a car isn't so hard that people forgot how to physically drive over the pandemic. What I think is the much more likely thing that changed is the habits of awareness of other drivers. The instincts of which corners have low visibility or your general sense of how fast people drive on various roads. Driving is ultimately a social activity in some way. Most people who get in accidents aren't just failing to "hit the right button" on their car, they're trying to drive well and avoid something unexpected.

It seems entirely reasonable to me that some number of people kept driving daily during the pandemic on mostly empty roads with mostly absent rules enforcement and picked up some bad habits. Maybe that's speeding, or running red lights, or being on their phone while driving because there's less risk of running into another car. Then as people who didn't do that started driving again, their memories from 6-18 months before didn't match the current driving culture any more. Different people adapted in different ways, but the bounds of what's "normal" has changed somewhat.

I don't think I'm worse at physically driving now, but I have definitely been surprised by drivers running red lights or being overly deferential to cross traffic a fair bit in the last couple years. I've adapted, but I'm definitely driving with a different mindset now than I used to.

could be phone use, could be drugs, we dont know but i guess im wrong while skeptically agnostic about the given assumed cause of the issue despite lack of evidence. How about aliens. How about ghosts. I think ghosts have been crashing peoples cars.

What that sounds implausable to you? Seems unlikely huh? You require hard evidence?

How dare you disagree with me im a pro ghost watcher for ten years.

Not convinced? Sounds ridiculous. Exactly. Youre not gonna convince me people lose driving skill over a year. You can speculate to infinity. We need real evidence. If you dont have it, weve got nothing.

only the young are arrogant enough to think they can go years without practicing a skill and never lose any edge.

I don't really care what you claim, it's not true.

Thats vague and comes off condescending, and also just doesnt make any sense. Care to elaborate?

Isn't that just reflecting that you have the exact amount of skill of someone who drives every 3 months? What OP is talking about is people who likely drove for an hour or more every day suddenly barely driving more than a couple times a week for a year or more, and are now back to driving daily. That's completely different from just not driving much all the time.

I've noticed truck drivers in particular have gotten much worse. They used to be overall very good. For the last 5 years or so, noticeably worse.

Everyone else was already bad.

I'd like to see slow trucks drive in the right lane rather than the left lane, and I'd like them to stay within the lane lines whenever possible rather than randomly drifting across them.

Stupid question, but to this day I can't get the idea of overtaking. Any given stretch of the road has a speed limit. That limit is well below the maximum capability of almost any car on the road. From the POV of traffic regulations, you'd expect drivers on either lane to drive at that limit. What is, then, the point of overtaking? The cars are swapping places back and forth, but otherwise are (supposed to be) moving at the same speed. Is it a way for some to work around speed limits (by always overtaking forward, never being overtaken), or just a pointless dance to keep drivers from being bored and falling asleep behind the wheel?

Drivers are supposed to keep right (outside/slower lanes) except to pass. That's the law in WA state and probably in most parts of the country. As far as I know it's also the law in other countries too; offhand on the Autobon.

In theory, the lanes further left should be at about the speed limit and the lanes to the right could be for slower long haul or dangerous loads driving, such as large and heavy trucks which might have a lower speed limit on some sections of road. In practice, please keep right except to pass and don't cause a traffic hazard trying to enforce slowness upon speeders with a rolling roadblock.

Yeah one wishes it would actually work like that.

Unfortunately there’s many drivers that drive below the (already low) speed limits.

Add to that curvy road and it becomes much worse (you can drive much closer to the limit by accelerating and braking dynamically).

I would conceed that keeping drivers awake is understated, though, the speed limits are too slow for modern cars. I comfortably do 15 mph over (freeway driving when road conditions support, I dont speed on surface streets), and id do 20-25 if it didnt move the penalty to jailtime.

I do this to save time, it cuts ~25% from my commute. My only recommendations are that slow traffic keep right (which is still me, traffic moves fast here), and be mindful of the flow of traffic. The most dangerous aspect of speeding is the speed limit, some people are inclined to follow the speed limit whatever it is, and become a serious hazzard when people are trying to cut through traffic at twice (or faster) that speed.

Where do you live that speed limits are only 45mph on freeways?

Speed limits are 55, sorry, sometimes I have a case of shiftwork brain. Northern virginia, if you watch those "idiots in cars videos" then youve seen these roads.

Overtaking doesn't happen as much on long haul stretches of highway, in accordance with what you'd assume. Mostly it's either passing a truck that's going under the limit, or because a truck is slower going up an incline. Once you're in a more occupied area though, a lot of overtaking is people going at the speed limit passing local traffic that's merging on/off the highway at lower speeds.

80% of drivers think they are safer than the average driver

As in outsider of the auto industry this sounds like a classic blame-the-customer attitude that exists in many industries. The auto industry attributes the increase of severity and frequency of auto accidents to an external party so they share zero liability.

That doesn't seem like it follows though. Most people are driving the same car they were driving in 2019. It's not like the auto industry went and changed everyone's cars and repaved the roads or something. If this was some long term trend, then sure, easier to see how you could explain it with changes in headlights or ride height or some other factor of how cars are designed.

A dramatic increase in amount and severity of accidents after a major world-impacting event like the pandemic seems like exactly the sort of thing that would make sense to be some change in the way people drive. This isn't "Oh, the users just hate the new Slack design. What idiots." For 90+ percent of the US, nothing has changed about the cars or roads in the last 4 years any more than the 4 years before that, and yet the outcomes of driving have changed.

How do you imagine the auto insurance industry is driving this change in customer behavior and outcomes? I cannot imagine any way in which it's the fault of the insurers, but I know that this is merely a failure of my imagination.

Bear in mind that the auto insurance industry is quite distinct from the auto manufacturing industry.

Unfortunately for you physics allows for just such a scenario. Will go with the science versus confirmation bias of some rando

I doubt the auto industry is to blame for increases in crashes, which seems to be the implication of your comment.

Fair point, but how did cars change during the pandemic?

Due to electrification, I imagine the average weight of a new car is increasing, which causes more damage. Previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.

Due to increasingly pedestrian-unfriendly designs, like "grr I'm a bad boy" grills on trucks, crashes becomes more damaging to what they crash into. More, previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.

The purported timeline is: Pandemic hits, people stop driving, incidents falls drastically. Pandemic stops, people starts driving again, but incidents and severity increase drastically compared to pre pandemic.

The companies are saying internally "people forgot how to drive properly", which granted, sounds weird. But it also sounds weird that people upgraded their cars, while not driving them, or that there was a huge spike in car sales as people upgraded post pandemic.

Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet [1]

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALSA

>I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.

Well, first of all it doesn't need to be what any person is convinced is "large", it just needs to be nonzero. Second of all, it's not about customers, it's about manufacturers. As your own data indicates[0], a nonzero number of people replaced their car during that time period, just like in every other time period. If more people choose electric than did decades ago, there will be more electric cars than decades ago. And there are[1]! Electrification is increasing, therefore weight is increasing, therefore crash severity is increasing.

So the timeline is, each year, more and more people are buying electric cars, and it looks like severity increased, too. Do we have data on people's ability to drive over time? Maybe, but I haven't seen it, so that's what seems unconvincing so far. We definitely have data on vehicle weight over time, though.

[0]: "Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet" – by my viewing of the data, it shows that a lot of consumers, in fact, went out and bought a car during that period. Millions did, tens of millions even, and it only takes a single car difference to affect the population average.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/charging-into-the-fut...

> This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.

I understand you work in the insurance Industry, but I worked in the auto Industry before and after COVID and just went through 2 total loss claims with my insurance and handled a lot of these third party warranty policies for my customers and think I have a more nuanced perspective than your own as mine is multi-dimensional.

I can tell you that while it's true people may be driving more aggressively, not after but during COVID as police weren't pulling people as frequently due to fear of contamination coupled with emptier streets, but the real reason claims are being declared a total loss (resulting in higher costs) is exactly because of the disruption in the supply chain and the shortage of parts kept in inventory for even 5 year old vehicles.

After dieselgate, Mitsubishi US was absorbed by Nissan US, who has been undergoing a great deal of pain since the ousting of Carlos Ghosn who left it in economic shambles with bad financing policies that resulted in lots of cost cuts during and many more after the Renault feud. Trying to get parts for a 2017 Mitsubishi after 2020 in the US was futile as the two dealerships merged together.

It was often the case that you were better off purchasing parts from Hyundai for shared platforms as getting them from Japan were difficult if not impossible as they had severe COVID restrictions and the plants stopped and the catalogs/inventory seemingly vanished in a matter of months during the first year of COVID.

I have had many battles with submitting adjusted insurance claims for service/parts that made me think the burden of a owning an imperfect new car was best solved by selling it back to the dealership at the inflated offer they were paying back then and getting a 'good enough' used car from us or elsewhere given how much time was being wasted dealing with these policies. One customer I inherited had a 3 year old VW CC was using our loaner for over 6 months waiting for an ECU and a harness which was covered by parts and labour by VW, and this was in 2023!

My Italian motorcycle was broken into and it's main wiring loom was ripped apart in the process, and declared a total loss: the cost to repair and replace was projected to be about $1500, which is reasonable but the problem there was over a 2 year waiting list and it was unlikely to ever be found since the part was made by Ducati before it was absorbed by VW Audi Group and was impossible to be found in even the HQ in Bologna according to owners because demand for it was low as it was known to be a defective part and best to solve by swapping out with parts from more widely available Suzuki models but meant changing everything from the stator onward to work reliably which easily tripled the initial estimate. Add to the fact that this bike had low sales figures outside of Italy and I took the settlement offer and gave up on ever owning one again.

The same thing happened to my much less rare Japanese motorcycle, which was much older and less expensive but the same thing occurred: deemed fixable but no parts can be found so is declared a total loss.

My insurance rates just went up by 25% 2 months ago, despite them not having gone up during these two events (over 6 months ago and months after my policy renewal) or even after 2 tickets several years back as I have an otherwise clean record and I'm beyond the risk age.

The response given to me by my insurer was that 'everything is going up' and that servicing my policy was naturally also subject to a price increase but was not a direct result of the aforementioned reasons which makes me think that in fact no... insurance in the US is not too cheap but incredibly convoluted and subject to arbitrary price increases.

> I understand you work in the insurance Industry, but I worked in the auto Industry before and after COVID and just went through 2 total loss claims with my insurance and handled a lot of these third party warranty policies for my customers and think I have a more nuanced perspective than your own as mine is multi-dimensional.

I'm a dilettante who passes through industries for a few years at a time, so I have no doubt your perspective is more nuanced! I may have understated how much impact that supply chain issues are, I'm going through a similar issue.

Just anecdata, it really seems like drivers are significantly worse after COVID than before. Not just on main roads but on side streets and parking lots. I can't say if it's due to driving less during shutdowns or a confluence of other issues but people seem to drive shockingly worse.

Smartphone use. App use while driving, wearing airpods and the like, more vehicles with monitors, more integration between phone apps and car entertainment systems to fiddle around with?

I have defintely seen private drivers watching tiktok on the highway, and ride share drivers either trying to manage jobs across multiple smartphones, or spending their shift in a discord/group call with some friends.

It's this plus a distinct lack of enforcement.

I've driven in 3 major cities over the last decade (LA, SF, Seattle) and in all of them the local police departments have been ignoring a lot of traffic infractions that they would have pulled people over for before. The shift seemed to happen after there was that "Defund the Police" call and the BLM protests.

> The shift seemed to happen after there was that "Defund the Police" call and the BLM protests.

No surprise there, it's not the first time police unions have decided to just not enforce any laws at all to get politicians to do what they want.

As much as I would want, I wouldn't place all the blame on the police. Just here in Virginia, we are struggling with:

https://www.moheblegal.com/blog/2021/08/new-va-law-prohibits...

> In March 2021, a new Virginia law went into effect that prohibits law enforcement officers from making traffic stops for certain minor offenses.

This law prohibits police from stopping you if you are e.g. missing a taillight or a brake light, which for me feels insane.

There are similar things in DC/MD as far as I can recall

The same thing happened in Minneapolis, along with this:

‘The City Attorney’s Office will stop prosecuting tickets for driving after suspension when the only basis for the suspension was a failure to pay fines or fees and there was no accident or other egregious driving behavior that would impact public safety.’”

As someone who only drives in Minneapolis every few months the change that happened around 2020 was ridiculous. I regularly saw cars doing well over 100 in the city when I had never seen that before.

Disagree. BLM caused the politicians to throw the police under the bus before it was determined if they were actually in the wrong or not. Of course the police are going to be more interested in avoiding possible incidents and less interested in going after trouble.

BLM got what it "wanted"--there's a definite drop in police shootings where they were active. But it was a cat's paw result: The increase in criminal black deaths was far greater than the decrease in police black deaths.

Yeah Seattle I see so many people driving without plates now. Lack of enforcement is a real issue. They are simply not enough police as they all quit after the Riots

> Smartphone use. App use while driving, wearing airpods and the like, more vehicles with monitors, more integration between phone apps and car entertainment systems to fiddle around with?

These are all likely factors which is why I can't just claim everyone forgot how to drive during COVID shutdowns. At the same time the shocking incompetence I've seen (anecdata) the past year or two haven't seemed to involve people fiddling with distractions but just being hyper aggressive shitheads.

I just wish that vehicles - especially large ones - would stay within the lane lines unless they are actively changing lanes.

I've also noticed many cars with tinted windshields and front seat windows, which probably reduces visibility.

I understand why they might do it though given the blinding LED headlights. ;-)

Is this present in other countries? You would expect it to be so if it's partially the result of lockdowns as plenty of other countries had those.

I don't feel there has been a difference where I live in Europe.

And my personal experience is that the driving culture in the US (east coast) is more aggressive to start with (except, maybe, sparsely populated remote areas).

This is purely anecdotal, but driver quality seemed to go down during the BLM protests of 2020. Kind of like the “f** the police” was being applied to traffic enforcement.

Do you know if the timing was significant? Did anything significant happen with driving stats happen in June of 2020?

A global pandemic and less driving? I'm not sure why you'd need to pick out BLM in any way here

Because, in my purely anecdotal experience, drivers got much much worse in early June of 2020.

Not April 2020. Not July 2020. June (and very late May) of 2020.

Part of the issue was that lots of roads were blocked. Both protestors and police were blocking roads. Large portions of downtown were shut down. Bus services were mostly canceled. And the police were very very stretched thin.

So there are reasons other than “attitude” why these protests might be affecting traffic.

But it was shocking how bad drivers got so quickly. It didn’t seem gradual.

Huge missing variable is cognitive impairment from covid. It may affect up to ~20-30% of people several months after getting it [1][2][3], but whatever the exact rate, it's an amount that is orders of magnitude more than the accident rate.

"The most frequent symptoms seem to affect memory, attention, and concentration" [4].

We generally suck at assessing our level of impairment (see drunk drivers), so if we're used to driving a certain way and no longer have the capacity to do so safely, eventually something's going to happen to some of us.

Given the magnitude of ongoing covid infections and the still very low per capita accident rate, this could be the single best explanation of an uptick in accidents. It's not a surprise it's overlooked though, as statistically we don't really track cognitive abilities except in education contexts and individually we tend to downplay or ignore any changes in how we think. Cognition is largely invisible as a measure.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/upshot/long-covid-disabil... or https://archive.ph/RnBZ2

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8715665/

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8798975/

[4] https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-075387

I hadn't thought of that aspect but I strongly suspect this is the cause.

If a change happens gradually you're not going to notice it until there's some glaring indication of it. And you often won't notice that things haven't returned to baseline when you know there was a deviation. (Observation: Long Covid is more common amongst athletes. Really? Or are they actually measuring a baseline and seeing they aren't what they used to be?)

It seems fairly silly to think that Covid really changed how people drive. You didn’t drive for a month and you just forgot, and then in the intervening three years did not relearn it? That isn’t how humans work. I don’t doubt you that it is widely believed, it just doesn’t make sense.

More likely is that due to distracted driver growth since the advent of smart phones, we’re all just getting a little worse every year, so every year is a new high watermark.

> It seems fairly silly to think that Covid really changed how people drive.

As someone who has driven before, during, and after I think it's silly to think Covid didn't change how people drive. It's a night and day difference from 2019 to 2023 (first year of "back to normal") that cannot be explained by a gradual shift of people becoming more immersed in technology.

The attitudes in society towards law and order and what is acceptable day to day have massively shifted. Enforcement (at least where I am from) seems to be nonexistent too - and I think COVID laid that fact bare. People realized no one is actually watching or caring about what they do. Why not drive 55mph on the shoulder to get around that traffic jam if you know there are zero social or legal ramifications?

I was driving quite a long time before Covid, and I drive about 50,000 miles a year. I’ve noticed a long, slow decrease in how well people drive, but I don’t think it has changed any more dramatically in the last three years. if you took the trendline prior to 2020 and drew it to 2023, it would get you to pretty much where we are today in terms of accidents and fatalities. They had already started increasing again before Covid.

And in any case, the plural of anecdote is not data. there’s just really no data to support the idea that everybody not driving for a month, and then driving less for a year or two, has made people worse at driving.

I wish I could find it, but I read a study recently about participation in the social contract that used a question like "would you run a rural red light with no one around?" as their metric. A lot more people say yes now than before 2020.

> As someone who has driven before, during, and after I think it's silly to think Covid didn't change how people drive.

Unless you're arguing that Covid had ramifications for everyone's brain, there's no reason to think that's anything but superstition.

> Unless you're arguing that Covid had ramifications for everyone's brain

"Covid" can refer to either the worldwide pandemic, or the specific disease. "Covid", the event which was a world wide pandemic, did affect everyone's brain. You know how? Because that's where memories are stored. Memories are stored in the brain, and memories influence belief systems which affect behavior. What people remember, and what they have now learned, is that they can get away with a lot more illegal shit while driving than they are used to, and what they have learned through experience (which are formed through memory) is that people are super aggressive when driving after the worldwide pandemic, which causes them to change their behavior too.

> no reason to think that's anything but superstition.

Pretty ballsy to say that hard data of drivers getting more reckless (which is furnished in the article you're replying to) is superstition.

> Pretty ballsy to say that hard data of drivers getting more reckless (which is furnished in the article you're replying to) is superstition.

thankfully, that's not what I said.

What I said is that this idea that everyone forgot how to drive is stupid and superstitious.

blowing smoke up ones ass used to be a medical treatment until we learned differently.

Something may be going on but it sure as shit isn't that people forgot how to drive.

> had ramifications for everyone's brain, there's no reason to think that's anything but superstition.

Or people began driving differently when the roads were empty (even if less frequently) and continued doing that even the amount of traffic increased significantly

Covid revealed a lot of things. Essential workers discovered they were disposable. That the rich would lock them into their jobs and out of public parks and spaces to protect themselves. Then to add insult to injury prices on all basic goods went up 30% so yeah poor people are angry and they are driving like they got nothing to loose. There is basically no hope of owning a house for anyone in the bottom 70% who doesn’t own one by now either.

It was much more than a month my friend. Shutdowns started in March 2020, traffic in my metro area didn't return to pre-pandemic levels until at least mid 2021.

People who had to still had to drive through the pandemic could have gotten used to driving faster on emptier roads, and therefore are more frustrated and aggressive with the traffic/slowdowns today.

Or maybe it's because the population of drivers has shifted, there's still a lot of people working from home (either full time or part of the week)

Or maybe lowering of social empathy we've seen since the pandemic has bleed over into drivers' attitudes (people are notably more rude/less considerate in public)

I don’t believe people get significantly worse at driving after not driving for a month. I have gone on one month vacations where I did not drive, then I came back and gotten my car, and I don’t think I was any worse off, and even if I was, I was right back to where I started Very quickly.

I don’t think half as much for a year would make me any worse either. The average American is 40 years old and has been driving for 25 years. The average American who drives is even older. It’s hard to imagine them cutting their commute in half for a couple years. Will make them any worse than they had been before.

In instances, like this, there is neither nor logic, just subjective feeling, you can be pretty sure it is incorrect

Locally, I saw a marked difference in a small part of the population.

Roughly a quarter of drivers are maniacs, and drive until there is another car actually impeding their progress, or the get a ticket. Over covid, the empty roads taught these drivers to expect that that can drive 50 in a 30. Now that the traffic is back, these morons are still trying to drive 50 in a 30, and weaving around stopped or turning traffic to do it.

IMO at night the white LED lights aren't the problem; the people who insist on driving everywhere with their high beams on all the time are. Maybe it's just me but it seems that more people than ever are driving with their brights on - and those people are by and large driving vehicles with halogen lights.

I’ve also noticed this consistently in recent years.

Literally cannot drive 10 minutes without encountering a vehicle with high beams on (can tell by the location, not brightness alone). I’m talking about busy urban areas, not the boonies.

This happens far more often than cars with no headlights (which used to be more common).

At first I thought this was some sort of signal for drugs/etc. Of course that makes little sense…

However, in reality it’s probably worse than that…

I’ve noticed a fair number of these cases where you can tell one of their low beams is burned out. “I can’t see with my half a low beam, and rather than fixing it, I’ll just turn on my high beams. There, I fixed it.”

Welcome to the generation of drivers that have never switched their headlights on or off ever. They'll drive in inclement weather with no lights because it's still bright enough to not trigger the dusk sensor. They'll sit on the side of their road with headlights shining fully for no reason. They basically don't know the lights are there. Why would they? Never used the road outside of a car. Never known any different.

I think some of those people just don't have their headlights adjusted properly.

I have noticed that in the last 5 years more and more people just don't know that your headlights are supposed to be pointed downward and not straight ahead.

This becomes more obvious when you look at bikes, the amount of bikes I have seen with their blinding LEDs pointed straight ahead 'because they want to be seen by cars" is insane. They don't understand that you don't need to be directly in the beam to see a light source.

What I thought was common knowledge seems to have been disappeared

Yes! And I’ve noticed it tends to be the older cars with ‘low’ temperature lights.

I have two theories:

1- They are trying to compensate for their hazed, plastic headlight enclosures. Unfortunately not only are the high beams brighter, they point up.

2- It’s a stick it to the people with newer cars and their obnoxiously bright lights mentality.

I really doubt that is the issue. As always, the main factors are speed, weight (of the vehicle) and intoxication.

I hate driving around at night because of that. Feels like everyone in town has them and I am just constantly driving blind because of them.

Car accidents are going up in part because some police departments simply do not have the budget to do traffic enforcement. I lived in a big city, and the police didn't have the manpower to fight crime and traffic enforcement. As a result, fatal car crashes were very common.

LED lights aren't a problem if they are adjusted properly.

OEM LED lights aren’t a problem. Retrofit LED headlamp bulbs are a problem regardless of adjustment, IME.

Agreed, and also: vehicle size itself. As vehicles get bigger, people feel less safe sharing the road with them in their sub-compacts, so now they buy crossovers, which themselves grow with every generation. It becomes an arms race in which the environment and anyone not trying to get around not in a big metal box is the inevitable loser.

The reason is that cops dramatically reduced the amount of traffic enforcement they engaged in ( https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1537100042623848448?t=7... ). Turns out they don't want to risk a murder charge for $65k/year; I don't blame them, I wouldn't do it for $1m. Less traffic cops = more traffic crime.

Both of the dramatic increases of car accidents from the past decade coincided with BLM events: Ferguson and Floyd. See figure 1 - https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Correlation is not causation… ? In what manner does BLM protests affect traffic on a mass scale

The protests are a red herring. It's the cops not wanting to be charged with murder so they just make less traffic stops.

I don’t think they were afraid of being charged with murder in the first place. Qualified immunity for police is quite strongly backed.

Yea I don't know about BLM protests but cops have vanished from enforcing traffic laws where I am.

I would say someone blows a red light at least 50% of the time at a red light.

There might just not be enough cops now though demographically. That would be my guess. The same way there aren't enough nurses.

I think this can be addressed by using speed cameras instead of chase cars to enforce speed limits. Tint and lights can be covered by periodic vehicle inspection. These are fairly common elsewhere, but the US chooses cops that give chase.

There’s no real evidence that that enforcement leads to lower accident rates. Most people simply drive at whatever speed they think is safe and the ones who think that’s a faster speed find the tickets worth it.

This happened at the same time screen's got distracting, so any correlation is likely coincidence.

Similarly the United States once introduced a maximum highway speed that lowered highway speeds everywhere. Fatality rates went down, but it turned out to be unrelated, Similarly the United States once introduced a maximum highway speed that lowered highway speeds everywhere. Accident rates went down, they just happened to do it at the same time legislators were responding to the unsafe at any speed era. They lifted the maximum speed, speeds went up, and rates of accidents and fatalities kept going down.

There is a strong positive effect that more enforcement of traffic laws reduces traffic accidents: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/effect-high-visibility-e...

While interesting, that is not correlating traffic laws with reduction of accidents generally, it is saying that using short term bursts of “ highly visible enforcement” does. that’s well and good and I suppose perhaps that has been curtailed also due to police staffing shortages, I don’t know that there is any evidence that the pre-pandemic background level of enforcement really had much effect.

And from what I understand the level of accidents we are seeing now is basically on trend with what you would have expected if you just followed the trendline forward from 2019, even if the pandemic never happened.

yeah, because all this enforcement is somehow happening stealthily. All these cops pulling people over but flipping on their ninja switch so no one sees them.

No, but generally they do it so infrequently that you bake it into the cost of driving if you’re a frequent speeder. For many years I just considered it a cost of driving, but if I knew a lot of cops were enforcing in one area (like when I got 3 speeding tickets in under 24 hours in the same stretch of road) I’d slow down there.

There are known places where cops pull people over a lot and you’ll see people go from 15 over to driving the speed limit there, then accelerate right after.

Truly ridiculous. When one of these cars is behind me, I get a shadow _in front_ of my car, that's how bright their lights are (my headlights are clean).

Its truly a tragedy that your eyes must be plagued by such a thing, a tragedy of the commons at that, its such an issue that I have never heard anyone complain about it before you.

Of course, this isnt a problem in countries that dont have such asinine rules around headlights, where an actual modern headlight can identify cars/pedestrians and selectively not cast light directly at them.

You are probably right though, forget about how these noble regulations have kept us in the automotive stone age, we have a big stick so lets use it! Its not like the government is going to get out there and fix the roads anyways, all they seem interested in is stealing money.

Some people have suggested fighting back against this with SOLAS tape. Does anyone know the legality of a measure like this?

The more light tends to the blue end of the spectrum, the more it scatters in atmosphere. There's a reason the old timey fog lights were yellow/orange.

And yes, I feel the same as you do.

Add overly bright lights to the list of unenforced laws in the US along with speeding, excess noise (e.g. modified exhaust), and pollution (e.g. "rolling coal").

They are also signal driven and cause migraines/seizures.

Honestly it can be so bad I fantisize about putting a mirror in my rear windshield.

This is a global thing, and it's started to receive more attention in the UK [0]

One thing I find blinding is those "auto-dip/intelligent" full beams which people don't dip. They simply don't work as well, but people don't bother dipping.

I accidentality forgot to dip the lights in my 2005 yellowish micra the other day past going past some traffic. In times past I'd be flashed, but I wasn't. So I carried on. Not a single flash over 12 miles. To me that suggests that normal car lights is about the same level as full beam lights from 20 years ago.

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/headlight-glare-is-getting-worse-...

[1] https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/driving/2024-01/modern-car...

>Eventually, everyone starts using it and then no one will be able to see properly at night anymore

That will be the only solution, truly.

We should all install these annoying headlights so they get banned

I and people started noticing this like 7 years ago, glad that people start complaining it now. It's a combination of more aggressive lighting, bright LED, and taller vehicles.

Looking directly in my mirror now feels like a hazard rather than helpful.

> the one I find personally annoying the most are white LED headlights

Those are the worst. Actually, I take that back. There was a trend a number of years ago of people putting in these super-bright headlamps that were usually tinted purple/blue. Those were the worst -- cars using them were basically telling oncoming traffic "I hate you and hope you die". But, at least in my state, they were made illegal.

But those superbright LED headlamps come pretty close.

Even with normal lights, many Americans don't seem to know or care about dipping headlights when appropriate. At least that's my observation as a kiwi been here for about 23 years. I get that some (many?) modern cars are supposed to do it automatically so maybe that's mine or my car's age talking but even 20 years ago I seldom saw anyone actively dip their lights when approaching on a mostly empty road.

Yeah, it's a problem but it's made worse by the fact that on a lot of cars there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between high or low beam in terms of brightness to oncoming traffic. I've seen cars dip their lights, but if you blinked you would have missed the difference. I used to be proactive about dipping my lights when I knew there was oncoming traffic but I learned that if I did that, the oncoming driver almost never dipped their high beams so now I make sure that they have a clear view of my lights before I dip them and it has significantly increased the reciprocation because I guess it signals to them that I did indeed dip my lights.

OTOH, I get flashed by other drivers often when I don't have my high beams on and I don't have after market lights. Ironically, it seems to happen less when I drive the car with the brightest lights (Land Rover LR3 HSE) because it seems to shape the beam best to keep the light out of the opposing lane. It happens the most when I drive my 2005 Mustang which by far IMO has the poorest road illumination of any vehicle I have access to drive.

Car insurance in California has price caps. And as many of us know from econ 101, price caps lead to shortages.

The California auto insurance market basically failed in December and it is now almost impossible to get auto insurance with less than 3 weeks lead time. Most of them have closed their brick and mortar locations and do not accept online applications.

Of course, California’s solution to a shortage is to try to mandate supply.

quote from commissioner that refused to allow price increases for 4 years:

> “These alleged passive-aggressive tactics by insurance companies to slow down drivers’ access to coverage are unacceptable, dangerous, and will not be tolerated,” Lara said in a press release Thursday.

Price caps are pathetic stand-ins for profit caps.

Profit caps incentivize bigger costs and bigger payouts

i do not care for them, but profit cap is not the same as margin cap

Profit cap is not a real thing as far as I know

But if it were, it would encourage serving the smallest possible cohort and doing no more business

Notably, the Affordable Care Act limited administration costs to 20%.

I’ve always suspected that that incentivized health insurance companies to let hospitals inflate costs. If the government forbids me from increasing my percentage of the pie and I need to increase revenue I have to increase the size of the pie.

Yes, this and vertical integration. The insurance company may have limited profit, but if the hospital doesn't, and they're both owned by the same parent company, then the prices "inside the control volume" can be whatever fiction is most convenient to report to the government.

How many insurance companies are under the same parent org as hospitals?

Looked up the largest health insurer, they operate hospitals:

> Kaiser Permanente operates 39 hospitals and more than 700 medical offices, with over 300,000 personnel, including more than 87,000 physicians and nurses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente

The second largest also owns Optum with 60k doctors:

> Optum Care is a family of 60,000 doctors in 2,000 locations nationwide. We work together to help 20+ million people live healthier lives.

https://www.optum.com/en/about-us/optum-care.html

So I'd ask you back, how many insurance companies aren't under the same parent org as hospitals? The 2 largest are, wouldn't surprise me if most are.

I’m not sure. I don’t know much about healthcare in the United States.

Profit caps disincentivize companies to be efficient, meaning they'll just waste resources that could be used better elsewhere in the economy. Capping price or profit does nothing to address the root cause of the problem - lack of competition. Lack of competition could be addressed by finding ways to reduce regulatory hurdles to enter the market, or by breaking up monopolies with anti-trust action.

>Profit caps disincentivize companies to be efficient

Considering I was just laid off for the sake of "efficiency" that is perfectly fine by me.

We don’t care what is fine by you

I'll care if you don't.

Screw all the people who weren’t misfortunate in your exact way, I guess?

You got laid off because they dont need you. I understand how traumatic and life destroying it can be sometimes, but long term it destroys the future of overall population, to prevent firing people who are no longer necessary.

We’d all be stuck as farmers, tailors and wood cutters, if firing people was penalised or efficiency was punished, no one would want to make their company more efficient with wood cutting machines or sewing machines, or tractors for farming, etc.

In a small timeframe it is horrible to lose a job, but the state is responsible for protecting both the future generations balanced with comfort and safety of present population.

A affordable unemployment insurance is a much better idea tbh compared to profit caps or price caps.

Good luck tho!, may you get a great job soon. May god bless you.

cost-plus has largely proved to be a busted business model. in industries where it is de rigueur, such as defense and space, traditional business models have driven efficiency improvements and new product development alongside price decreases.

Wouldn't that just be taxes?

The government should not be prohibited (in some places they are! Muni broadband as an example) from offering competing services.

Proper competition would limit market malfunction.

The prohibition should stand. People should have a voluntary option to pay or not pay for services as they choose. Except I suppose in quite exceptional circumstances.

If a group of locals want to pool their cash and start up a local broadband service then good on them, best of luck. But taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook to help them.

USPS is an example. It's sort of a public utility that has some strange requirements, like it _must_ __offer__ service to everyone. In some places this is less profitable, and private postal / shipping firms might not even offer their own service (or pay USPS for the last leg instead).

However, because USPS exists, there is a ceiling to how much other firms can charge without differentiating their services to make it worth the difference in cost. It helps ensure the market functions with proper competition.

For any other market where distortion (dysfunctional market) is observed, the solution is not to mandate the impossible from the existing players, but to modify the market conditions where they are broken.

competing with USPS mail delivery is illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes

> But taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook to help them.

Aren't said locals literally tax payers? And they want their tax money to go to something actually useful for them.

Say we have a Centiville, a conveniently sized community of 100 people. 90 of them want municipal broadband because they like the internet.

That 90% should be allowed to pool their resources, start a "Centiville Fibre" company, build out fibre locally and charge locals a fair rate. Then the remaining 10 don't have to be involved in something they don't want. Or they can pay market rate for it without getting a dividend, which is effectively a penalty.

No government involvement required outside maybe permitting. The people who want it pay, it probably happens faster and all is good.

> And they want their tax money to go to something actually useful for them.

They're going to have their taxes raised to pay for the installation costs. Doing it through the government doesn't mean there is more money (unless they're harvesting resources off people who think it is a bad idea / don't want it / can't afford it which is unfair).

I don’t have children but I still pay for the schools. The idea that your tax dollars should only get spent on something you use personally is laughable.

Well, yes. But that is a straw man because nobody argued that.

Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to pay for things that they don't use and don't think are good ideas. If you use it, you should pay for it. If you think it is a good idea, you should pay for it. But if people think something is a bad idea they should only have to pay for it under highly exceptional circumstances.

There is no need to force people to pay for broadband. This is a problem that a company can solve using voluntary action.

What straw man is constructed here? There are people who don’t think they should pay for schools with their taxes. There are people who literally are advocating to instead be paid to not use public schools at all.

Many people strongly disagree about the places their tax dollars go. It is maybe one of the single most common complaints people utter and this is an example of it? People are able to make decisions about where their tax dollars go but only in the abstract of collective action via legislation. It’s kind of how governments work on a fundamental level and most of politics is about where the tax dollars go.

If a strong majority of people choose to do something as a municipality, that is the system at work. Sorry to the 10% of people who think they’re getting a bad deal (and are also almost certainly wrong on an objective level unless they just don’t want internet at all).

The suggestion that instead a private enterprise should be spun up for it so they can choose to not subscribe is the antithesis of the entire point. The entire point is that the cost is already beared by the taxpayers in the first place and that it should serve them. It makes more sense to invest directly in the creation and keep it in the hands of those who bore the cost. We give billions out in corporate welfare and yet the companies who get that money are quite often the most reviled in the nation based on public polling (Telcos). It is almost like the incentives aren’t aligned.

> What straw man is constructed here?

The idea that your tax dollars should only get spent on something you use personally is laughable - I'm not arguing that.

> The entire point is that the cost is already beared by the taxpayers in the first place and that it should serve them...

Well, having the taxpayers pay for it is obviously failing. Maybe try not taking the money off people and letting them build their own broadband? If you've identified that something the government is doing isn't working, the first port of call is try privatising it. The private market is pretty good at providing things.

Getting local government to do something instead of state or federal is an improvement; but by golly you could just have the people who want something organise to have what they want without dragging the unwilling in to it. 90% vs 100% of local people paying for something doesn't really make a difference to the underlying economics.

> If a strong majority of people choose to do something as a municipality, that is the system at work. Sorry to the 10% of people who think they’re getting a bad deal (and are also almost certainly wrong on an objective level unless they just don’t want internet at all).

No that isn't the system at work, that is the system failing. Taking a system that could work with just a motivated minority organising it and changing it to a system where everyone has to vote on it at regular intervals is a recipe for failure. If a strong majority wants something, they have all the tools they need to do it themselves at their own cost. The only reason they even need a majority is to push any obstructionist permitting and whatnot out of the way.

> We give billions out in corporate welfare and yet the companies who get that money are quite often the most reviled in the nation based on public polling (Telcos).

A sensible take there is to not make paying them compulsory? I get what you're saying but I don't get how you aren't joining the dots. You start by saying that some people are going to have to pay for something they don't want. You then get to the conclusion and you've identified that people are being forced to pay for something they don't want and that is bad.

There is an easy solution to all this. Stop forcing people to fund things they think are bad ideas, then let the people who want broadband band together, set up a limited liability corporation to control the legal risk, and build themselves a broadband network. IE, get government out of the picture as much as possible. Then literally everyone gets what they want. If someone changes their mind later they aren't a shareholder and will end up having to give money to the people with more foresight.

Okay. Genuine question for you, how do you feel about other forms of public utilities like electricity and water?

Similarly. If someone wants to go off the grid there isn't any reason to force them on to it. Ditto water supplies if they want to try something alternative. And they shouldn't have to pay for a service they aren't connected too because that would be dumb. I'd probably advocate a law that you have to disclose being unconnected to major utilities clearly, obviously and early in the process when selling or renting a house.

I don't really see why anyone should be unhappy if Sam the Solar wants to power his own house. Good luck to him. He doesn't have to pay for my electricity and I don't have to pay for his. If it is much more cost effective for him he can come do my house too. There is literally no need to force them to pay or force them to consume a service that they don't think it a good idea.

And the closer the equilibrium can be pushed to a fully private free market the more cost effective it is likely to be.

Example: Germany’s mostly-public (Gesetzliche - more like, extremely strictly regulated) health insurance system putting a market-based cap on what private (more like, more lightly-regulated) insurance can cost and cover.

I was on the private system my first 13 years working in Germany. I was obligated (but didn’t try to fight) switch to public recently.

The change has overall been positive.

I'm all for government 'competition' so long as they play by the rules of the market. If government 'competition' means a money-losing (i.e. tax-supported) enterprise, then it's not competition, it's just price-setting with extra steps.

3 weeks lead time sounds inconvenient but not really a big deal?

This is the lead up to them exiting the state like in Florida (and California for other types of insurance). I believe state farm and allstate have already exited california, but I may be wrong.

Three weeks delay is just the most visible thing, they are basically pulling out all the stops to try to avoid covering as many people as possible.

But even 3 weeks delay in driving a vehicle you just purchased is considerable.

Last week I switched car insurance company and coverage was offered in the literal same day, all over the phone. In comparison, three weeks seems like an eternity.

That’s just semantics though. Whatever an “eternity” means to you, it’s still three weeks. And is very different from not being available at all.

Not being able to drive for 3 weeks is not an option for a lot of people. It’s not “semantics”

Ok and not being able to drive for 3 weeks is different from not being able to drive ever.

But maybe it is a big deal? You shifted from your previous statement.

Can you give an example where it’s a big deal?

Just about everywhere in America requires you to drive to work. If you can't drive for 3 weeks, you can't work for 3 weeks. Do you see why this might be a problem

That only makes sense as a problem if you previously had a car and then lost it, in which case your grace period should cover you.

Grace and Insurance really don't belong in the same sentence. They are stingy enough to deal with as is, even when you have photo evidence of no fault in the crash.

Can’t say that holds up to scrutiny personally

three weeks of spotty or delayed attendance can lose one a job

most of the people with the option to remote work are working decent white-collar jobs, so add this to the long tally of policies that are designed to help but only hurt the poor

> three weeks of spotty or delayed attendance can lose one a job

Under what conditions will a person have a job that they are expected to be at, but not have car insurance to get there? I'm sure this exists (for instance for someone whose policy is revoked for DUI or accident or whatever), but in many cases I assume public transit or a three week wait to start is acceptable.

Three week wait to start is not acceptable for my slightly over minimum wage job on the other side of town or in the next city over.

This is a weird hill to die on. best of luck to you

Suppose you need a car to get to work?

Which company please? [edit: Sorry should have specified: California. Anyone has an auto insurance company working quickly - or at all- in California currently?]

In most of the US, just about all of the large national direct-sales insurers operates sales 24/7 and will write you a policy in 20 minutes at 3am if you want: State Farm, GEICO, Progressive, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide, Farmers, Travelers, etc.

Yes sorry, should have specified, in California? California is having this problem currently. I am also used to California auto insurance working fine and quickly but that's not the case currently.

Not the person you asked, but my USAA auto insurance was valid at 12:01 AM next day, and I filled out the application at 6 PM.

Thanks sorry, should have specified: In California?

with toggle i got same day in california a few days ago

Same here, but via web chat

Btw, Outside California Many companies price cheaper if the insurance start date is X days after the purchase date. X is more than 1.

Lol it's usually literally 5 minutes for me to buy a new car insurance. What's this weeks of lead time? This is not some physical good you need to manufacture and ship!

What do you do, just drive around uninsured for 3 weeks in your new car and hope nothing happens?

You wait. I’m not saying it doesn’t suck.

How does that work? Do you just hope no one buys the car in the meantime? Or will the dealer let you store it with them?

You can drive a car home without insurance. A quick google suggests californias grace period is 30 days.

It may be allowed, but who pays in case of an accident?

Your prior insurance covers you for a while

Most (all?) dealers in California offer some kind of 24/48 hour insurance for you to legally drive home. The prices are sort of ridiculous when compared to normal car insurance ($50-$100 for a couple days of coverage IIRC), but thats just a function of the risk profile and the fixed underwriting costs of a short policy.

You aren’t allowed to drive without insurance

New Hampshire is the only state in the US that does not require liability insurance. If you drive through NH, make sure you have uninsured coverage. (and it is a good idea anywhere)

It is legal to drive without liability insurance in almost every state… you just have to post a $20k-$50k bond with the state.

Yea but if the costs of accident exceed that bond you still have to cover it if your at fault.

Plus most medical expenses quickly will exceed those bond values these days. Maybe decades ago if you had a lot money to just set aside getting no interest on it it may have made sense.

However the costs of medical and even cars today make it quite a risky proposition

Laws haven’t kept up with rising costs, so the amount of coverage you are required to have in most states won’t cover the average accident, let alone catastrophic ones. Same with the amount you have to bond for.

That's not any different than with car insurance. If the costs of a car accident exceed your limits you have to pay it too.

Ahh yes, the "legal if rich" clause. classic.

It really. Anyone with money has good coverage plus umbrella.

I looked into it as I prefer to self-insure for any non-catastrophic risk.

It makes absolutely no sense for me to post a bond for such a small amount when I can get ~10x the coverage, plus all the claims handling, for $1200/yr for two cars and two drivers.

It would make sense if I was a business who had hundreds of cars or some other weird corner case perhaps, but regular people who could afford to post a bond have a better option in the insurance market.

It makes no sense to self insure like you said. You would get totally screwed in any split risk decision

LOL $20k-$50k? If that other driver ends up in the hospital at all you are SOL.

That’s no less than the state mandated liability coverage in most areas.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/minimum-car-ins...

Hospitalizations are not covered in many states. You have to cover your own medical costs

Even if hospital costs aren't covered the average US car price in 2024 is close to $50k and a totaled car is definitely covered. Lord help you if you hit a Hummer EV or a Cyberbeast.

Yeah the minimum coverage is no longer enough. But that’s always been a problem if you hit a Bentley or exotic. People who drive 100k cars should really have to cover that extra repair cost with their own insurance but that’s not how most state laws work.

Virginia also does not require liability insurance, but they impose an additional tax if you want to drive without it.

We're only 5 weeks into this new rule.

Not just California. In Arizona, I was looking to shop around insurance recently and couldn’t even get a quote from my home insurer (who also recently raised my rates, mind you).

CA also has sort of a price cap on wildfire home insurance, which has prompted many insurers to leave the state entirely.

This one frustrates me because when the government intervenes to try to lower wildfire insurance premiums they are literally risking people’s lives.

People should have to pay the full cost of the risk of living in these dangerous areas so the price system encourages them to move.

Definitely agree, and I also firmly believe that each property should get exactly one FEMA bailout ever. If you live in Florida and your house gets destroyed by a hurricane, FEMA should pay you for it. If you choose to rebuild on that exact same spot, and your house gets destroyed by a hurricane, you should get exactly bupkis.

This should carry with the property address - the next person who buys it should have to sign a form acknowledging that they aren't going to get a FEMA bailout if it gets destroyed.

Lots of Florida Republicans out there who complain about welfare but rely on some of the biggest welfare checks that get written to repair their homes because of the absolutely foreseeable results of their choices.

> the next person who buys it

If they can’t build on it, who would buy it? Urban farmers?

In any case, your plan would destroy the land value, and the corresponding property tax revenue.

> In any case, your plan would destroy the land value, and the corresponding property tax revenue

Sounds like the market effectively discovered the true value of the property with all externalities priced in. I don’t see a problem here?

The problem is that the city relies on property tax revenues to function.

perhaps disaster prone areas shouldn't be worth a lot?

The value of the land has already been destroyed. What’s going on now is corrupt public subsidy.

Well, it would likely be affordable at least.

On the downside, when the next disaster hit and FEMA didn't cover it, it would look like FEMA doesn't want to cover low income housing, which isn't a good look.

But there does need to be some mechanism to convince people to abandon homes and towns that are not appropriate given environmental conditions. And it needs to be done carefully so it's not like kick all the poor people out, do some civil engineering that never happened while it was a poor community, then sell the land to developers who make a huge profit.

That is basically what governments are for, collective actions that make land more valuable: roads, schools, police, fire departments, and civil engineering projects.

I could be mistaken on this, as I don't live in an area where such things are common, but my understanding is the issue is that if your house is destroyed by say, a hurricane, no insurance provider (or fema) gives you a bag of cash and says "move", reimbursement is predicated on rebuilding the structure where it stood.

Insurance makes you whole, not the property. You are perfectly welcome to pocket the cash. Although if you have a mortgage, you do have an additional obligation to maintain the value of their collateral or pay off the loan.

If you have replacement cost coverage (as opposed to actual cash value (=depreciated value) you typically have to use it to reconstruct the home if you want the full amount. This is typical.

"We will pay no more than the actual cash value of the damage until actual repair or replacement is complete." [0]

[0] https://www.iii.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/HO3_sample....

Terrible idea, so glad the government structured NFIP this way.

And a rational insurance program would not keep insuring the same property over and over as it gets destroyed.

If built to modern codes houses can survive a hurricane, or so I'm told.

Not all coastal areas have the same strict building code. Homes not built with concrete exteriors and hurricane tie down anchors have a strong risk of being demolished in strong hurricanes. South Florida revamped their building codes after Hurricane Andrew wiped many of the homes and infrastructure in the 90s. However, not all coastal houses in northern Florida or on the gulf are built with concrete or on stilt foundations.

A secondary threat is prolonged flooding which can submerge entire homes with salt water for weeks at a time. That's very costly and not preventable with existing homes in flood zones.

This I never understood. Other countries didn't need building codes mandating such things - people always built houses that were intended to stand for many decades and that are suited to their local environment[1].

It defies comprehension that despite being somewhat poorer and enjoying milder weather, Europeans built their houses from brick and mortar while the US insists on erecting cheap cardboard boxes that even if they're not blown away or flooded, will probably rot away within the lifetime of their owner.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Y678tV7.png

this isn't the three little pigs. Brick is not automatictally stronger. Wood houses have advantages as well, and can be just as strong.

I did not use the word "wood" once. I don't think houses with walls you can kick holes in qualify as wood houses. They're closer to cardboard than wood.

Anyways, the point isn't the materials - the point is that the houses are fundamentally unsuited to the environment they are in.

Are you just constantly kicking your walls or something? I don't get why it's such a big issue. I've only accidentally made a hole in a wall once and it was about an hour fix.

Drywall walls have never been a problem for me, in fact they're pretty nice. It's really easy to modify the walls. Need to do a new Ethernet run? Want another power run? Feel like moving a lightswitch? Install new access points on the ceiling or change up light fixtures? Easy to drop down the void and cut a new box. Want to redesign the layout of a room? Often not a problem, easy to change.

Meanwhile a concrete wall is a massive pain to modify. You get the runs you get. Good luck redoing a layout. Say goodbye to having good wireless coverage.

> good wireless coverage

We were talking about houses blowing away and falling over but sure.

Even in places with lots of hurricanes the odds of the house "blowing away and falling over" are pretty slim. I speak as a person who grew up in a place that gets a lot of hurricanes. The biggest impact is usually flooding and roof damage.And now, once again, as someone living in a highly tornado-probe area, it's mostly roofing damage. The odds the tornado will destroy your house is still incredibly slim.

So do you spend significantly more for construction for a failure that's still extremely unlikely? Y'all are acting like every time there's a thunderstorm all the houses just blow down. You're entirely disconnected from reality of the actual risks versus massive increase in costs.

Very few houses are a total loss in the average hurricane. Indeed during most hurricanes there’s just lots of minor damage that you might see during a particularly bad thunderstorm, and people even continue to go to work.

Major hurricanes are a different story. But even then total loss is relatively rare except for storm surges unless you’re in the path of the eyewall.

There is no construction that can withstand storm surge, which is the biggest and most destructive hurricane impact. Even if the structure is intact, everything has to be ripped out of it. Most of them do survive winds short of tornadoes, though roof damage is very typical for major hurricanes and tree falls can cause problems.

We’re talking about the wind blowing up to 30ft of saltwater _miles_ inland. Given the comparative rarity of a major hurricane in any given geographical location and the oddities that determine the storm surge and where it comes in, the damage usually is worst in places it’s never flooded before - because places where it has are indeed required to build higher.

The US used to build using brick and mortar. It was abandoned because it was unsafe, most of those buildings were destroyed by environmental hazards that Europe does not have. Consequently, most housing in the US for the last century or more primarily uses wood, which does survive the hazards endemic to the US.

In most of the US, only wood or steel frame construction is safe. Wood houses last centuries.

Wood is used primarily where wood is plentiful. Northern Europe uses wood to build, especially Finland. Japan uses wood to build, although they import from Canada these days. Australia also uses lots of wood.

Wood holds up better in earth quakes and tornadoes than brick, but you could probably build safe buildings with bricks in the USA, they would just cost more and require similar or more maintenance.

The earthquake retrofits for brick buildings seem to essentially install a structural steel frame to which the brick is fastened. At which point it is not really a brick structure but a steel one. New “brick” construction is almost entirely brick facades over a steel/wood frame.

While steel-reinforced masonry can be made safe, it isn’t obvious to me that actual brick-and-mortar can be.

Europe really use brick construction. Germany and France don’t have alot of earthquakes. They also don’t have many trees.

Materials availability / cost is the driving force.

America has lots of wood and lots of gypsum, and that's what we build our houses with.

The design problem is more complex than you are portraying. I don’t need my house to last for 200 years if it comes at the cost of not being able to modify it (walls, windows, openings, floor plan) as infrastructure needs change.

Do you notice the awkward protruding wall plug, seemingly used by the lamp, on the photo you linked? It doesn’t have to be that way - I have put a receptacle or switch in to the perfect spot as a one day project many times, and we have reworked wall layout in several places.

And, the photo looks like it has single pane windows with snow outside? They might not have had functional multi pane windows when the home was built?

Needs and technical capabilities change, and a design that is less committed to mass walls has important flexibility.

> And, the photo looks like it has single pane windows with snow outside? They might not have had functional multi pane windows when the home was built?

That's water outside. After a storm. That's a waterproof house in a coastal area of Germany that tends to flood during storms.

Needless to say those windows are designed with another problem than just insulation in mind. I can't tell you whether they're multi pane. All I know is that they open towards the outside rather than the inside for obvious reasons.

This is what building to code should address. If a house is built to a specific hurricane code, and is destroyed due to other reasons (a hypercane, for instance), then let insurance cover this and mandate rebuilding to an even higher standard.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hurricane-idalias-destr...

: Dozens of modest homes along the Big Bend coast were heavily damaged in the floodwaters, but interspersed among the debris were residences left relatively unscathed, all because they were built elevated on stilts.

I'd do it a little differently.

If a house is destroyed by any form of reasonably common widespread disaster it becomes illegal to build anything on that lot that would likewise be destroyed. You can rebuild after the hurricane, you must build a house that will stand up to a hurricane. (Yes, it can be done.)

I wouldn't apply this to flukes--your town does a Tunguska there's no reason to require asteroid-safe houses.

I would also make an exception for things which by their nature must be in the line of fire--such things must never be permanent habitation and can't have community-rate insurance against whatever happened to them.

A business can rebuild it's beach cabanas but would have to go to Lloyd's if they wanted insurance.

While I understand the idea, who would buy these properties they likely may want to sell to escape these rising costs?

for long standing communities, ideally the government would offer voluntary buyouts if they can’t find someone willing to cover the insurance premium.

they already do the same in flooding zones.

but yes, people who live in fire-prone areas may take a loss. encouraging people to anticipate these losses is part of a functioning market. if they can live somewhere risky without financial risk, we only encourage future people to do the same.

me, i'll take discounted land in california any day of the week.

For $1 each, lots of people. Price will find buyers.

You're only looking at step 1.

If you recursively got everyone in dangerous areas to move, no one would live in California. If you live in a population center in California, the only reason why you aren't prone to wildfires is because of the people living around you that are.

It's a scenario where everyone paying the same actually makes sense. Your insurance is that others are accepting the risk of losing all their personal belongings or even their lives - even if insurance will cover them financially.

It's not the same as hurricanes or earthquakes.

Its quite unfortunate because it would be a great opportunity to accurate price the risk to encourage better building standards and fireproofing. In reality we don't need people to move to greatly reduce the risk.

In many wildfire events homes burn because brush/scrub burns all the way up to the house and catches the siding on fire, or because embers land on the roof or enter soffits and start a fire that way. These things are really easily improved. Insurance could require fireproof siding, no bushes/plants right up against the house, fire screens on roof/soffit vents, and fireproof roofing. Those changes alone would decrease the number of houses that burn in a fire.

Obviously there are some areas where the landscape, wind patterns, and nature of trees means if it burns it will rage and everything's gonna go up no matter what you do. But that isn't everywhere.

What I don't know right now: how much does CA law allow insurers to price this kind of risk? Is it a matter of law not allowing them to send accurate price signals? I can believe this is the case. I also don't know if CA law allows them to only sell in certain areas... there's no practical wildfire risk to the Bay Area for example so why stop writing policies there?

Or are insurers going into knee-jerk mode or even using this as an opportunity to goose profits (knowing that wildfires wax and wane)? I can also believe this is happening.

Like I said: it is unfortunate that CA law, insurance companies, or both are not using this as an opportunity to improve fire survivability in rural areas.

According to State fire officials (Cal Fire), the entire state of California will burn. It is simply a matter of “when.”

There is practical wildfire risk in the Bay Area. You should drive down 280 some time.

Much of the Bay Area is urban and suburban, with very little chance of a wildfire ever threatening those homes. Why stop writing policies in those areas?

wildfire insurance isn't saving lives, the state does that via fire departments.

I tried to get car insurance in California last year. It was so absurd I just sold the car.

Have you considered moving to any other state rather than just trying to live without a basic necessity of life in America?

I live in one of the "any other states" (Washington) without a car quite comfortably. A lot of us can't or don't drive. It's nice to not have to put up with car insurance companies.

Hello fellow car free Washingtonian! Selling my car was one of the best decisions I ever made.

As a car lite person, this comment is condescending. As much as I'd love if it were the case, efficient public transit is not a thing in most parts of the country. A car is a necessity. California needs to greatly expand transit or figure something out quick.

Why is it condescending? I can't drive or at least I can't do it very well. But before that, my spouse and I had long since sold our car.

To me, it is more condescending to insist that a car is a basic life necessity. It demeans those of us who live without one.

What a weird take. If you do live in WA, you’re well aware of just how rural WA is. You full well know public transportation isn’t a viable option. You should also know that Seattle’s public transportation isn’t something to write home about. And you’re fully aware that commutes of >30 minutes are not uncommon, in part die to how unaffordable the greater Puget Sound if.

A car is a basic necessity of life for the vast majority of Washingtonians. Congratulations on being the vast, vast minority.

> You full well know public transportation isn’t a viable option.

I do not know this. I have over a thousand taps of my ORCA card in 2023. My wife has more. We have been as far north as Bellingham and as far south as Portland on transit. We attended the wedding of a friend's kid in Yakima by riding transit to Issaquah and taking Greyhound from there.

I don't appreciate being told that my actual, lived experience "isn't viable", especially when I know several other people who do it just the same as me. Not all of us can or want to drive. This is even more true as people get older.

> And you’re fully aware that commutes of >30 minutes are not uncommon, in part die to how unaffordable the greater Puget Sound

According to AAA, the annual cost of owning a car is $12,000. We don't spend that money, so we can afford to live closer-in where transit is better. I am not here to judge people who choose to move far away but I haven't done it and I won't. But even if I did, I could just move to where I already have acquaintances in Lynnwood or Redmond or Renton or Burien and take the bus just the same as I do today.

> I do not know this. I have over a thousand taps of my ORCA card in 2023.

You're in the vast minority who can take the Sounder, etc. Your scenario does not reflect the reality for the vast majority of Washingtonians.

> I don't appreciate being told that my actual, lived experience "isn't viable"

Yet, it isn't viable for the vast majority of Washingtonians.

> We don't spend that money, so we can afford to live closer-in where transit is better.

Congrats on being wealthy enough to live in a place where ORCA has any value. Most Washingtonians do not.

You do, in fact, live in a transportation bubble. You need to acknowledge that your transportation bubble is not viable for the vast majority of Washingtonians, so your premise that being car-free is do-able in Washington simply is not a reality for millions of Washingtonians.

This is exactly the same blinders we see on r/seattle. Those who call for elimination of cars are privileged enough to live in Seattle and don't seem to recognize other's do not live in Seattle (or commute to Seattle from where most public transportation is not effective, viable, or possible).

I’m with you in spirit.

But WA has 7.7M people of whom 3.9M live in Snohomish, King, or Pierce counties.

I agree a majority needs cars, but it’s hardly overwhelming — and worth remembering that half of people live in a narrow, urban bubble. A lot of WA’s political strife is caused by this.

Building your life around transit means making choices. Building your life around a car means making choices too. If the quoted TCO of owning a car at $12,000/year is accurate, moving some of that spending to housing could make transit friendly housing more viable.

I don't think this poster was calling for removal of cars or whatever, just pointing out that it's possible to build your life without them. For at least some people.

There's certainly tradeoffs. Where I live, I could do many things with transit, but hours of operation are very limited, and direct routes are very limited. Sometimes, I can take transit to the airport and it makes sense, but on my most recent trip, getting to the airport would have been very stressful as the ferry canceled most of the morning runs on short notice and AFAIK, there's no reasonable alternative route without a private car. On the way home, there's no transit on my side of the ferry on a Sunday, and even if there was, it ends hours before I get there. If I needed to build my life around transit, I'd need to fly only during limited hours and not have any scheduling mishaps, spend nights in hotels a ferry away from my home, or move to a more transit accessible home.

At the same time, I don't complain that NYC doesn't accomadate my life built around cars. I choose a life built around cars, and so I avoid built up urban areas whenever possible. I hate paying for parking, so going into the city needs a good reason, and I would never want to live there.

Some people, when you say “you know it’s possible to get by without a car”, take it as a personal affront. No amount of evidence is sufficient. Any evidence provided is disregarded as “sure maybe for you but real people can’t possibly live in such a weird way”.

The person you’re responding to is one of those people. Don’t waste your time.

> If the quoted TCO of owning a car at $12,000/year is accurate

While you can certainly spend as much as you like (sky is the limit here), there is no need to spend such amount if you don't want to.

My TCO for my primary driver in 2023 was $2419 when accounting for every expense.

> Those who call for elimination of cars are privileged enough to live in Seattle and don't seem to recognize other's do not live in Seattle (or commute to Seattle from where most public transportation is not effective, viable, or possible).

I believe you fail to recognize that a lot of people who don't drive don't live in Seattle. Whether or not someone drives is not always by their choice. I have friends who are physically incapable of driving, yet because drivers tend to outvote and outweigh non-drivers politically, those friends are denied the transit service they would really like to have. And even when it is by choice, nothing says that Yakima or Spokane or Port Angeles can't have transit; most of them do!

I live in Seattle. My wife and I were born here and we will hopefully die and be buried here. It is our home. I have lived through decades of transit that would make a New Yorker howl in peril. It was not so long ago that our idea of a frequent bus route was every half hour, and the light rail (that began running after both of my children were born) stopped in downtown and at 11pm.

Seattle residents aren't a monolithic bloc but, generally, our push for fewer cars is because cars, and especially those cars driven in from places that do have quality transit to reach the city, cause a lot of problems for people outside of those cars. I really, really want to make it to retirement without being run over by someone driving into town who's late for a sporting event.

> Yet, it isn't viable for the vast majority of Washingtonians.

Not driving can be viable! It is viable, if not as convenient, in places you wouldn't think and might even consider are "too rural" or "too spread out." The fact remains, there are a lot of us in Washington who don't drive and, bluntly, I don't appreciate us being insulted or accused of having an excess of privilege or living in a bubble.

There may well come a day when you are not physically able to drive and I wish very much for you to have a robust transit and sidewalk and low-speed city setup that enables you to have independence and access throughout all of your days.

What an incredibly weird take that makes a lot of assumptions. For reference, I live in Seattle now, no car.

Prior to Seattle, I also lived in Texas and Virginia. Also no car. I moved to VA being unable to afford a car or insurance.

In many situations it is doable. But it requires restructuring how you life and where you live. I spend more on rent, but make up for that by not paying for gas, insurance or the many other small fees that add up. People get trapped into this idea that they need a car that they never consider the costs it has.

This is a very bad take.

Most WA residents live along the I-5 corridor in cities or surrounding suburbs, not in the rural parts. GP specifically lives in Seattle city limits, like about 10% of WA residents.

Also, GP is not trying to eliminate cars.

Usually telling someone to 'just move' is pretty rude. People have reasons to stay in the places they're at. Public transit is not viable in California at all. It's impossible. As someone who did 'just move' (and to the PNW, where transit is shockingly better), I recognize that this is certainly not a viable option for most people.

Events since 1989 show California has no intention of solving anything.

Since the quake?

Yes. So it feels. In particular the 1989 earthquake and the years that followed were put to good use removing freeways in the SF Bay Area (and not replacing them - nobody complains that the Embarcadero shorefront freeway should be removed but it's fair to object to the lack of substitution) - And abandoning the idea of elevated and double-decker freeways instead of doubling-up wherever else it could be. Highway 85 completed shortly after that (but was in the works long before that). By contrast, it feels Los Angeles continued on an optimistic path, when the Bay Area turned back (and for example fought new housing as much as possible). This is also the time San Francisco turned against visitors and businesses - working to discourage people from visiting as much as possible. And then turned on its own inhabitants.

I'm impressed--no sarcasm. Would you mind giving us a glimpse of your day-to-day?Except in Seattle near downtown it seems like there would be tons of challenges.

I'm in a suburbia (not rural), but we have more of a trail system than a lot of other places in the United States. There really isn't much I can't do on a bicycle, and when I absolutely need to transport something myself, which happens maybe once every couple of years, I've rented a truck for a few hours. My e-bike does most of the heavy lifting when my total travel distance is over 15 miles and I need to transport stuff.

I get up, check the weather, throw on clothes for whatever's happening, jump on the e-bike, buzz half a mile down to a gravel trail that runs north-south through my city, and go do what I need to do. I use panniers mounted on a rear rack to hold stuff. For groceries I tend to go to Trader Joe's which is in a shopping area off the trail about a mile and a half from my house. Hardware stuff I get from a family-owned place that's 7 miles away, 5 miles of which is on trails. Electronics is from a store that's sort of like Radio Shack on steroids that's about a mile from the trail system, but that's more like 10 miles each way. I don't need to go there often. Work is 10 miles away, 9 miles of which is on a trail. I park in a bike cage, and there is a locker room with showers.

thank you - super interesting answer to me. a lot of this seems like it was enabled in the last decade or so? or is the e-bike not even necessary

E-bikes certainly make it more accessible and I would highly recommend one if you are trying to drive less. Myself and many of my friends commute primarily by bicycle and get around fine on regular bikes, but our city is small and commutes are less than 5 miles.

I just bought a perfectly usable Class 2 e-bike with a rack for $1,100. I have several regular meat-powered bicycles too. Which one I take depends on how I feel. Sometimes I'm just not up for pedaling my way through a 20 mile round-trip errand and will put on my lithium legs.

Is this near Tacoma?

It is pretty straightforward. My wife and I live in a condominium unit just east of the University District. We take the bus or walk everywhere. I'm sad the Safeway has closed, but we have easy bus access to groceries at QFC, the massive Magnuson Park, the smaller Matthews Beach park, and a short hop to the train.

I am fortunate to be able to work from home most days. I work for a medical group and we have doctor's offices across the city and King County. I can reach all but one by a one or two bus trip when I need to go, which is rare. We have friends who have moved up to Everett and it's a two bus trip to go all of the way from Magnuson Park to downtown Everett.

The only "hard" trip is to go see one of our kids who has since moved to Tacoma. We try to time it when the Sounder is running (a few mid-day trips would be great) or take Cascades if we feel like splurging.

Thanks for sharing. Gotta love the U District, at least as constituted before the peaceful protests.

I spent nearly 20 years in an American state without a car. Plenty of people I know do the same

I'd say maybe a third of people I know don't have cars. In America. That's not a "basic necessity of life", especially when we're talking about well-developed regions like the west coast.

You must not live in the west coast if you believe it is “well developed”.

All west coast states are largely rural where public transportation is ineffective and cars are a basic necessity of life.

Even in large cities in California, it really depends on how much time you want to or can afford to waste on public transit.

Specific cases do work - or at least work better than the car-owning alternatives, for example major transit directions for short-ish distances in San Francisco. If your life revolves around a few of these, you are doing pretty well without a car ... and you still can't escape from that area without one. A significant additional "sweet spot" zone is where car usage has been made - deliberately and assiduously - unbearable. The choice is then about a lesser aggravation, rather then desirable service. And so we get the quality of life we deserve, and that's not great.

Nobody is arguing that YOU should own a car. If you are happy without one that's great and carry on. But that's rather specific situation.

fwiw Californian cities have some of the worst public transit of major metros that I have seen

like the Muni is cute and all but it’s a joke compared to the east coast systems i grew up with (wmata, mbta, nyc mta) many of which are in smaller cities.

Is there something in particular that causes you to be this aggressive to a complete stranger?

I just moved to Nevada from California.

My Nevada insurance costs half of what I paid in California.

Cause labor is cheaper in Nevada, people drive cheaper cars and there are less cars in Nevada on the road in general, so you are less likely to get into an accident. These are just the top reasons off the top of my head.

Also could be less fraud, smaller average liability claims, lower costs of litigation, etc.

Less rain and snow as well

Same for me when I moved to Arizona. California doesn’t let insurers use credit rates to price insurance, but Arizona does.

Thank god. I honestly sat here and tried and can’t think of a more regressive barrier to transportation.

I don't really understand. Geico gives you a quote instantly and let's you buy it instantly.

I'm in California and have been buying insurance like this for 20 years. Last time was 18 months ago. Basically instant.

Geico will not give you a quote instantly and let you buy instantly.

you say you last bought coverage 18 months ago. i said the market failed in december. i encourage you to try to buy coverage now and see. i was also surprised since i expected the previous situation of instant insurance to still be in place.

not sure why i am being downvoted, i encourage anyone to try for themselves

Yes. I tried to get car insurance in July in California and barely succeeded — I had to walk in to an AAA branch and they quoted me 2-3 times the Geico price.

Geico will quote a price but forces a 15 days waiting period. Then they’ll send you snail mail and ask you to send in a picture of your car within two days, by snail mail. This is the car you don’t have insurance on, so it’s probably still at the dealer’s or at the seller’s house! I think they’re not allowed to actually refuse to sell insurance but they’ll do everything they can to make it annoying enough that you go away. State Farm and the others are all equally bad.

I eventually was able to get well priced insurance same day through “toggle” which is a Farmers subsidiary, even though Farmers is no longer offering online applications and has 14 days waiting. AAA also was available but like you quoted me 3x the price.

I just got car insurance last week through Progressive in California. It was cheaper than the same coverage in Washington and activated instantly.

I also just got insurance from Progressive two days ago and I was told they would not do faster than 14 days in California.

Okay. Sorry they're jerking you around. But your experience is clearly not universal.

I mean, the insurance agent told me it was universal for all new customers of progressive in California. You are the only person on this thread who has said they had a different experience.

I am curious what makes it different, as I have no record and drive fewer than 2k miles a year.

How am I supposed to answer that? Either your insurance agent was wrong, or mine shouldn't have sold it to me. All I can contribute is my experience.

I concur, bought insurance for a new car early January and got it instantly using esurance.com (Allstate) by just entering my VIN. Yes, I am in SF/Bay Area.

interesting. i forget if it was allstate or state farm but one of them refused to do online and also refused to do fewer than 14 days out - this was like two days ago.

To be clear: I already had my old car insured with them for several years, so I just removed the old car and added the new car. I am also 50+ with no negative record and a garage in a single family home.

oh i am discussing for new customers, not people with existing policy - might be different there.

Coudn't even get someone on the phone at Geico in 5 hours 2 days ago. Wasn't happening yesterday either.

As for those refunds, Californians are still waiting for about $3.5 billion of the $5.5 billion that Consumer Watchdog estimates policyholders are owed for pandemic-era overcharges.

The matter still hasn’t been fully resolved, say the state’s insurance officials, who argue that rate hike decisions aren’t interfering with unfulfilled rebates.

“These are separate processes,” said Michael Soller

Don't forget fraud isn't covered in econ 101.

TBF, that’s overcharged in a very insurance-specific sense, not a mustache-twirling fraud sense. Effectively they didn’t adjust prices fast enough to the actual changes in risk, which on the whole seems like something best dealt with ex post, not ex ante.

> Effectively they didn’t adjust prices fast enough to the actual changes in risk, which on the whole seems like something best dealt with ex post, not ex ante.

If the insurers could have it their way, they wouldn't have to adjust at all (for overcharging), while avoiding undercharging ahead of time. Oversight is necessary to counter misaligned incentives.

Right, this is a reasonable compromise between stability/profitability of risk-buyers and fair pricing for risk-sellers. Prices are unconstrained at transaction, but outsized profits can be clawed back.

The point is no part of this is _fraud_.

How would they adjust prices for policies already sold and used, in the event the price for those policies was too low? Issuing refunds after the fact works in a way that issuing bills does not.

It is, it is just an adjustment in the cost of business (either positive or negative depending on whether it's coming from the business or the customer).

This has become a significant political issue in most states, and auto insurance is regulated at the state level. Many insurance commissioners are elected positions, and if not they are closely tied to the governor. No one wants premiums to go up during inflation, so there is government pressure like never before.

What happened is that with the shutdowns, profits went from 2-3% to 20-30%. Some of that money was given back to consumers, but most went into an absolutely insane soft market where every carrier paid more than they ever had to acquire any driver they could.

This led to a lot of carriers having drivers on their books that they really didn't know how to price correctly. Everyone realized at roughly the same time that they had screwed up more than usual - and that was when drivers got back on the roads. Suddenly frequency and severity of accidents were up to historic levels because everyone forgot how to drive and is driving ANGRY.

So there's a double whammy, it's drivers they haven't insured before on the one hand and the drivers they do know how to price changing their behavior en-masse. So we've gone from once-in-a-lifetime industry profits to massive losses. For the first time, when the carriers tell the government the price is unsustainable they actually mean it. Hence the California shut downs - carriers are TRULY taking a loss on most policies they write and are trying to shut down new customer operations as much as legally possible. You'll notice a surprising lack of auto insurance ads on tv compared to 3-4 years ago.

Progressive's underwriters are so far ahead of everybody that they got a lot of their price changes submitted before everyone (the other carriers and the government) figured out what was going on. You can see that in many states where the prices are public, in an incomprehensible data format. So they have been one of the only carriers still getting new customers.

It's basically been a state-by-state showdown now between state insurance commissioners and carriers, and the commissioners are starting to give in. Premiums were up almost 20% last year nation-wide and it's only going up.

Even Progressive last year said they were basically uninterested in new business.

> state insurance commissioner

As a Brit the fact this position exists AND is elected is bonkers to me. It seems like the US talks about a free market but has done everything possible to add voting and red tape all over the place.

That is when you realize "free market" means "our buddies at the top can charge whatever they want, and you may not compete". Same with healthcare, telecom, financial services...

state mandated insurance shouldn't be legal unless either the states or the insurance companies themselves carry the entire risk.

Car Insurance in the US has turned into a tax on the poor.

I don't mind the idea of insurance, but I do mind the idea of insurance companies trying to lessen their risk by getting the state to mandate everyone needs to pay for it. If someone is paying insurance and the other driver doesn't carry insurance and doesn't have the money to sue for it, that's the risk of doing business as an insurance company.

It's regulatory capture, plain and simple.

And lets not even get started on police enforcing it and writing tickets or impounding vehicles of people who don't have insurance. Who doesn't carry insurance? Those who cannot afford to. The state is literally causing harm here.

I like state mandated car insurance (provided by provate companies).

While there may be downsides, I'm happy to know that if a car hits me or my car, there is an insurance who pays (and it goes not to my insurer).

Whether the other car has insurance or not is irrelevant to you. Your car insurance is going to pay or not pay based upon their internal policies.

What the other car having insurance does is give someone for _your_ insurance company to sue to recoup their money. Most individuals aren't going to be worth sue-ing, but other insurance companies will be. And most major insurance companies are going to have in-place agreements so that litigation isn't actually necessary (because it's more expensive).

The other vehicle being covered by insurance is absolutely _no_ guarantee that _your_ insurance won't decide to declare the vehicle a total loss. I myself drive a 2004 corolla that's had a salvage title since the mid-2000's due to someone hitting me. I chose to "buy" the salvage title from them and that vehicle has been 100% solid. They scrapped it because they didn't want to fix the body damage.

The insurance have had their cake and are eating it too. They're not required to cover you, but you're required to be covered.

Maybe your comment is a bit US-centric.

I experienced once a minor car accident where another driver did some damage to my car (well, and his). There where no courts involved. Just one insurance company retrieving a bill (not mine because it was not my fault as the other driver and me agreed on (and used a form to confirm that) and paying the bill.

And my point is less about _who_ paid, but more about that _anybody_ pays. If two people without insurance hit each other, who's going to pay the bills?

yes, my comment was US-centric.

if two uninsured people hit each other then they sue each other, they come up with an agreement on money exchange, or they both go about their business and pretend it didn't happen.

at least in the US, the only difference between two uninsured people hitting each other and one or both having insurance is the party doing the suing changes.

of course, injuries complicate matters but it's all roughly the same. Someone has to pay, which likely means litigation without a gentlemans agreement.

But if someone doesn't have insurance what's the chances that you suing that person is going to actually recoop your money? right, probably not going to happen. That makes it a business risk for insurance companies that end up having to fix their customers car but not being able to recoop that money. So they convinced law makers to require insurance so the chances of that happening are far less.

^ to better explain what I was trying to say before.

People will pay for uninsured motorist protection and _under_ insured motorist protection. under insured typically means an injury happened but the other persons insurance policy doesn't cover injury (liability) or the medical bills exceed what they do cover.

Think about that racket. They insure you but don't want to insure you without being able to fully recoop their money so they charge YOU to cover the case where the other drivers insurance won't cover it all.

it's a frickin' racket. If it's required by law it needs to be covered by the state or the insurance companies themselves need to be required to cover it. Anything else and it causes undue harm to everyone, most especially those who cannot afford insurance in the first place.

I live in California and my latest insurance quote was $7k for the year for a family of four, with no accidents or tickets. If this is cheap I'd hate to know what expensive is.

My guess by family of 4 you mean two young adult children, which will significantly increase your rates, especially if they are male.

How many miles do you drive and what cars do you have? Do you mean four cars?! What cars.

I have two cars, an outback and a golf. Yes we do have two teenage drivers which of course is expensive, but they've had no accidents or tickets. We drive maybe 20K miles per year all together.

It's very similar to the dumpster fire that is PG&E electrical rates.

PG&E is a private company, but the CPUC has strict controls over it's operations. You can read the CPUC meeting minutes for yourself. Things like "PG&E would like to replace the chain link fence surrounding substation X at a cost of $150,000 - DENIED".

CPUC is a commission whose members are selected by the governor. They are the defacto decisionmakers. Yet Gavin Newsom will give quotes to the media on how "PG&E will need to be punished for it's mismanagement".

My only theory is that keeping PG&E private provides a convenient scapegoat for the utter mismanagement by CPUC.

Do they list the reason why they were denied? Something like: Utility attempted to charge $150k to replace $5,000 worth of fence with 10 hours of labor?

The utility isn't doing the work, they are hiring it out.

The reason it's denied is because more spending on infrastructure means higher rates. CPUC is trying to control rates.

For anyone interested you can read about the 2024 rate decision here: https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M520/K...

For example, PG&E wanted to replace gas service lines made "with Aldyl-A plastic that were installed before 1985" due to the risk of line failure.

The CPUCs decision was "PG&E’s request to replace unidentified services is denied. Moreover, the Commission does not find that PG&E has supported rounding up the number of services to be replaced by 73 per year."

It's a byzantine system of regulations that dive into the minutia of running a utility. Not to mention a lot of these decisions are by administrative judges since the regulations are written into law.

When I was getting ready to move to Germany in 2004, car insurance was one of my main to-do’s, as I was shipping my car over (only sensible if you’re involved with the US government) and my bank would only release the title for export when I showed insurance coverage. There was precisely one provider: AIU via Geico.

What luck, I thought! I already had a good Geico policy at Maryland’s max ($500k), because I was a very careful young woman with a bright career ahead of me that I didn’t want to bog down in legal debt should I cause an accident.

When I asked for the max, the saleswoman on the phone laughed. “You just need the minimum, sweetie.”

The minimum liability was a bit over 7.5 million EUR (15 million Deutschmarks, two years after Euro-ization). In Germany, you are liable for ALL costs associated with an at-fault accident, down to fixing the guardrails and traffic signs.

It was also $2700 that first year, because I was 24 with no driving record and a car I still owed a fair amount of money on, and only got one year of credit for my time in the US.

Forcing a grieving family to deal with medical costs from a crash they were victims of is inhuman.

Always buy the underinsured/uninsured motorist coverage. My daughter was hit by a car, the main payout was from my insurance, and not from the person who hit her.

Liability is everything, the cost of the car is nothing. Get the umbrella policy on your house. Buy liability insurance when you rent a car.

It's not just the medical bills- it's also the legal damages.

> Always buy the underinsured/uninsured motorist coverage.

Agreed. I'm a personal finance nerd, and it felt like an epiphany when I discovered this a few years ago, because it's rarely discussed but seems so important. I max out our UM/UIM coverage now.

Side note: My wife is a stay-at-home mom and I've long wished for a disability insurance product that would cover the economic value that she provides, i.e. cover the cost of daycare / after-school care if she couldn't care for the kids. As far as I can tell, there's no such product for people who aren't wage earners. The closest thing I've found is UM/UIM coverage, since the most likely cause of disability is a car crash. Presumably it would pay for at least some of the other things beyond medical bills.

> Buy liability insurance when you rent a car.

Why do you say this instead of just relying on the liability coverage under your regular auto insurance?

Getting the umbrella is good, because during the process they review the rest of your insurance (at least they did for me).

>stay at home mom

I'm in the same situation, it sure would be nice. We do both have life insurance at least.

>Why do you say this instead of just relying on the liability coverage under your regular auto insurance?

To be careful. If you don't buy it, make absolutely sure that your own auto insurance covers it. [also people who don't own a car won't have auto insurance..]

>Side note: My wife is a stay-at-home mom and I've long wished for a disability insurance product that would cover the economic value that she provides, i.e. cover the cost of daycare / after-school care if she couldn't care for the kids. As far as I can tell, there's no such product for people who aren't wage earners.

AD&D (accidental death and disability) is the closest you’ll come. It’s most commonly offered by workplaces I believe, and is not expensive. On the flip side the situations it pays out are pretty narrow.

The only other alternative I know of is life insurance but of course that covers death, not disability.

> AD&D... most commonly offered by workplaces

Like the employer offers coverage that extends to a non-employee spouse, like family health insurance?

I remember finding one product sold to individuals including stay-at-home parents a few years ago by Bright Peak Financial. Now I can't even get their website to load to see any details, so maybe it doesn't even exist anymore, but the coverage limits were pitifully low. Like it would cover only fraction of our childcare costs, and only for a time measured in months.

We definitely have term life coverage on her that will run until our youngest kid is a teenager.

>Like the employer offers coverage that extends to a non-employee spouse, like family health insurance?

Yes. I believe it’s typically offered for just you, you+spouse, or you+family - like health insurance. Lots of info on Google.

> AD&D (accidental death and disability) is the closest you’ll come. It’s most commonly offered by workplaces I believe, and is not expensive. On the flip side the situations it pays out are pretty narrow.

This is the problem. Those policies usually cover “unable to work at all” which is extremely narrow (some won’t pay out if you can do any job anywhere, even if you were a doctor lawyer 10 programmer CEO before).

You can find a policy to cover stay at home spouses, but they’re often somewhat custom, expensive, and only pay out until children are X age. Long-term care can also be added, even more.

>>My wife is a stay-at-home mom and I've long wished for a disability insurance product that would cover the economic value that she provides, i.e. cover the cost of daycare / after-school care if she couldn't care for the kids.

There is absolutely disability insurance for homemakers and non income spouses in the USA. I've written that exact policy both individual and for employers / employees.

If you get a loan on a vehicle also get GAP insurance. It's stupid cheap, $10-20/mo. I had a car stolen and totaled that I owed $26k on. USAA, who were absolutely horrible to deal with after 20+ years of using them, was only willing to give me the "Local cash market value" - this means they open up craigslist and look for the cheapest private party car of your model. This is not hyperbole.

They gave me $15k. I went from a beautiful 2008 Lexus IS350 to a $2500 2001 Honda CRV because I had no money to buy a car with other than the cash I had left over in my bank through bo fault of mine. It was actually even worse with lot fees after the police found the car and impounded it, etc. But that's another story.

GAP covers that, and car thefts are up at a massive scale now. I get GAP on every car and if the dealer has some anti-theft option I get that too. I bought a car last week and I think it was $900 and if the car is ever stolen or wheels stolen over 5 years I get something like $5k cash. I'm also going to put a DroneMobile system in it.

Don't get a car stolen. Garage it if you can. I used to have that "USAA will cover me! hehe! no worries if it's stolen!" naivete until it happened.

I seriously can't explain how rude they were to me. Had a fraud investigator come to my house and grill me in the most despicably rude way possible. They acted like I tried to get it stolen or something to get out of the car payment. "I've had this car since it was new, never missed a payment, and I I'm still employed making $YZ money. Why would I try to get out of my payment by .. hiding my car? Leaving it open to steal?" I'm not kidding. It got stolen when I walked into a Walgreens to buy a frozen pizza.

Gap insurance covers a tightly-bounded amount of loss (it will never pay out more than the remainder of your loan), which is why it's so cheap. That's also why it's a great target for self-insurance - you know exactly how much you need to have to cover the worst-case loss. If you have the cash, you are almost certainly better off skipping this one.

If you have the cash you might as well just skip the loan, unless it’s unconscionably low.

For new cars you can sometimes get really low loan rates that are lower than inflation. IMO it's basically free money to take out the loan.

I work in insurance. Local cash value is normal. It’s not a Craigslist lookup, it uses industry standard published tables and is the same across all companies. People are frequently shocked that they are underwater on their cars so much, but it’s worth what it’s worth, car insurance has no reason to cover loans. As you found out, GAP is insurance on the loan itself, most lenders will strongly encourage GAP coverage or even mandate it.

where do they get the data to publish in the industry standard tables?

There was absolutely no way I could walk into anything but the most decrepit used car dealer and walk out with a car anywhere near what I previously owned for what they gave me, completely unrelated to whether or not I had a loan. The KBB was around 20k dealer. They gave me the crumb not fully loaded non F-sport (a $5k package) private party low end. $15k was shockingly low. Mine had like, 15k miles and the 15k range had over 100k. Their criteria seemed to be "Lexus I of some sort, cheapest." I don't think the IS250 was even normally that low.

Maybe it's what they all do, but it sucks. And it's not what a lot of people expect.

We had our i3 totalled a few years ago. Insurance company guy was transparent and said he'd gone to our version of Craigslist here in Norway, found i3's of same age and similar milage, and took the average.

As such I could definitely buy a replacement with the payout.

While I'd much rather be without the experience, I was almost pleasantly surprised by the insurance company.

That’s what progressive did when our older car was totaled by hail. It wasn’t just Craigslist but it was some similar ones available- and averaged. They’d go buy one for us, or give us the cash, or (what we did) is give us back the car and most of the cash.

You may have been able to push for a better settlement if you saw their comps and noticed they were not actually comparable, but at the end of the day, no insurance company will give you more than local market value. If you're underwater on the loan and the value doesn't cover it, that's om you. I never buy GAP; if you need to buy GAP, you should be buying less car.

Yeah I really had no idea what powers/options I had in the situation. The way they treated me made me seriously want to somehow get them to recover a LOT of money I had to spend (around $4-6k in impound lot fees they wouldn't pay). They pretty much went out of their way to make me feel like I should be grateful they helped at all.

I was maybe 23 and definitely didn't have money for legal help. I hate how I let myself get treated.

Don’t beat yourself up over it. But also, post the learnings not just the mistake without the context only for both of them to come out later after people point them out.

GAP comes on leases too pretty standard these days.

FWIW our car (2014 RAV4 EV) was totaled in California in 2018, and the insurance payout pretty much exactly covered replacing it with a near-identical new model (actually a bit lower mileage!) from a local used car dealer. I think we actually came out a few hundred dollars ahead.

We were insured with Travelers.

I’ve wondered since then if that’s how it usually works out, or if we were a lucky fluke.

Travelers does well with that. I switched after I was in a not at fault accident (other side was a commercial vehicle, fully insured, 100% admitted liability) and got screwed over by my own insurer (low ball offer on the value, stalling on giving me access to the comps until the night before the offer expired, reneging on rental coverage, threatening to not cover something with PIP...)

I have two "new" cars (2019 and 2021 model years) that I've had since they were less than a year old, and have new car replacement on both.

Travelers is relatively unique in that their new car replacement is up to 5 years, not 1 as most are (some go to 2 or 3). NCR also integrates gap coverage.

If my 2021 RS 5 gets totaled two years from now, I get a check for 110% of the MSRP for a 2026 RS 5.

You may have done some, but you can negotiate with the insurance company and either seek legal help or file a protest with the department of insurance if they are not in good faith servicing your claim.

It seems like the industry has some pretty strong incentives to standardize on the lowest possible values in those tables.

Further, what does “worth” mean if you can’t take the amount of money you were given and easily purchase a car of the same make, model, year, and condition?

Particularly when you add on them keeping your car and parting it out or whatever. I got screwed on that pretty hard... they "forgot" to document all the options and packages (my car was intact, generally, but totaled due to airbag deployments). Even tires (look, I am realistic, I don't expect that to account for much)... I'd just put new performance tires ($1,700) on them 400 miles prior (yay for the odometer reading on the receipt) and they weren't affected by the accident, but the adjuster looked at a scale of "New / Like New / Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor" and described them as in "Fair" condition. When I balked at that they upped the offer by $60, $15 a tire. If it wasn't for all the drama associated with it, I'd have bought the car back and parted it myself.

I had a two year old Audi A4 totaled. I expected that I'd get about $24K for it (this was a couple of years ago). My insurer offered $19K. I asked to look at the comps, and sure enough, most of the comps were between $22K and $27K. Except one, from a shitty little dealer 150 miles away for $12,999. There was obviously something up, salvage title, or some other issue. But they shrugged. "Doesn't say so on the offer, so it's a valid comp".

My two cars now have new car replacement coverage for 5 years that also wraps in gap coverage.

It absolutely is a local craigslist lookup— I followed up with one of the dealerships USAA called (6 hours away from where we live, with all of four cars in their "lot") to clarify how their valuation was provided. They explained that Vanessa (the USAA agent) simply asked how much they would sell a VW TDI for if they were a VW dealership. The high-school aged secretary said she didn't really know, so agreed that whatever value Vanessa offered sounded reasonable. This was the value they were willing to pay when their drunk client smashed through my parked car in the middle of the night in his BMW on the way back from the opera. "Industry Standard published tables" must just be the title on the top of the sticky note from her calling around.

The whole thing was an absolutely miserable experience completely stacked against any sort of reasonable resolution, and USAA was caught in so many lies it still irritates me years later. I'm sad that this is so clearly a continual process for people day to day.

Lol, wild. Mine was also a drunk lady slamming into my parked car. I had absolutely nothing to do with the theft and accident at all. And I was treated that way. I was actually out drinking for my birthday and my car was parked (downtown where I lived) next to a bar my friend worked at and he called me.

where does the data in those “published tables” come from?

I also had a terrible experience with USAA. I don't know what happened to them, but it is a rotten company now. I switched to Country Financial recently as I can at least talk to a person without a nightmare phone tree there.

A bit of a tangent but this is one of the biggest reasons I don't buy new cars. The depreciation in the first few years is astonishing. You are immediately underwater and will be until you've paid off at least half the loan balance (this is not the same as paying half the payments).

My previous car was new, but only because we were buying a minivan and there were significant new safety features just introduced. But totally agree that buying used makes sense if there's not a significant difference in functionality.

There are brands (and probably is market dependent too) where this isn’t always true. Where I live, a 3 year old Toyota or Honda costs 10-15% less than a new one. In that case, it doesn’t really make sense to buy a used one if you can afford it.

Still, I also buy cars used. But I go ~10 year old, from a reputable low maintenance brand and model.

My personal opinion is that if a vehicle's loan value would ever exceed the value of the car, you can't afford it.

Well, your car's value plus your disposable assets.

But I agree. A lot of these problems are solved by not buying such expensive cars.

Being expensive is not so much an issue as it is buying a car that will depreciate faster than it can be paid for, because that's how people get in over their heads.

It's not just expensive cars, people are putting tiny down payments on cheap new cars financed for long terms and they're under water for years.

Not everyone buys a car to sell their car though. Some of us buy vehicles to keep, collect, race, trade, etc. I could not care LESS what the value of my 2 sports cars is in 15 years unless it soars to the moon for some reason and I become a millionaire.

This isn't /r/frugal fwiw.

I know, I have a few vehicles without plates in my garage :)

I’m talking about the people buying cars for transportation who are in a financial situation for which GAP insurance might be a concern.

Unless you’re going to put 40% down, you’ll have a day when the loan balance exceeds the value of the car.

My last car loan was at 0% (meaning the only cost of financing was the insurance company profit on the collision policy that I had to take because of the loan). No way am I putting down 40% on a 0% loan.

I could have charged the car on my credit card for the points and paid it off 45 days later; it’s not a matter of being able to afford it.

Not at all, something like a used Tacoma on a short financing term will not need anywhere close to a 40% down payment to stay above water.

I have a 3% loan on one of my $25k cars I race because my money makes 8-10% in the markets and having $25k sitting in them vs giving to a leinholder dropped me 3-4% yoy on it (3% loan), but it still isn't 0, or negative it's in the +4-8% range. I also take tons of 0% loans year through year. You can utilize debt and credit to your gain it becomes more of a "Ok I will pay you $30k in 3 months instead of right now because my money sitting here makes more than you charge me to borrow or less than the money makes sitting in my account paying you 3%." You know, those 4.5%+ SAVINGS accounts right now?? I make TWICE that in the market.

It's not smarter to bypass Apples 0% interest financing on a $3500 macbook or VR headset than drop the $3500 that will now make %0 interest for you immediately.

Some of you (all of us?) were taught some moral/ethical line about not incurring debt by our ignorant boomer parents who follow the "don't ever be in debt!!!" mantra, which is literally impossible nowadays. And they are INSANELY in debt. Almost every boomer home owner has a reverse mortgage!! Your boomer parents were rich at $50k. We are not. My boomer parents had a $150k 3500sq ft house. I have a $3100/mo 1300sq ft townhouse. Living good on that $.79 Clinton gas.

Learn financing.

I pay my boomer parents rent now because they royally fucked up their finances. Do not listen to boomers for financial advice. And I mean the bobbleheads on TV as well. I guarantee a LOT of you will be paying your parents rents soon. My moms 71. They were stupid beyond belief with their money. Just remember all the trash they bought in the 1990s, 454 cubic liter 2500 HD suburbans? Hummers? Massive houses?

Go torch your Kiyosaki books and everything else and throw that $1500 Camry you've driven for 35 years in the trash and spend the whopping $20k on a modern car that can survive a collision and enjoy your life. Who gives a fuck if you're rich at 75 when you can't do anything, that new cars compound interest isn't saving your retirement or not.

If you want no replacement, replacement value, or loan value it's pretty clear that those or separate coverage and options. It sounds like you just got the wrong level of coverage and blame USAA for that more than anything. TBF, if you used them for the loan, I'd kind of question the proper insurance not being suggested at purchase time, but if not... it's kind of on you.

FWIW, I have USAA and had the almost exact same thing happen to me in 2020 - car stolen and totaled. They paid me a really fair deal on the cash back for the 2yo crosstrek.

It probably helped that it was a cut and dry case - the thief took the keys from inside my house and I called the cops seconds after I saw him drive away with it.

I’m sorry this happened to your daughter and you!

As someone with two kids, can I ask, does health insurance not work in this situation? I ask partly because at the moment we own no cars. If health insurance doesn’t cover it I’m wondering how we should insure.

So she was a pedestrian when she was hit (she's OK, but messed up two years of her life). This makes me wonder if it's worth owning some crappy car even if you never drive it, just for the privilege of having auto insurance...

Anyway, yes health covers it but they are first in the line getting reimbursed, even before the lawyer- which I think sucks, I mean what am I paying them for?

> but they are first in the line getting reimbursed

Sorry about the incident. Do you mean the health-insurance company tries to get reimbursed? From who? the auto-insurance of the other driver?

You can get car insurance without a car. It's inexpensive and available from most (many?) insurance companies.

> I mean what am I paying them for?

The reimbursement right that the insurance company has is called subrogation. The basic idea is that whoever was at fault shouldn't be better off because the injured party had insurance; otherwise it would be rational for individuals to not have insurance as long as most other people do have insurance. Subrogation means someone will still sue you into the ground even if the person you hurt was made whole by insurance. There can be many links in the insurance chain before you get to the person who actually caused the problem, and in your case it sounds like UMC was the final link.

At least, this is the stated public policy reason for subrogation. You are right that your health insurer got reimbursed even though they promised to cover your loved ones, and that feels weird.

Your insurance will cover your children even if they are not listed in the insurance contract. Being redundant to be clear: if a random driver hits a pedestrian child, parent's auto insurance will cover the costs even if they are not involved in the accident. The insurance company may chose to not pursue legal action even if they pay for the costs. The injured party can still do.

Agreement. My wife was in a crash with an uninsured (and, as it turns out, unlicensed and with outstanding warrants) driver. Everyone was uninjured, thankfully. Our car was a total loss.

The only monetary payout we got was our uninsured motorist coverage. (Seeing the lady who hit her get arrested at the scene and taken to jail was nice. Our insurance company pursuing her in court was also nice, too, though having not been thru the experience before we were taken aback when my wife unexpectedly received a summons to testify.)

I max'ed out our uninsured driver coverage after that.

Why is it so hard to go after the person's assets? In a just world, everything she owns should be sold and the proceeds handed over to her victim.

These people usually have no assets.

They own nothing and are happy. Or in jail.

It’s called being judgement proof and basically lets you ignore civil penalties.

Oh my God is this why the city of New Orleans doesn’t pay squat on judgments?

A decade ago, I was "judgment proof" after a decade of drug dealing and general degeneracy... the person I was then allowed me to be the phenomenal asshole we are all capable of channeling: fuck you, I got nothing! "Blood from a stone."

Life is so much simpler, yet more satisfying, now that I've lived long enough to secure away a few assets. God willing, we'll all live long enough to not be the pieces of shit our youth/ignorance once allowed.

----

I read the other day that 20% of male Millenials are currently uninsured.

I’d expect around that percentage to not even have a driver’s license.

Most people have negligible assets beyond where they live and stuff like clothes. Legal settlements can't generally force people out of their homes.

If they are that poor they probably are renting anyway, so there is no house or property that can be claimed.

What about next month's rent?

Ahh yes, California needs more homeless.

Know your state laws. Uninsured often only applies if you can prove they are uninsured. Uninsured people will hit and run, so if you don't catch their plate, you are out of luck. Make sure you have a dash cam. And if you do catch them, good luck getting any compensation from someone with no insurance. You will likely have to sue them just to collect 10 dollars from them for a couple months before they disappear. Best case scenario, they go to jail.

Isn't best scenario is you get your money back?

Why wish for people to be imprisoned?

Why wish for people to be imprisoned?

Hit and run can be a grave crime. You might be leaving someone for dead.

So they don't do it again! He wants to protect _you_ and you're mad about it?

So that there's an incentive for people not to hit and run.

Seems to be working eh

That scenario doesn't happen; you can't get money from someone who has no money.

(Theoretically, you might be able to get money back if it's a rich person who loves the thrill of driving without insurance or something. Theoretically, you could also find a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk after the crash.)

They could go to prison for a hit-and-run, or driving without insurance, as those are crimes. But not having money is not a crime.

This exactly, thanks.

I just think it's odd the best scenario for you is for them to go to jail instead of paying you back. Might be rare but I find it strange.

> Why wish for people to be imprisoned?

Because they're the disposable element of the population who does hit-and-run accidents.

Why is uninsured a separate category from insured driver insurance? The insurance company should just pay out regardless of the characteristics of the other driver. What if they are wearing a funny hat instead of a serious hat?! Seems like a scam by the insurance companies to pad their premiums.

It's because each coverage covers specific causes of losses. The pricing of the coverage needs to be justified by actuaries. It's a very competitive market, so they can't just "pad their premiums"; another company will undercut the price.

I can buy coverage to repair my vehicle if it’s damaged in a collision where I’m at fault (“collision insurance”). I can buy coverage to repair my vehicle if I’m not at fault and the other driver is under-insured (“under-insured coverage”). Same for another driver at fault who is un-insured.

Those are different risks and not everyone wants coverage for all of them.

>Why is uninsured a separate category from insured driver insurance?

Because if another driver hits you and that driver was insured to cover all the damages they caused then their policy would cover you and you'd never have to make a claim on your own policy.

There's a lot of different types of insurance you can buy:

Liability - this is mandatory. Covers damages paid to other people caused by you.

Everything else is, typically optional.

Collision - Covers damages to your car paid to you caused by you.

Comprehensive - Covers "act of God" situations paid to you like tree falling on you car, hail damage.

Uninsured/underinsured coverage - Covers damages paid to you caused by other people who weren't carrying enough insurance to fully cover the loss.

My car got hit-and-run'd while parked in a hotel parking lot, and there was no evidence of who did it. I filed a claim with State Farm and the repair process was super smooth. I paid my deductible and they gave me a rental, and that was that. It's the only claim I've ever filed, so I don't really have anything to compare it to.

Insurance can or can't be easy depending on 50000 circumstances. What you just described is worst possible situation for many people.

- a 1200 dollar deductible on a car worth 4 grand is a life ruin-er for some people.

-if insurance decides to total your vehicle and you have to dispute the value, absolute nightmare.

Personal story,

I am 7 months in awaiting my court date for an uninsured dude that totaled my buddys car I was driving. It's my buddys extra car, no UIM or comprehensive coverage. I paid 7 grand to fix it out of pocket, because his insurance would have totaled it and charged him deductable. car is valued around 4k or so, despite being the cleanest 0 legacy on the planet. all new paint, mechanic owned. Other motorist hasn't paid a dime and is ignoring all court orders.

Insurance has done fu** all for all of this.

The thing that confuses me is the wild swings in prices between carriers. You'd think that the underlying underwriting strategies are fairly similar (convergent evolution, regulation, and likely everyone watching everyone else's behaviour).

The market is aggressive enough that there are ways to scrape and analyze your competitors' rates. Hell, Progressive spent years advertising that service explicitly.

So why will the same coverage on the same car for the same person vary by hundreds of dollars per year?

I'll just pull out the standard "hakfoo solves all the problems with civilization" hammer and say this should be a state-run monopoly. The math of insurance is based on having the biggest, most diverse risk pool to sop up any poor bets. Parceling out the population among different carriers works directly against that. Spending millions of dollars a year to remind me of your name and logo works against that. Needing have redundant C-suites and agent staff works against that.

I know that some (higher priced) insurers offer much better service and less hassle in the event of an issue.

I do not have enough experience to speak to this, but I have heard others in the auto repair industry complain about how insurers like Progressive are very cheap about replacement parts for damaged vehicles - opting for the lowest cost parts no matter the quality, instead of paying more for OEM parts. That might help account for some of the differences in cost between providers.

This is absolutely true.

There is a pretty staggering difference in terms of how the different insurance companies pay out their claims -- everything from how they dictate services and hourly rates within their Direct Repair Program (DRP), and to the parent's point, where they set thresholds on the percentage of parts on a claim/repair which can be:

  * OEM (e.g. genuine parts from the auto manufacturer)
  * vs. Aftermarket (e.g. 3rd party clones)
  * vs. Remanufactured (e.g. picked up from a salvage yard)

In general, higher-end insurance companies that charge higher premiums tend to want collision repair body shops utilizing majority or even all-OEM parts, whereas other "cut rate" insurance carriers typically try and get body shops to utilize mostly or all Aftermarket parts, some of which can have very questionable reliability.

My company has many clients in the automotive and collision repair industry, and we've even built a number of parts procurement platforms for the US and Canada markets -- in one of those applications, we specifically had a module that put in the DRP part allocation requirements for each insurance carrier, and to run reports for those carriers to show body shops that were in compliance vs. out of compliance with those requirements.

State run car insurance monopolies exist. Check out BC Canada. As a customer, it’s slightly more than I was paying in the US, but less than I would pay in neighboring provinces. There are some weirdnesses (have to renew/sign up in person through a private agent) and concessions to politics (insurance agents as mentioned, and senior citizens are guaranteed a discount regardless of risk profile).

It works, but it isn’t leaps and bounds better. It’s still possible for an accident that you aren’t at fault for to absolutely ruin your financial life.

I was paying to ICBC twice as much as I was paying to Progressive in US. And yes, that's with me brining my good driving record to Canada.

Insurance coverage in Canada was higher, but I couldn't go any lower.

I heard, that the province make the ICBC to spend money on road safety measures. I don't think US insurance companies has that expense.

Not sure when you moved, but ICBC changed a bunch of how they calculate payouts in 2019. My insurance went down to slightly higher than US rates after that, but used to be way higher.

ICBC does do road safety campaigns, but it also handles vehicle registration and licensing as well as driver testing and licensing. I don’t know if any of that extra stuff is funded by insurance premiums or if it is all from taxes and fees.

I think ICBC is worse than the private options available in other provinces.

Auto shops are charging them through the nose to fix all these German cars that get in accidents, and then the premiums for those drivers never go up by any significant amount.

ICBC had a bunch of money they had collected from premiums, 800 million or so I recall, and the government took it from them to flitter away on whatever, so the surplus paid in insurance premiums becomes another form of tax, Instead of ICBC being able to reduce premiums or needing to compete to offer the best price

AFAIK the premiums we pay are lower than other provinces. I know that Alberta and Ontario are higher.

The BC liberals did loot the ICBC insurance pool of 1.2 billion dollars calling it ‘dividend payments’, which realistically should have been premium refunds. When the NDP regained power they passed legislature to prevent this in the future, and ensure that ICBC operates as a nonprofit, which is why there were several premium refunds throughout COVID.

The unfortunate part is that ICBC doesn’t have a very complex premium structure. So you do end up with silly shit like a car with high cost of repair being insured for the same amount as a much cheaper to repair car. As a monopoly they are also required to insure all drivers no matter how bad the risk which means that we all pay to keep people on the road who should not be driving.

The problem with state run monopolies is that without competition they are rarely effectively managed. The obvious solution is to have multiple state run companies compete but then weve reinvented all the problems were trying to solve.

I think there are two reasons for these "inexplicable" pricing differences.

One is that different insurance companies specialize in different things. For example, if you want to offer the best rates to good drivers, you might actually want high-risk drivers to go somewhere else, or at least compartmentalize them so that your prime clients can still pay favorable rates. But if you do that, another company will show up and specialize in the customers you're walking away from. There's enough competition that no single firm can have it all, and there's definitely a lot of divide-and-conquer going on.

I also suspect that there's a multitude of ways to end up with a specific risk profile, so there's plenty of more or less random divergence on the tail end. Some insurers get where they want to be by giving discounts if you install a monitoring app. Others if you're in a "safe" profession. Etc.

> The math of insurance is based on having the biggest, most diverse risk pool to sop up any poor bets.

Sort of? Sometimes? There are diminishing returns, especially for car insurance where claim limits are fairly modest - I doubt it makes much of a difference if you have ten million versus a hundred million customers. A state-run monopoly has a comparatively weak incentive to make the math work, because it can always count on being propped up by the taxpayer - and if not, it can charge you more or offer worse service, and you can't do much about that.

Private monopolies share some of the same problems, so I wouldn't root for either. Thankfully, the car insurance market in the US is pretty competitive.

From the perspective of a private insurer, you do not want as diverse a risk pool as you can get. There are groups that you can reasonably anticipate are at high risk of being a bad bet. In many cases you want to encourage them to either change their behavior or seek an alternative provider. Either way, this looks like a high rate.

Telematics often makes it easier to figure out who those people are.

> Telematics often makes it easier to figure out who those people are.

Surveillance capitalism, insurance price hike edition. That's just great.

In a great many cases, insurance rates drop. Sometimes quite sharply. I've seen as much as a 50% drop.

Auto insurance is inevitably surveillance capitalism. Insurers always look at aspects of life your life and behavior to establish your risk profile. Age, employment, the kind of car you drive, your driving record, and more all have a measurable impact on your risk.

Telematics mostly makes things cheaper for good drivers. It also sometimes gives insurers a chance to try to nudge drivers towards safer behaviors, both through direct messaging and through higher prices for drivers with higher-risk behavior. Whether this is a good idea or not is a personal question, though for my own part I tend to think that underpriced insurance for operators of heavy machinery is not a human right.

Driving risk is in a large part driving by driving behavior which is a characteristic that is under control of the individual.

Monitoring that directly and pricing on it is far more fair than pricing on correlated hard to change attributes like being male or being young or being poor (credit score)

Also it’s a lot creepier for companies to run a file on people and get all that and more info sent over rather than just getting sent over how the person drives.

The appeal of diversity is to avoid systemic risks.

For example, I recall talk about some automakers offering insurance (often as part of an all-inclusive subscription model)

You'd have some very distinct systemic risks with that pool. If you had a Toyota-style sudden-acceleration crisis, or a Hyundai/Kia style theft crisis, you'd have a lot more exposure than a conventional insurer who accepted a broad range of models.

I'd expect there are other obvious systemic risks, like geographic limits (if you cover a wildfire area, you're paying more damage/loss claims), or restricting to some specific professions (which might track with specific damage patterns or vehicle choices)

Naively, yes, diversity avoids systemic risks. However, from working in auto insurance it was my experience that insurers reason about risk in considerably more sophisticated ways.

For one thing, in the US auto insurance is entirely a state-by-state market. This means that geographic diversity is inherently severely limited. Any auto insurance operation in California is going to be exposed to a lot of wildfire risk without the ability to geographically diversify. This is priced in.

For another, there some groups of people - remember auto insurance is really mostly about insuring people - who are statistically more expensive risks than other groups. Young men are measurably less safe drivers than middle-aged women, to pick an anodyne example. Individual premiums reflect this as well. I have no idea what kind of systemic risk would uniquely affect all middle-aged women across an entire state, but presumably you can think of one.

Most insurers have groups of customers they would prefer not to have. This is usually because the insurer cannot cover them at cost, never mind profitably. There's a series of ways they encourage those customers to find other carriers. This is where the idea of maximizing diversity breaks down most clearly - the overall risk pool is not improved by including these customers.

> The math of insurance is based on having the biggest, most diverse risk pool to sop up any poor bets.

If I were running an insurance company, I’d want a pool of low-risk drivers, whatever my actuarial research showed that to be. Compete for them on price and, if forced to serve all comers, offer worse pricing for those my research shows to be higher risk.

USAA started on the premise that military officers were a good (low) risk population of drivers to insure.

Car insurance rates in FL are among the highest in the nation and my rates keep going up. One of the drivers to this (no pun intended) is that so many motorists here are uninsured or underinsured (and many are not even licensed), as we are only required to carry $10k in Personal Injury Protection and $10k in Property Damage Liability, and many people carry just that. It’s also a “no-fault” state, which for simple fender-benders works pretty ok, but for more serious accidents can get very complicated and costly. It’s why we have so many personal injury attorneys and our cities are saturated with billboards shouting things like “DAN NEWLIN GOT ME $800,000”.

We have a whole grifter-industrial complex built around milking your own $10k PIP for any little thing that happens.

I was hit by an incompetent driver and burned through $40K in medical expenses of the $50K mandatory PIP in my state. It is a nice thing to have when it's needed.

> One of the drivers to this (no pun intended) is that so many motorists here are uninsured or underinsured (and many are not even licensed), as we are only required to carry $10k in Personal Injury Protection and $10k in Property Damage Liability, and many people carry just that.

This could drive up the price of full coverage (i.e. uninsured/underinsured motorist insurance), but you're not required to buy that. In principle it should also reduce the moral hazard of insurance -- if people have less insurance then they have to be more careful about causing damage because if they do it comes out of their own pocket instead of the insurance company's, or puts them at risk of being charged with a hit and run if they flee.

The actual problem is that too many people don't own anything anymore, because otherwise they would want to carry insurance to protect their assets. Leave too many people poor and desperate and you can see what happens.

What is the police doing? Uninsured motorists are illegal. They could perform routine traffic stops, ask the motorist to produce insurance, and if they don't have insurance send them straight to jail. Get these people off the roads.

It should be easy for people to grok that by having a large number of uninsured motorists on the road, their own insurance premiums are increasing. Thus, people should be petitioning the police to catch more uninsured motorists. Why isn't that happening?

Florida is a lawless dystopia. I still get pushback when I say this, but after living a good 25 years here and also 6 years in California for comparison's sake, I feel I've earned the right to make the pronouncement. Police basically do not do anything useful here.

Are you implying the police are active in California? Isn't theft insane there right now because of the lack of policing?

They are pretty useless there too. California is also a lawless dystopia in many ways.

These days automatic license plate readers can trivially be wired up to insurance databases. A cop car can just automatically know who is insured and who isn't just watching the traffic go. But it's hard enough to convince cops to pull over people with obviously bogus or expired paper tags.

Imagine simping for more surveillance.

I'm just acknowledging the technology is already there and often already installed. If they're going to surveil me they might as well actually do something useful and get uninsured motorists off the road.

Drag racing on the highway

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/investigation-cops-regula...

But they don't need to do insurance spot checks - in my state they run plates of cars that are in view and, presumably, they are alerted if you don't have insurance.

Here in British Columbia, the car insurance system recently received a massive overhaul. Car insurance has long been a public monopoly that many complained led to higher prices than in other provinces. That much may be true. But the recent overhaul involved eliminating the right to sue in most cases, instead requiring the insurance company to cover the long term healthcare costs of the injured. No longer do the victims of accidents have to sue for a settlement.

Of course it’s not perfect. Some people have been injured and then felt they received less care than they would have otherwise under the litigious system. But on balance I think this change is likely for the best. It closed of an externality that previously led to a great deal of unnecessary expense (on lawyers), recognizing that car accidents are largely random.

At a bare minimum, everyone should purchase uninsured motorist insurance to the maximum degree possible. If you are injured by someone from out-of-state or someone who has no insurance at all, you will need it.

> recognizing that car accidents are largely random.

I think maaaaaaaybe that was more of the case twenty years ago. But these days, inattentive drivers distracted by you-name-it are the cause of many accidents. It doesn't seem random at all.

> everyone should purchase uninsured motorist insurance to the maximum degree possible

Absolutely agree with you there.

Random as in you're not deliberately targeted by the loathsome subhuman creature piloting the weapon without paying any mind to its surroundings.

They are not at all random. In fact almost everyone’a insurance is more expensive because insurance companies are not legally allowed to use the highest predictor of risk besides age.

I believe responders believe I am dog whistling for ethnicity, but aren’t considering things like family structure, whether you grew up driving, and hours of the day you drive.

In my state those factors are all used.

Gender?

35 year old mothers vs 19 year old sorority girl? You bet.

> She quickly discovered that there was little hope of that. The driver who killed Seamus had just $100,000 of liability coverage per victim

This is pretty wild. The legal minimum coverage in Austria for cars is 7.6 Million Euro (6.3M for personal injuries and 1.3M for property damage). Apparently in most US states the minimums top out at 50k (however they are per victim). Seems widely off though.

At least in my state, an umbrella liability policy is fairly inexpensive. Mine does require that I also maintain liability coverage on my cars and home so it only covers liability in excess of that, therefore it's not too costly. If you own a house and have assets such as retirement accounts it's probably something you want to add.

I do agree that the minimums have not really kept up with inflation in healthcare costs. A $50K liability minimum would only cover a few days' care in a hospital, any serious injury would likely cost several multiples of that.

Cars in general are just getting bigger and more expensive to repair while our insurance liabilities are not being scaled for that.

On the flip side, I wish the fed gov't would regulate vehicle sizes such that we don't have such an arms race for bigger cars.

We really should be upping the minimal liabilities for cars. That might be the only thing that would really push our local gov't to invest in safer driving infrastructure along with alternative transit options. Vision Zero in many cities have been extremely lacking in comparison to our european counterparts.

> Cars in general are just getting bigger and more expensive to repair while our insurance liabilities are not being scaled for that

This is a good thing. Let the victims get stiffed to force them into smaller and more fuel-efficient cars.

Many years ago I upped my liability coverage from $15k/$30k to $100k/$300k, and I was surprised how little it increased my premium. It was a few bucks a month. A no-brainer.

I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to go higher.

In bc Canada, where insurance is probably too expensive, the normal coverage is 1million cad, with 2million being the new norm ( I have had 2 million coverage past few years).

Yeah the gap between 1 million and 2 is so small that you might as well get 2.

In Quebec, the license plate cost ($230 per year) also covers all injury. This means that the private part of insurance, only covers damages to things, which is rarely millions.

This blend of private/public insurance results in super cheap rates, while keeping injury insurance in place.

Both BC (full public) and Ontario(full private) have higher rates for the same coverage. 2x as much per year.

I've heard that before but did not notice a material difference in my insurance moving between Ontario/Quebec. Is it mainly for new drivers or those otherwise more expensive to insure?

I do know that I pay almost $400/year* between my license and registration in Quebec which would be ~$0 in Ontario. As well as a lot more for gas.

* I have a "luxury" car because it cost > $50k CAD (about $38k USD) and therefore is so-defined by the province (a Volkswagen). And Montreal imposes extra fees.

Interesting, re:Ontario. They dropped the fees during the pandemic. I am not sure it will be a forever thing.

But the insurance fees were 1/2 the price when I moved here. I don't know if that has changed a lot?

I carry $1M on my vehicle plus an umbrella policy of $4M.

I just now changed my limits to $300k/$500k, and the monthly premium increase was—not joking—about $3.50.

That was the highest choice I had through my provider’s app. I might give them a call and see what else I can get.

Nice work. It's such a tiny incremental cost (if you're already carrying a policy) for a massive increase. You accidentally rear-end someone with a g-wagon and that $3.50/mo is really going shine.

If you wanna go higher then you'd purchase an umbrella policy. They are affordable though and pretty much a no brainier for anyone who has any sort of assets they'd like to protect.

I have a two million dollar umbrella policy.

Yeah I have $500k/$500k liability that (no collision - my car isn’t worth much) and it costs $100/mo and another $5m liability with $1m UM and that costs $25/month so I’m a little confused about the comments around liability being expensive - in my experience it’s the collision coverage that is so expensive I think the annual premium for it was going to be like ~10%-15% of the insured value of the car

And the liability premiums aren’t linear. Most claims are for the smaller amounts, not common to have multi-million dollar claims (though it does happen), so that fifth million of coverage is cheap.

The thing is, say I get sued for $100m. It’s great for my victims that I paid extra all these years for $5m in coverage, but I’m going bankrupt either way.

Indeed collision on an older vehicle often doesn’t make sense. And could result in your vehicle prematurely salvaged.

The dollar amount is basically “how hard will the insurance company’s lawyers fight for me?”

If you have many millions you need much different insurance than normal plebeians.

Not really - if you’re involved in a bad auto accident you are going to be sued - ending up with a large judgement against you (because your insurance only covered $300k of a $1m judgement still leaves you on the hook for $700k) is a horrible outcome, rich or poor.

You want liability protection such that your assets (whether small or large) are unlikely to be impacted by a reasonably foreseeable outcome I.e. $300k of liability covers 55% of likely outcomes vs $3m covering 85%

Agreed - I wish I had better data but it just feels like a low seven figure outcome could realistically be the outcome of many serious traffic accidents I’m solving for a 3rd standard deviation event but only having a couple hundred thousand of coverage feels like your solving for the lowest 1-2 quartile of outcomes.

Can you share which company your $5m policy is with? I'm considering umbrella coverage, and $25/month is a crazy good deal.

Most companies that do home AND auto will offer it. The trick (not really a trick) is that the umbrella can ONLY be added after you maximize coverage on home and auto.

Check the bogleheads forum for discussions on insurance.

> the umbrella can ONLY be added after you maximize coverage on home and auto.

This isn't universally true - I have an umbrella policy with USAA. They require me to have a minimum of coverage on my home and auto to have the umbrella policy, but it's not the maximum they offer. It's a couple tiers down.

Of course, the price for the umbrella policy might depend on your home/auto coverage.

Chubb - you need to go through a broker and I should note i also have homeowners insurance that has some liability coverage which I suspect also influences the umbrella rate - just find a broker that sells Chubb/aig/natgen/travelers that cater to high net worth individuals (you don’t need to be one! I had a renters insurance policy from Chubb right out of college) But those policies tend to be more customizable - and my experience is that they’re more inclined to pay claims

I think the system (adjusters and courts) might be used to $15/$30k which may limit how often and how much they need to pay above that. If a lot of policies went up to that level, maybe the system would adapt, the payouts would increase more, and so would the premiums.

My insurer tops out at some lower figure, like 350 or something.

Does anyone know how to get higher limits?

Umbrella insurance.

Most umbrella policies require you to carry a certain amount of homeowners and auto liability coverage, and then they add additional coverage on top of that. It's relatively cheap (hundreds of dollars per year for millions of dollars of coverage).

Hundreds? I think most umbrellas would be thousands in a year.

My umbrella policy is ~240/year (either 1M or 2M coverage; can’t quite remember which).

It also scaled fairly linearly.

They're not. I've been getting many million dollar umbrella insurance every year, as well as quotes from different providers each renewal cycle, and they're consistently in the "few hundred bucks" category for a married couple. I'm also not a super attractive insurance customer, so it likely can be cheaper for others.

Definitely hundreds, mine is $372/yr for $1M/instance, atop my auto/home coverage (250/500 for the auto).

The thing about it is: your risk doesn't change because you have extra coverage. All that actuarial work is priced into your base coverage. In fact, they may even have factored in that people willing to voluntarily buy umbrella coverage are a little less risky than their model predicted.

Nope. That's not typical.

When I originally got my umbrella policy around 10 years ago the cost was about ~$120/year for $2million in coverage. I'm currently paying $183.47/year for $2 million in coverage. Covers myself and my spouse.

One tip if you do buy umbrella insurance: never tell anyone you have it. It makes you a more attractive target.

I've never seen an option to choose the liability cover on insurance, I didn't know it was a thing. I just checked my policy and it is up to $20 million NZ ($12M US) per event.

How much do you pay for car insurance in the US? Mine is 1,200NZD per year, about 730USD

You need to specify how many miles per year to somewhat compare since the risk is directly proportional to amount of time on the road.

I pay ~$50 per month for 5k miles per year for $500k liability coverage and uninsured/underinsured coverage.

But I also have a few million in umbrella coverage, so not sure if it’s even comparable.

I pay ~$440 a month for two vehicles. My buddy in PA thinks it’s because I live in New York.

Some states have weird laws that affect prices, too. I once got hit while in MN, and the insurance company had to pay out for the cost of a new body panel. The shop gave me the option of a new panel, or a refurbished one off of a scrap car.

It looked identical when they were done, but I ended up getting a check cut for half the value of the new panel because the used one was so much cheaper.

As I was in college at the time, a free $800 made my day.

I could see the state requiring new parts because of unscrupulous insurance companies insisting that shitty used parts were fine: but it’s nice you had the option of taking the cash. Best of both worlds, really.

Really, in the long run all it does is make your premiums more expensive.

> insurance companies insisting that shitty used parts were fine

That's not up to the insurance company, because they aren't the ones sourcing the parts or doing the repairs. You go to a body shop that either works directly with the insurance company, or the company cuts you a check in the shops name for the quoted work.

It makes no sense whatsoever to put a brand new body panel on a car that's already lost 70-80% of the MSRP value to depreciation... IF the used parts are not damaged already, and the paint matches. Again, though, that's in the hands of the mechanic, not the insurance company.

About 8000km a year, so just under 5k miles too.

Also you'd need to iterate everything about the insurance regulations in that location since the types of events that insurance pays out on can vary quite a bit between US states, let alone across oceans.

Some places have insurance laws that will make people say "wait, car insurance pays for that?"

Also, most of the reason US car insurance is so expensive is due to the cost of healthcare, which is paid for in other ways in many other countries.

About $1900/year, for two ICE vehicles (no liens), 300k/500k liability (per person/per incident maximums). Maxed out deductibles for Collison/Comprehensive on both. I just added a $1,000,000 umbrella policy at $500 a year though it would be nice to double the coverage there.

I use Geico and they give a breakdown of the cost per vehicle. My full size pickup is double the cost of my wife's mid-size SUV, which I cannot argue against.

When you say maxed out deductibles for collision and comprehensive, do you mean you picked the highest deductible? Or lowest deductible which would mean max coverage but also premium? I’ve always wondered about the value of collision and comprehensive, since it seems to be one of the more expensive parts of car insurance

Maximum deductible is taking on more of the risk yourself.

The first dollar in any claim is always paid, the last dollar hardly ever, so the first dollar is worth more. Maximum deductible also reduces the chance you’ll involve insurance at all. Why report a $200 fix when your deductible is $1000?

Comprehensive insurance is for when you CANNOT afford to lose the car. If it would be painful but you’d survive, you probably don’t need it.

> I’ve always wondered about the value of collision and comprehensive, since it seems to be one of the more expensive parts of car insurance

As a general rule - You should buy insurance on something when you both 1) have to have it and 2) can't afford to replace it.

Once you can afford to comfortably absorb a loss equal to the value of your car, you should consider dropping collision and comprehensive. For me that's when the car is worth less than around $5k.

Do it. Then get personal liability for your net worth on top of it. The peace of mind knowing that no one can sue you for more than you're worth is priceless.

"The driver who killed Seamus had just $100,000 of liability coverage per victim."

That's actually several steps up from what the insurers pitch to you as "basic".

A screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/JVe2flB

The 3 numbers are per person, per accident, property damage. Above 100k per person is 7 tiers up from their recommendation. Though, to be fair, the incremental cost is pretty low...~$9/month to jump up to that 7th tier in this example.

Also, I wonder if the issue is wholly "cheap" insurance or is it also expensive health care?

Just to put this in perspective, in Australia $20M third party insurance is compulsory. You can not register the car without it. The cost is about $500/year.

Whatever you say. For years after I purchased a new car, my car insurance was basically half of my car payment. I haven't had an accident, which was a minor fender bender at a light, in over 15 years. My rates were so ridiculous that I thought it would be better just to buy another car and lower the insurance to the minimum required.

And when you need the insurance, even when you are not at fault, they immediately raise your rates. What were you even paying them for before if they just raise your rates to repay themselves?

The point of the article seems to be that the minimum coverage rates people are required to get don't come close to paying the medical bills of car accident victims. It's not a consumer argument, it's an argument about externalities.

Bad headline for sure. The coverage by law is too low.

> For years after I purchased a new car, my car insurance was basically half of my car payment

Different cars have very different insurance rates, it’s a big part of the TCO. If you aren’t rich enough not to care, insurance rates need to be considered early on in any car purchase decision. I don’t even know how much my car insurance costs because it’s too small to matter because I have a basic paid-off car that’s cheap to insure.

Insurance rates were actually the deciding factor for me not buying a Tesla 3 a few years ago (before the carriers seemed to figure out coverage and risk for them a bit better). The insurance was going to be stupidly high, making the TCO with a decent loan (around 2% at the time) to be like $1k/month. I was like, I do not need to spent $1k/month on a car, so I bought a used Porsche for cash instead and pay almost nothing for insurance in comparison.

The car was a Kia...

The key is what’s being insured and what is driving the costs.

If you go from junker with just liability to new car with comprehensive, liability, and gap, you’re greatly increasing what is insured and how much it costs.

Usually it is all broken down in the quote or bill.

Kia's insurance is high now because they are being stolen a lot.

Aren’t the North American Kias easy to steal? I remember various articles.

If you can afford the fancy car, you may not need coverage on your personal vehicle. Once again the purpose of insurance is to cover something unlikely that would be a significant burden.

Did you shop around? Ask the agent whether there may be discounts you could be eligible for that you haven't taken advantage of? If you've been accident free, your risk profile does diminish.

It's meaningless to compare it against your car payment. You can customize your loan so much that it gives no insight at all. You can change the down payment, change the duration, etc. These parameters can easily result in 10x variation in your car payment.

There’s no surprise why drivers are worse to anyone paying attention around them. It’s TikTok and similar apps. There are stupid assholes in droves on the road doing 80 while scrolling through videos. If you keep an eye out you’ll start to notice the growing abundance of people doing this in the left lane of the interstate and relying on active lane keeping to keep them on the road.

It’s an epidemic of people addicted to their phones who won’t set it aside for 20 minutes to drive somewhere. It’s that simple. The knock-on effects is they enrage everyone else and create a generally more aggressive environment.

How can 1 out of 8 driver be uninsured in that country? Aren't the cars supposed to be registered? The state isn't checking that registered cars are also insured?

You technically can't drive a car off a lot without proving you have insurance coverage (at least in every state I've lived in), and, when you re-register your car every year, you'll again need to prove insurance coverage; failure to re-register deprives you of a sticker you'll need to keep from being pulled over. So in that sense, the system coheres.

But insurance coverage can fluctuate over the course of a year, because unlike with health insurance, there's no annual enrollment period; people switch insurers, or miss bills, or sign up ruthlessly for a month of insurance to get past the state bureaucracy and then just never pay again.

There's the SR-22 system, which is a court order to maintain insurance at minimum levels, which you get for getting repeatedly pulled over without insurance (or, perhaps, for getting pulled over without proof of insurance and then not proving you did get coverage afterwards). But that's not a fix, because you can only enforce it at police traffic stops.

>failure to re-register deprives you of a sticker you'll need to keep from being pulled over

My car is insured and registered, but it has been the better part of ten years since I actually bothered to put a new sticker on the plate. Maybe there are places where cops try to more actively police expired plates, but it certainly doesn't seem to be a thing around here.

> failure to re-register deprives you of a sticker you'll need to keep from being pulled over. So in that sense, the system coheres.

anecdata, but in my town of 60k people, any one drive I do I couldn't even count on my hands the number of expired temp tags (I've seen over a year old), and expired registration.

It really _feels_ like people don't get pulled over for that anymore.

I get pulled over for it constantly, including within the last year. Chicago.

My state (WA) doesn't check for insurance at registration, as far as I know. I renew in December so it's pretty recent and I can't remember ever doing that. Also, realpolitik: my city's police simply don't do traffic enforcement since 2020 (Seattle). You could probably go a long time with expired registration here as long as you didn't leave city limits.

it's required to have it, but in my state (ohio), you only have to prove it if you cause an accident or get pulled over by a cop

the poor or un-insurable go without and just hope they aren't caught

Anecdotal, but since I started cycling I’ve noticed an absurd amount of cars have license plate tabs that have been expired for years. There’s even a Porsche Taycan in my apartment that’s been driving without plates for over a year.

It doesn’t seem like registration is enforced in any meaningful way.

It used to be, but there's a pandemic of the blue flu going around. Cops have been quiet quitting for 4 years because they want to be able to murder with impunity again.

Many states (like PA) have abandoned licence tags to save a few pennies. Unless you're a cop, it's impossible to know if any vehicle's registration is up-to-date.

And most cops no longer track this stuff visually either. It's my impression that most patrol cars today have autonomous cameras installed that check every license plate in their field of view for expired registrations and outstanding warrants.

Many police cameras likely do facial recognition too. (Numerous states subscribe generously to commercial services that sell face recog with no independent certification of accuracy, which is famously terrible, like a 90% error rate.)

Not American, what's a licence tag? And why isn't the licence plate enough to check insurance/rego?

They make you add a new sticker to the license plate with an expiration date and new color or other visual marker. This is to make it obvious whether taxes have been paid. But now they just have automatic license plate readers for that, (and can also log vehicle locations and look for warrants, etc). It isn't or wasn't enough because these systems are archaic and poorly designed (as I once found out after being pulled over at gunpoint for a DMV mistake).

> Many states (like PA) have abandoned licence tags to save a few pennies.

Or dropped the requirement for front plates. The best part about front plates is that they can drop off and remain at the scene of the accident (or embed themselves in the bumper) during a hit-and-run.

In Texas, if you don't get in an accident, cops will rarely spot that your registration is out of date and definitely won't check if you have insurance. If you do get in an accident and are lacking a driver's license and/or insurance and/or current registration, they'll take the report, maybe issue a citation and usually just let you leave if the car can drive.

Some states do communicate with the insurance companies. However, sometimes the insurance companies fail to notify the state (or the state fails to record it) and we get to have a friendly police interaction and sort the whole thing out in court.

I imagine past some threshold, even if the cops do know that someone isn't insured it's just not worth running a whole anti-uninsured-driver campaign.

Too many articles with a kid getting hurt or dying. As a new parent these are so much harder to read now: I feel like I can just start to understand the pain the parents went thru. In a blink your world is turned upside down and your joy is gone.

I have two teens. It doesn’t go away.

Just keep in mind that the world, including and especially car and pedestrian safety are much better now than in the past. Still hurts to read about these accidents when they happen though!

I agree that there are too many articles about relatively few incidents, but that's what people want to read about apparently, so that's what the news people give us.

Pedestrian safety has gotten significantly worse in the past few years in the USA as people keep buying larger vehicles. The USA is much less safe for pedestrians than most developed countries.

There should be much stricter regulations on drivers ability to see to the front and sides of their vehicles. I'm not quite sure what other regulations would force better engineering for pedestrian/cyclist safety. Policymakers should put more effort into discouraging people from buying vehicles that are significantly larger than they really need, and making large vehicles safe for everyone on the road, even at the expense of possibly making them more expensive, less convenient, less cool looking, or slower. After-market modifications which compromise pedestrian safety should be strictly banned from city streets.

Personally I think manufacturers should be partly liable for damage caused by their vehicles.

The natural way would be to price this into insurance premiums, using a high value for human life. It would require that the premium depend on the vehicle model and the expected damage it will do. An SUV model with bad visibility that crushes toddlers, would have a high premium. E($100M * number of crushed toddlers).

Can't we just ban the toddler crushers instead of restricting them only to the wealthy willing to pay for the privilege?

Some people need vehicles with significant size or hauling capacity: delivery trucks/vans, long-haul trucks, ambulances, fire trucks, buses, tow trucks, vehicles used by tradespeople and farmers, etc. At least some of these vehicles are inevitably going to be on streets with shops and residences. But the vehicles needed could be re-engineered to be at least several times safer for pedestrians/cyclists if it were mandated, and many of the large vehicles on the road could be made smaller and lighter without compromising their drivers' needs.

And the military needs tanks and bombers. That doesn't mean just anyone should be able to buy them for joyriding.

We're inevitably going to have delivery trucks, buses, fire engines, some number of pickup trucks (or comparable), etc. on city streets, so under the circumstances we should try to make them as safe as possible (whether by forcing them to be lower to the ground and have more windows in front, requiring them to add cameras, limiting their weight, giving them a slower speed limit, limiting where they can park, ...). The owners of such vehicles should also be required to pay for the external costs their choices impose on everyone else.

Instead we effectively subsidize these vehicles by giving them special tax breaks.

Vans have good visibility as well as more cargo capacity than the shiny $100K pickup trucks mostly driven in cities by non-tradespeople. The engine bays on modern pickups are unnecessarily large. It boggles the mind that there is no regulatory pressure in the US to make pickup trucks safer for pedestrians.

Occupant safety improved, but pedestrian safety peaked in 2009 and is now back to the level of 1982, with death numbers continuing to climb.

15 years ago most cars had good visibility, and pedestrians getting hit rolled over the vehicle's hood. Now people prefer vehicles with much worse visibility and hoods that hit pedestrians like a freight train instead of like a scoop.

Pedestrian safety is great if you don’t cross highways at night and aren’t drunk.

If you're in a state that isn't regressive, teach your kids to jaywalk. It changes your view from focusing on the traffic signals to what the cars are actually doing. I don't think I go a single day without seeing a car flagrantly run a red light. There are no more rules and kids need to understand that.

At my university, the drivers are very used to stopping to let students cross, but a lot of people don't seem to look around or even lift their eyes from their phones. If I tried doing that, I'd be really nervous that I would be the one where a driver unfortunately doesn't stop in time. I really don't get those people.

I don't think GP is suggesting that you step out in front of cars and hope for the best, but rather that you cross in places other than those which have been deemed for crossing. In theory, walking a half mile to a crosswalk, waiting 30 seconds, crossing when okayed by the light, and walking a half mile back should be "safer". But just walking across the road when safe requires an understanding of how traffic works and how to judge safety.

It might be Baader-Meinhoff phenomonon, but In the past two days I've seen multiple pickup trucks hopping the curb in places that I find shocking, so I'm becoming more inclined toward taking safety into ones own hands. The system clearly isn't working.

Oh, I know. I just mean that if I would be too nervous to emulate the people who cross without looking.

Seconded. On bicycle, I learned the Idaho stop techniques - treating stop signs as yield signs, and treating red lights as stop signs.

The most important thing I got out of this experience is that traffic signs and lights are suggestions. A red light usually means stop, but sometimes it is safe to go. A green light usually means go, but sometimes I must stop to avoid getting T-boned or cut off.

The only absolute rules of traffic are observation and physics. I predict other road users' behaviors and avert dangers, regardless of what the traffic signs/signals say or even if they're absent. For example, I slow down or stop near blind corners, even if there is no stop sign - and there have been times when vehicles popped out. I always look left and right even when I have the right of way, even when crossing a green light, because time and time again this trust has been broken.

That sounds very low. Here in Denmark (where health care is a lot cheaper). The required liability coverage is around $20 million covering both treatment and compensation. Obviously the amount they pay out would normally be a lot less then in the US.

That makes a lot of sense. What are the policies on underinsured motorist coverage minimums?

The mandatory liability insurance covers any damage done using the vehicle, independently of who is driving it.[0]

If there is no insurance for the car, I would assume that normal laws regarding liability apply. There is also punishment for driving without a license[1] or without insurance[2].

From [1], a man with no license or insurance was jailed for three months and fined 100k DKK (15k USD), but this also includes drug offences. He also cannot legally drive for 5.5 years.

From [2], the vehicle is impounded the third time you drive without a license within three years. The first offence incurs a fine of 7000 DKK (1000 USD) and the subsequent 8500 DKK (1230 USD).

From [3], if you lend your vehicle to a person that drives recklessly, the vehicle can still be impounded and sold. The owner is liable for traffic infractions, but the owner can't lose their license because of what the lender did.

[0]: https://www.if.dk/globalassets/dk/files/privat/ipid/ipid-bil... [1]: https://viborg-folkeblad.dk/viborg/koersel-i-biler-uden-plad... [2]: https://sikkertrafik.dk/rad-og-viden/bil/korekort/boder/ [3]: https://fdm.dk/alt-om-biler/bilen-hverdagen/bilforsikring/na...

A common reaction in the comments is that healthcare costs too much and I don't disagree but my first reaction was "I lived 20 years in places with amazing public transportation and didn't have to deal with this at all" Those places were Seoul/Singapore/London/Paris/Amsterdam/Berlin/Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto Like, I just didn't need a car at all. Rarely missed one.

While these cities might make cars less common per head of population, there are still cars. So if you cross a road you could still end up in the same scenario couldn’t you?

The US has a wicked combo of big vehicles, high healthcare costs and insurance options which don’t cover expenses.

As a contrast, I’m in New Zealand where you don’t have to purchase insurance, but healthcare will be paid for by the state.

yes but if there are less cars then there are less accidents. If there are less accidents then the insurance companies need less money to cover them and so the cost of insurance doesn't need to go up as this article suggests.

The article's solution to too many accidents is to raise rates but another solution is less accidents.

I know it's a recurring theme, but it's just stunning to me every time again how cruel the US health and employment system is. In any half way affluent nation, no one whose 2 year old is on the brink of death should have to worry about how to pay for the hospital stay, or the days off of work...

The article explains that insurance /coverage/ in the US tends to be inadequate, which has nothing to do with the pricing of insurance. My first reaction to the title was surprise that insurance companies would be willing to price the risk too cheaply

Agreed, it’s a very poorly worded title.

The article does state this though:

  According to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (apcia), a trade association, last year insurers paid out $1.08 in claims for every $1 in premiums they took in.

The business of insurance sometimes has good (profitable) years and sometimes has bad (losing) years. That’s why insurers work so hard to invest and spread their risk over multiple years. I got a dividend from State Farm during the pandemic because they had an unusually profitable year, and they re-distributed some of their profits to policyholders.

Another aspect is that insurance companies can make money on the float, and this can potentially let them be profitable while paying out more in claims than they take in (or at least netting out to paying out what they take in). That’s assuming that they can effectively invest the premiums.

Buffett successfully applied this strategy with geico.

Errr the pandemic profitability and refund was extremely abnormal.

It was due to the lockdown where essentially no one drove for several months and then there was reduced driving for a year is so.

The refunds were also not done willingly, they were done due to DOIs demanding it and peer pressure.

I wanted to fault them for this too, but it's an inescapable result. Liability premium costs always moves in lockstep with the rate of coverage, as it has to by probability laws for an insurance company to be viable.

It's unfair and a drag on everyone to have such high rates be the norm, but it's really indicative of deeper problems in society (or at least certain areas) that the insurance company has little to no control over. I moved from a very low crime area with adequate policing to LA, and the difference in insurance premiums is nuts.

Eventually I was the victim of a hit-and-run (not while inside my car, thankfully). A witness gave a description of the vehicle and where it fled to (within a 1 block area). Police report was filed. Crickets. The car was an old shitbox so I only carried liability. Now I'm just without a car. I briefly looked into getting a newer car now that I make a lot more money, but the premiums are just eye watering. I'm lucky to work remote.

I imagine many other law abiding citizens have been through very similar situations here. When one party in an accident is likely to be uninsured, unlicensed, or just allowed flee the scene, it's no wonder that insurance companies have to pass the cost onto everyone else who pays for insurance. To say nothing of other cost inflating phenomena like the increasingly proprietary design and overengineering of cars that are totaled by a fender bender. Insurance companies are businesses and have to remain profitable. I hate it, but this is the system we've built.

> The car was an old shitbox so I only carried liability. Now I'm just without a car. I briefly looked into getting a newer car now that I make a lot more money, but the premiums are just eye watering.

Carrying only liability insurance continues to be cheap even in California. The problem with getting a newer car is that either the lender requires more expensive insurance to protect an asset that they partially own, or most people have emotional attachment to a new car so they don't want to carry just liability insurance. That's why premiums are eye watering. It's difficult for most people to fathom buying a $50k car (about average new car price) and say they don't want to protect it.

> To say nothing of other cost inflating phenomena like the increasingly proprietary design and overengineering of cars that are totaled by a fender bender.

I looked into this and this is actually a trade off between cost to repair and cost to manufacture. Newer car designs like Tesla's "gigacasting" simplify manufacturing because they can use one machine to make one large part, whereas in a conventional car the equivalent might be 100 parts welded together by humans or robots. Even when welded by robots, it is much more time-consuming and lowers throughput in production. Thus, auto makers consciously choose manufacturing techniques to lower the selling price of the car, knowing that they are increasing the price of any repair.

"The hospital charged the couple’s insurance $180,000 for his care" - this sounded like a health insurance problem than car insurance.

Typically health insurance is first in line, but will then try to assign this to the proper insurance company based on who is covering the actual source of the damage. If it's just some health thing, then it stops with the health insurance company. But if it's a car accident (or work related, etc), the health insurance company will go after the car insurance company (or worker's comp, etc) as appropriate. This is fairly standard, but still there might be some arguing and lawyers and whatnot.

The consumer/patient/victim is last in line and doesn't need to be overly involved in these arguments between insurance companies - but it does become a big problem if none of the insurance is enough to pay the bills, and the person who caused the damages doesn't have money either. The victim gets stuck with whatever bill is left. You can sue the at-fault driver, but that's little help if they don't have money. More effective is to plead mercy and negotiate with the hospital. If you owe them $200k, that's more their problem than your, if you don't have it. And they've already gotten maybe (hopefully) $100-300k from insurance anyway, so maybe they'll forgive the rest or setup a payment plan for $50k or whatever. None of this is good! But there really is no good outcome when someone gets smashed with a car.

One reasonable remedy would be to increase the required liability coverage to $1M or more - enough to cover the amount of damage one can do in an automobile. Of course then only the people who care about these laws will have it. We'll still have an uninsured motorist problem. Now that I think about it, maybe they should make proof of car insurance required for registration. Why don't we do this already? Registration is much easier to enforce (there's a sticker on your plate in the US).

180k is a lot but also my guess is that having a trauma team work on you is quite expensive - pretty much no other time in someone’s life is someone going to be getting direct work from so many high-wage professionals.

Note that the family was on the hook for ~4k. That seems to me to be insurance working as expected.

We don't have to have this unproductive debate, because you can just switch the scenario to an accident causing death and be right back where we started in terms of demonstrating that $100k coverage lines are not enough to cover the externalities of driving.

No it is not. Insurance companies get a bad rap, some of it deserved. But you would be absolutely shocked at the amount of exaggerated injury claims and the amount of fraud encouraged by lawyers and doctors.

This is a funny way of saying "Healthcare in America costs too much." Car insurance coverage would be reasonable if healthcare costs were lower.

Car insurance can't be much more expensive, because it's already pricing out many drivers. This is just car insurance companies subsidizing healthcare--yet another example of how the entire US economy is subsidizing healthcare because we refuse to cut out the health insurance middleman corporations.

Car insurance is a particular injustice because many (most?) states require car insurance to drive--another example of corporate middlemen writing themselves into laws. There should never be a case where a law forces me to be a customer of a business--if I can't walk away from the price negotiation table the market isn't free.

Right, but if 50% of the people on the road are completely uninsured, the economy grinds to a halt because driving suddenly becomes a potentially bankruptable activity even for those not at fault.

Bold of you to assume that insurance would prevent you from becoming bankrupt.

In my state (and many states) you're only required to carry $10k in liability insurance. That's barely going to scratch the surface of paying for a car accident which causes serious injury. Add to this that most people who experience bankruptcy due to medical bills have health insurance[1] as of 2019, and it's clear that driving already is a potentially bankrupt-able activity. In fact, living is a potentially bankrupt-able activity as long as we insist that health insurance companies have to be a part of our medical system.

The economy ground to a halt for the poorest Americans at least a decade ago.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/health-insur...

The main reason our insurance cost so much is because there are so many claims. This is partially because our licensing is too lax, there is too much vandalism and storm loss, and the costs of the vehicles and health are is so high. Higher quality drivers will result in fewer claims and cheaper premiums.

If we had a comprehensive public transit network, then only the people who need to drive would do so. Then you could raise the licensing requirements.

More importantly however you probably want to separate out roads from streets in American towns, cities, and suburbs to reduce the number of accident prone interactions. As it is now, streets and roads are treated basically the same way and you get the abomination that are "stroads". By keeping them separate you remove all pedestrian and bike traffic from roads and you massively slow down car traffic on streets (along with removing traffic lights on streets).

"If we had a comprehensive public transit network, then only the people who need to drive would do so. Then you could raise the licensing requirements."

That's not a prerequisite for raising licensing requirements. In fact, claims tend to be highest in major cities that do have public transportation networks. So the people most likely to lose their license are more likely to have access to public transit.

Pedestrian and bike deaths are an extremely small percentage of road fatalities and injuries. If you want to make an impact on insurance cost through reduced claims, you need to take another action. Higher quality drivers through more stringent education and testing is the most comprehensive way to do that with the lowest infrastructure cost.

Note that not everyone would lose thier license. Many of the people involved in accidents today are ignorant and could be brought up to a possible level with better training.

That's not the issue. The issue is that in the regions where you do have good public transit, most of the drivers are commuting from places that don't. So until those areas have at least decent access to public transit, you risk excluding people from those areas from economic opportunities in the city.

So you still need a comprehensive public transit system. It doesn't need to be super regular or blazing fast but it needs to be viable enough that commuters can still commute if they can't get a license.

I'm not sure where you are, but most larger cities have public transit extending quite far from the city proper. Sure, the super commuters might be left out, but there's no reasonable solution for that use case.

This is the crux of the issue.

Ultimately no impactful regulation of cars/drivers is possible because it's impossible to survive in most of the US without driving. You can take someone's license or mandate they have $10 million of insurance but at the end of the day they'll just have to drive without a license and drive without insurance because in most places there's no alternative.

The solution is to stop building out our infrastructure in ways that make cars a requirement for survival. Give people an alternative and maybe then you can start enforcing stricter automobile regulations.

As a benefit you'd reduce all the other horrible impacts cars have on our society (health, pollution, costs, anti-social behavior)

It's pretty much an unfixable problem at this point given that we also have lost the ability to do infrastructure projects with anything resembling a sane budget or time table.

It's really not. Florida for all its wrongs is actually showing this to be feasible. Decades of attempts at building rail in the state floundered and failed over and over again but Brightline is finally actually making good stable progress.

And this isn't just some new company that popped up out of nowhere. This is more or less the same group that had been attempting passenger rail in the state for the last 15 years or so. What changed is they stopped trying to sell it as a public infrastructure project and instead sold it as a purely private project that is funded by bonds which only come out at a loss to the government when the project succeeds (and the companies have to pay back with interest if it fails).

But now that Brightline has been shown to be viable, politicians in the state are bending over backwards to allocate land for routes (for example republican politicians allocated a route along I-4 from Orlando to Tampa in near record time). They are pursuing their next sets of routes in the state including the aforementioned Orlando-Tampa route, an east coast up to JAX route, and numerous local commuter rail routes from the surrounding counties into Miami.

All it takes is one good success and everyone who was otherwise staunchly against it starts moving heaven and earth to spread the boon to their constituents.

Adding a few intercity links is good, but it's far easier than restructuring metro areas to facilitate public transit and pedestrians rather than cars.

I agree but however Miami already has decent transit for the city itself. It isn't comprehensive by any means but it's enough to make leaving your car at the local train station and commuting in viable for a lot of people.

What is missing in the area however are fast, cheap intercity links (until now) and more importantly fast, reliable commuter rail. Brightline (and hopefully soon to follow Tri-rail) rolling out fast, regular commuter rail to the lower third of the Florida peninsula would mean that south Florida would have rail transit viability (and range) comparable to the NYC metro area (which is probably the best "no car" metro in the US at the moment).

Drivers are getting worse and insurance companies are often mandated to cover all “good drivers” for some state-defined definition of good.

So I am basically subsidizing alcoholics and stuff because they can’t price that into the premium in California.

I knew a kid with ADHD in high school. There were days (game days) when he would intentionally not take his medicine, yet he would still drive. He had numerous accidents. One time he stopped behind someone at a stop sign. Then he rear-ended them because he forgot they were in front of him and he got caught up in looking for a gap to pull out. He totaled 3 cars before the end of high school.

Our driver tests are a joke. Driver quality seems to be decreasing significantly in my area. To make things worse, there is a massive shortage in driving instructors for new drivers.

Prior to December, I had only see 1 wrong-way driver in my entire 20+ years of driving. Since December, I have seen 4! One of them was on the freeway going up-hill and slightly around a bend - at night - which was extremely frightening to witness as people were dodging it at the last second due to poor visibility.

I've seen this happening more now. I have two potential explainations. First, almost all of the people I've heard of doing this have turned out to be really drunk or high when they were arrested or autopsied. Second, one is more along the lines of what you're saying with poor driver quality. Some people have an over-reliance on GPS telling them where to turn and have lost the ability to navigate for themselves (or even just verify what the machine is telling them is at least safe).

> Some people have an over-reliance on GPS telling them where to turn and have lost the ability to navigate for themselves (or even just verify what the machine is telling them is at least safe).

Perhaps we ought to start attaching jail time to people who drive the wrong way due to reliance on incorrect GPS as a soft form of eugenics. Keep them in a position where they aren't in a position to find love and reproduce for a year.

Most of it is not a genetic issue. Many of the people who rely on GPS so heavily have the capability to navigate without it, but ate too lazy and inexperienced to do so.

To be clear, there was a yellow line separating the lanes and they were in the wrong lane?

The examples I know of are usually on divided highways - they're on the wrong side of the barrier.

I have joked that I could train an above average dog to pass the California driving test.

Lawyers and fraudelent claims are a big part of the problem. My wife rear-ended someone at a slow speed and the other party declined ambulance coverage. They were able to drive home no problem. A week later they hired a lawyer and my wife caused the woman to have a miscarriage. Of course they were unable to provide any medical documents confirming even the most basic details yet the insurance company still gave them a payout probably because it was cheaper than paying attorneys to right it. A very similar scenario exists with condo property insurance. The lawyers make millions and the consumers premiums keep going up.

I got to see this world firsthand recently, though not as extreme, and while, at least, trying not to make this system worse.

I was rear-ended while stopped. Other driver was (otherwise) pleasant, had insurance. Made a huge dent in my bumper. Really shocking, but I felt fine and could go about my night with nothing but emotional damage. (My city doesn't even send police if there are no injuries and both cars are driveable.)

Everyone told me I should "get checked out", in case there was non-obvious injury, which I did, at an urgent care place, which charged more than it should, but not a crazy amount. The doctor confirmed I was unhurt from it.

Because I didn't know how much injury I had when filing the claim, I just answered "yes" on the form for that part, planning to fill in details later.

About two months after the accident, I got an email from their insurer offering me $1000 compensation plus up to $5000 toward any medical claims I could document (conditioned on waiving further claims against the other party or insurer).

My (very naive, paladinesque) instinct was to contact them and say, "Oh geez, come on, there wasn't even a real medical issue, just cover the doctor bill for the exam and we can forget about it."

I asked my friends for advice, and the consensus was, "No way, man, you gotta take them for all they're worth! Really play it up! They don't want to pay for litigation, you can easily milk more out of them! Giving up the right to sue alone has gotta be worth $5000, easily!" (Spoiler: I didn't do that.)

I was gobsmacked. Really? This is the kind of world we live in, where it's expected that you use the threat of the crappy court system to play up injuries?

Remember: I didn't even have to document anything. I just answered "yes" to the injury part, and that was enough to spook them into that overgenerous offer.

This should really scare you. Litigation is so overbloated that you'll get a "sucker's" offer of $1000 just for asserting injury with no documentation. That should scare you. It means the inflated costs appear throughout the system and pump up insurance costs.

(Throwaway because I don't want my real identity within a hundred country miles of this.)

In the absence of meaningful penalties for reckless drivers, bankrupting though settlements will have to do

This sounds more like another symptom of the problems with our healthcare system. I wonder how many non-American are aware of this extra idiocy in the system: if you get hurt on commercial property, at someone's home, or in a car, you can't use your own health insurance; you now have to fight with someone else's insurance.

I recently had an uncomfortable realization that driving is a bunch of people trying their best and some not trying their best, all in a fast-paced context. People needing a car to get to work every day...makes me appreciate public transportion all the more. We need it last decade.

Or perhaps the healthcare is too expensive? I think my car insurance is expensive-ish ($800/yr or so) but I can't imagine what it would be if any healthcare for the other party would be on the line.

Now, of course I pay for that healthcare one way or another anyway, whether I'm involved in the accident or not. Which is why there are seatbelt laws, 0.02 percent alcohol limits and drivers licenses requiring $1000 or more in driving lessons.

If someone injures you, and your insurance doesn't cover it, can't you sue them? If you do and they can't afford it, can you put them into debt? Seems reasonable rather than you going into debt for medical bills?

You can sue them, and you may win, but the trouble is collecting the money. They might simply not have any money. Or they may have it, but won't make it easy for you to find it. Meanwhile, you still need to pay your medical bills.

What does “put them into debt” mean here? Force them to take a loan to pay a judgement? If so, who’s doing the lending?

They have to pay the judgement. If they do not, their wages get garnished. There is no lending.

What wages? The judgement-proof are often paid in cash.

These sorts of people usually don't have wages to garnish.

Yes, they will owe you $x and you will still owe the hospital $x - but that's often not very useful, as they don't have any money (and you do).

You may desire to transfer the debt onto them, but the hospital will absolutely not accept that. Why would they? If a bank owed you $1 million, and they said "oh, now Jim owes you that money, not us" you would similarly refuse.

Most carriers offer Uninsured/Underinsured coverage. I think it's mandatory by some states or maybe the carrier. The idea is to make you whole regardless of the other person's coverage limit. Not sure how effective it is in practice.

https://www.allstate.com/resources/car-insurance/uninsured-m...

Given how many cars are driving uninsured, you basically need uninsured coverage by default.

How does this apply to a pedestrian hit by a car like in this case?

In many states, uninsured coverage only applies if you can prove they are uninsured. In my case, they totaled our car, sent us to the hospital, and drove off. Thus it was no-fault for me but I had to pay my deductible. Cop: "this is pretty typical".

No effort was put into finding them, even though there are cameras at every intersection. Through my own effort I got a grainy photo from a local business, but not good enough to see the plate. Until the police actual police and there are consequences for people, things will only get worse.

A significant amount of people are judgement proof, aka they have no significant assets or income eligible to seized or garnished to pay for debts. Plus you alone bear the legal costs of obtaining a judgement to begin with.

Have fun collecting that 20% of their minimum wage paycheck for the rest of their life to pay off your injuries, car damage, and lawyer fees. Assuming they don't just get paid under the table or work as a contractor.

And if they move to another state, have fun transferring your judgement over there and trying to find their bank accounts and employer(s). It's like getting blood from a stone. It's easier and cheaper to just pay a tiny bit more in insurance premiums.

Yes, if you are poor you are not worth suing, even if you will surely lose. The cynical term for this is "judgement proof".

Once you have any sort of reasonable income you should strongly consider buying significantly more insurance than the legal minimums.

disproportionately the type of person to kill or seriously injure someone else in a car crash is the type of person that is “judgement proof”

Sure. And they can get their own lawyer, and you have to pay your own lawyer, and the case will likely settle for something, and at best you'll get only the fraction of their assets minus lawyer fees that isn't subject to seizure - probably a tiny fraction of what you'd get minus the uncertainty, drama, and delays of just getting things like high under-insured motorist coverage, or long term disability insurance. I don't think once someone declares bankruptcy after you sue them into the ground that you can wring out much more.

https://archive.today/F8vka

One thing that bugs me is that it's hard to tell when/why I'd need car insurance to cover medical or wages costs vs. short term disability, long term disability, health insurance, critical illness/critical injury insurance, life insurance, etc.

It seems like we could easily simplify the kinds of insurances offered and what they cover to be more standardized in an effective way. And would then have less gaps.

One more thing where the entanglement of workplace provided insurance benefits makes it messier too (particularly with disability insurance/benefits).

US lawyers and healthcare also deserve responsibility and blame in this strangely American tragedy of the Insurance-Industrial-Complex (IIC).

Nobody can suck-up free money faster than the US legal and medical systems (okay, US education system is also a contender).

Is that why pushy American mothers always want their kids to be doctors and lawyers? Seems like a small rent-seeking step to so-called success for a child, but a giant leap into the abyss for society.

Part of the problem of car insurance in the USA is that we don't really enforce people to be insured (1) and that the minimums are too low (2).

Here in AZ when you drive uninsured the cops can't even hold your car anymore. They'd tow you and you get to the impound lot, pay the fine and walk away.

That doesn't help anybody, as the person still isn't insured as they walk (drive) away.

If we increase the mandatory minimums groups of people will not be able to afford insurance and that costs votes.

This is something that is so different in Belgium. In Belgium driving without insurance and / or license (even not having it on you) is considered a big no-no. Hell, most people scoff less at driving while (slightly) impaired than driving without license / insurance.

Somehow i always paid an invisible amount for my insurance (even after having one accident where i was at fault, and drunk). And yet local insurance companies seems to be making ends meet easily. I don't know what is the problem there. Maybe because it's not the USA? Why is this only a problem in Anglosphere (yes i heard in UK it is about as bad - and their healthcare is socialised, so it's not because of healthcare)?

Liability for driving a car should come in form of subsidized debt not insurance. If I cause damage and I am at fault and can't pay out of pocket, the govenrment should pay for me and then I would be in debt for that cost to be paid over 7-10 years time(basic liability is 25-30k,so maximim 250/mo for a decade).

Being forced to pay for a damage I have yet to cause is messed up. The fear of being in debt would also lead to better and more careful driving. This is for the manadatory stuff, insurance should still be an alternative option.

In a free society, citizens should not be forced to do business with a business. All manadatory obligations by the government must be with the government. Alternatively, the government can provide a no-profit minimal insurance service kind of like the postal service.

You are basically swapping out private insurance for public insurance. It isn’t a bad idea, however, to handle unexpected expenses via loans rather than hedging via risk pooling. I have no idea how it would work in practice (if it were private or public), especially when huge accidents happen costing millions of dollars.

The main goal is to remove for profit insurances. There is a perverse incentive created when anyone can get in an accident and the insurance will pay for it, same thing with medical care (why in the US it is super expensive -- because insurance will pay up). Car ownership is manadatory in most US cities yet car ownership is very expensive, for many who finance it is ever more than the cost of rent.

The bureaucratic government will also pay up but to a lesser extent but the car owner/patient will not want that, since they have to pay it back. If a fender bender costs $2k to fix it's not a big deal to let insurance pay for it but if you have to pay it back you will try to find cheaper options and force mechanics to compete. Everything costs what people are willing to pay for it, but the cancerous thing about manadatory insurance is people are no longer paying, insurance will just raise your premium instead (most people don't calculate that in), they won't force you to seek cheaper options.

> Car ownership is manadatory in most US cities yet car ownership is very expensive, for many who finance it is ever more than the cost of rent.

Only someone in the USA would claim that car ownership is very expensive without knowing how much it cost in most of the rest of the world. Sorry, but owing a car here is super cheap compared to other countries I've lived in (Switzerland, which has cheaper auto ownership compared to the rest of Europe, and China).

Insurance is basically risk pooling, and you need someone to calculate the risks, and get paid for that work. They also have to setup a lot of other things. Now, the government could be the insurer of last resort, but they aren't going to be very good at it without profit motive, or maybe it will be heavily subsidized like flood insurance in Florida.

We are already able to shop around for insurance. I changed insurance companies 2 times in the last 5 years because their premiums jacked up beyond what I was willing to pay. If it were just the government, I'm not sure, I guess it would be like medicare. Except where you use the government to act as a lender per accident rather than as an insurer. It is an interesting idea; you could have banks do that as well, but they would be forced to loan to people they normally wouldn't to. If the government was the lender, or guaranteed the loans, it would be more like student loans?

> Only someone in the USA would claim that car ownership is very expensive without knowing how much it cost in most of the rest of the world

I know quite well what cars cost in several countries, I live in the US, why do I need to bring up and compare random countries?

> Insurance is basically risk pooling, and you need someone to calculate the risks, and get paid for that work. They also have to setup a lot of other things. Now, the government could be the insurer of last resort, but they aren't going to be very good at it without profit motive, or maybe it will be heavily subsidized like flood insurance in Florida

Yes I get how insurances work. I don't want the government to risk pool like an insurance, I want them to offer the option of subsidized debt, much like student loans not like insurance.

> We are already able to shop around for insurance. I changed insurance companies 2 times in the last 5 years because their premiums jacked up beyond what I was willing to pay. If it were just the government, I'm not sure, I guess it would be like medicare

We are not talking about insurance existing as an option but being legally mandated.

> it would be more like student loans?

Yes, the requirement would be to sign up for the student loan like debt which you don't pay into so long as you don't cause an accident and have to pay back only the cost of the accident but unlike student loans there is no interest, only admin fees (student loans should be direct loans from the government with 0% interest but different topic). If you don't like that, then you have to get basic liability insurance.

Either you protect yourself and get insurance in case of an accident or protect your cash flow and liquidity so you can own a car,home,etc... faster so that even if you get into an accident, paying it off wouldn't be as impactful as a life long debt.

For me, as an example my average basic liability was around $150/mo, which is $1800/yr and $90k if I owned a car for 50 years. I have to pay that amount no matter what. The maximim coverage of basic liability here is $25k, so long as I don't injure a person or total a car to a point where I max out insurance at $25k more than 3 times in my driving life I lose $15k. If the total liability cost was averaged at 1k/yr, that's 40k I am giving up. That's several cars, a house payment, several medical emergencies!

> The fear of being in debt would also lead to better and more careful driving

Let’s try to apply that to a different area: “The fear of being in debt would also lead to better and more careful choice of which college people choose to go to.”

How well did that work out?

Worked out well actually, it's not a more careful choice but plenty of people including myself avoided college because of the debt and then you most of the military enlisted population who are only there to avoid college debt. So people do respond to the threat of debt.

With cars it might result in less car ownership and better public transport (more people need to use it), which is also nice for the climate. But the law itself is filled with financial penalties to reduce bad behavior, how is this different?

The ultimate goal though is to kill the parasite which is the middle man mandatory insurance.

My experience has been completely different. State Farm jacked up my price by 40% over the last two years, even though I had to incidents. When I called and asked they said it’s due to inflation. Insurance increase along with groceries has been one of the permanent inflationary increases in my expenses since Covid. I’m sure a lot of people are in the same boat.

The increase in auto insurance is just reflecting the increase in their two main expenses: healthcare and cars/car parts.

Also higher crime.

Is it that car insurance is too cheap or that medical care is too expensive?

It is very clearly the latter, yeah.

Medical care is much less expensive in many European countries (both before and after insurance), yet auto insurance coverage is usually still much higher.

Do you have a source for it being higher? My understanding is that the accident rates are lower. If the accidents/claims are lower and the health care is cheaper/covered, them I wonder what the other factor is. Maybe a lack of profit cap?

It's mentioned in the article:

> By contrast, in Germany drivers are required to have €7.5m ($8.2m) of bodily-injury coverage, and in Britain liability is unlimited. And in those countries, going into hospital does not mean running up a life-altering bill.

Yeah, but that can't be the reason, right? If healthcare is so cheap, then claims should never be getting close to the limit unless there's a fatality (wrongful death) or permanent disability. Both of those are very rare, about half the rate as in the US and diffused by tens of thousands of drivers. So it still doesn't make sense to me that the cost would be much higher.

I could imagine that the intention is to not socialize the cost of traffic injuries via the health insurance (who would otherwise end up paying if the insurance coverage of the driver at fault is insufficient, I believe; you’re basically never billed for anything healthcare).

Additionally, the insurance will pay for any damages due to subsequently lost wages etc. of injured persons, which can quickly add up and would otherwise also be socialized to the public unemployment insurance system.

It seems like a good way to properly account for the cost of driving to me.

Your reply doesn't answer my question. Your statement about the cost of driving has no facts to support it. I would like to see those facts - or really a complete breakdown of why one is more costly than the other. The article and your explaination do allot address many factors.

> If healthcare is so cheap,

Well it's not that cheap... It can be very expensive for serious accidents. You just almost never need to pay anything yourself. I'm not sure the cost for liability insurance is that much (or at all) higher in most of Europe though.

"I'm not sure the cost for liability insurance is that much (or at all) higher in most of Europe though."

The whole point of the article is that it's more expensive in Europe.

> The whole point of the article is that it's more expensive in Europe.

So a policy with a $100k coverage limit is cheaper than one which covers up to €7.5m? Not exactly unexpected regardless of country.

Would 7.5 mil insurance in the US be cheaper than the equivalent in in Europe? I doubt that but in any cases the article doesen't say anything about that..

But higher coverage doesn’t mean higher payouts. It’s cheaper and easier to offer full coverage of a rare and inexpensive event than a more common more expensive one. Or do you mean that premiums are higher?

Recent increases aren’t actually related to human medical care, body shops are just charging a lot more to fix cars these days, leading to increasing premiums. Anyways, both people and cars are expensive to fix now.

Or is it the lack of any cap on U.S. tort judgments?

Medical care is too expensive, and risk of getting in an accident is too high

That’s insanely low! In Portugal the minimum required by law is 6.45 million for victims and 1.30 for property damage, per accident. A policy like this can cost as little as 250€ / year.

I assume these low limits in US insurance also affect material damages so that if you crash into an expensive car you just get a bunch of debt you need to pay off?

Despite the seemingly affordability a lot of drivers are uninsured. In California its 1 in 5 and in Mississippi its 1 in 3 drivers that are uninsured. Its likely they try and flee the scene over staying to offer to pay with money they don’t have. Hit and run drivers successfully get away 9/10 times. You might only carry liability insurance at which point you pay for your own repair.

This article is really an indictment of healthcare costs, not that car insurance is too cheap. Change my mind.

The USA limits the number of new doctors a year, driving pay for doctors to stratospheric levels averaging over a million dollars a year each.

Deregulate medicine and watch the free market dramatically improve quality of care, time with each doctor and costs.

Now I guess I'm arguing against my point, but I think these numbers are out of whack.

I don't think the US limits the number of new doctors per year. That would surprise me. I do think the AMA or whatever has a vested interest in controlling the supply of physicians, because it props up salaries.

That said, it is certainly not the case that US doctors average $1m/yr in salary. There are some doctors that make that much or more, and different specializations make different salaries on average, but the overall average is more like $225k/yr.

Finally, while I am not going to argue about the benefits of deregulation - we do have to make sure people actually get appropriate care - it is the case that practices across the country are being bought up by companies like HCA. This seems to lead to the 'enshittification' phenomenon as applied to medicine. The parent companies demand more efficiency, leading to office staff having to handle more patients and more work than before, and doctors having to see more patients in the same amount of time as before. Quality, from the perspective of the patient, suffers. I don't think deregulation fixes this.

I don't think 'the market' is a good solution to healthcare. When I think of healthcare, I think of people who are sick, or hurt, or whatever, and they need to get some help. If there is ever a time where having to weigh pros and cons of available services while shopping around to find the best deal is a good outcome, asking people to do this when they are hurt or sick is not it.

I think the limit that the parent was talking about is related to the number of student doctor seats at hospitals. That is a real thing, and the AMA heavily defends it.

> That said, it is certainly not the case that US doctors average $1m/yr in salary. There are some doctors that make that much or more, and different specializations make different salaries on average, but the overall average is more like $225k/yr.

The average primary care physician makes $265K/year.

Among specialists, the average is $382K/year.

Not sure where where you're getting an "overall average" of $225K. In fact, the blended average is $352K/year.

Source: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/how-much-do-doctors-make/

I looked around at several sites like that one, and saw 'averages' quoted all over the place. That's why I said 'more like 225k/yr' instead of declaring that to be the average.

Sites with lower averages:

Forbes https://www.forbes.com/advisor/in/education/doctor-salary-in...

Payscale https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Family_Physician_%2...

Sites with higher averages:

US News https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/physician/salary

Resolve https://www.resolve.com/the-data/physician-salaries

I'm fine with 265k as the average. It's just not anywhere close to $1m/yr, which was my point.

As an ambulance chaser who gets to deal with both the healthcare industry and the insurance industry, you are correct.

If you claim too much on your health insurance then the company (e.g. UHC) requires you to file a report of all details related to it. If it's a car accident then they require all info about the other parties. They will sue the other parties to recover their costs.

Vehicles are bigger. People are constantly on their phones. There are basically no consequences for killing someone with your car.

It is unconscionable that in an era of ubiquitous data and technology that vehicle mortality rates keep increasing.

US road deaths have started to increase recently after a multi-decade steady reduction.

IMO, that’s disingenuous to call “keep increasing.”

A "fun fact" that often astonishes europeans when I tell them: in America, it's even possible (and common?) to get insurance coverage for cases where the other party doesn't have their own insurance cover.

I believe in some states this is required.

My state (Oregon) requires insurance for motor vehicle operation. I understand the idea, but I can’t help but feel like it’s business model protection ensconced in law. The insurer isn’t obligated by law to pay for… anything. They’ll do everything they can to get out of paying for anything.

And yes, you can buy “uninsured motorist protection” from your insurer as well. Even in states where it shouldn’t be possible for there to be uninsured motorists.

I would expect if you have liability insurance theres a lessened chance you would flee the scene of an accident you caused.

Every state I've lived in requires auto insurance.

The idea makes sense -- the state recognizes that vehicle accidents will happen and preemptively deals with free loaders by requiring auto insurance, instead of just suggesting it. It falls down when the state isn't actually requiring the insurers to do their damn job.

Mandating insurance makes sense from the perspective of CYA, though I wonder if the govt could do something to enforce competition. Maybe make public actuarist data, and payout rates and information?

Regulations frequently kill competition, either explicitly on purpose, or accidentally. Insurance is otherwise a hyper-competitive business anyway. Super easy to shop rates among many companies, so they all gravitate downward to about the same level, net of small differences in coverage or services, fancy websites, etc.

And of course uninsured motorist coverage is a thing, because making something illegal doesn't mean people won't do it.

> making something illegal doesn't mean people won't do it

Isn't that the point of making something illegal? Here the system is: no insurance, no plates.

(it's also no inspection, no plates. One has to be wary of the sketchier tourists, but everyone with local plates has both insurance and a functioning vehicle)

If people engage in a risky activity where the legal system expects them to pay for damages if something goes wrong, but damage sums are so high that most people are unable to pay for these damages, it makes perfect sense to require people to have insurance if they want to engage in this risky activity.

The real crime is the state then zoning and building infrastructure in a way that forces you to engage in said activity, effectively forcing all citizens to buy insurance.

Frequently covered by (non-car) liability insurance in Germany.

In the US you can get away with only having liability insurance.

Why would that be astonishing? It's routine (EU).

Do uninsured drivers exist in the EU? We're not barbarians, here ;)

(no insurance, no plates)

For comparison, car liability insurance in germany typically has a coverage limit of 50 or 100M € (not sure about potential caps per victim though). There is also a legal minimum of 7.5M.

> And in those countries, going into hospital does not mean running up a life-altering bill.

I chuckle a bit that the next sentence to that is:

> Why not raise the liability legal limits?

Shouldn't the focus be on the insane hospital costs?

In a sane place, that would be the answer -- in a place where healthcare exists to care for people's health, and insurance exists to protect from consequences of accidental or deliberate damage.

Here, both exist to extract as much profit as possible for the operators of each, leaving us the unlucky participants as little more than units of measure.

Can someone correct the title?

I think it meant to read “Car insurance in America use to be cheap”

I was paying $55 a month back in 2001. Today I pay $277 a month.

You didn't read the article.

> And yet what Ms DuBarry’s story shows is that, in fact, American car insurance is still far too cheap. As much as drivers may resent paying higher premiums, insurance covers only a small fraction of the costs inflicted in car crashes. Instead, health insurers, government and drivers involved in crashes shoulder the burden, and victims are rarely fully compensated.

> According to a study published last year by the NHTSA, America’s highway-safety regulator, the direct economic costs of car crashes in 2019 was $340bn, or about 1.6% of GDP. Yet the NHTSA says insurance—and not just car insurance—covered just 54% of that. The agency put the true social cost, including lost life years, at nearly $1.4trn. In 2019, 9m people were involved in serious car crashes; around 4.5m people suffered injuries and 36,000 were killed.

> Drivers are subsidised, and society at large pays the bill.

Fuck cars.

Would my normal health (not auto) insurance cover my own hospital/ER bills regardless of whether it's from an auto accident?

Yeah but I suppose a lot of Americans are uninsured or underinsured WRT health.

About 8 percent are uninsured, which is a lot with a population of 330 million. I dont know if that includes the 7+ million illegal immigrants.

Depends on what state you are in but probably car insurance rates are worse. In Mississippi 1 in 3 drivers are uninsured. Uninsured rate for health in that state is 1 in 6.

Google health insurance subrogation auto accident.

Your health insurance will seek reimbursement from the at-fault party's auto insurance. Which may be your insurance.

Yes and it makes much more sense to prioritize health insurance over underinsured motorist, especially if you don’t care about your vehicle.

I really do think that the minimum liability needs to be raised to something like $1 million at least.

There also needs to be much more strict enforcement and scanning for people driving without insurance, that's a huge issue in CO.

No mention of whether $180000 is reasonable for the medical treatment.

Insurance companies receive all of the blame, when the root cause is usually the providers.

Insurance companies are probably the only entity keeping costs down.

This is the case with auto insurance and medical insurance.

The publication is called “The Economist” but they are omitting a massive externality.

You chaps in the US have no bloody idea how lucky you are. In the UK, everyone's car insurance are increasing by 50% to 100% for ICE cars. EVs premiums are even worse. I think personally greed has a lot to do with it and the fact the UK Govt don't care about the people.

I live somewhere where the government has tried to impose price caps on auto insurance and now I can’t even get insured.

My guess is the reason premiums are going up is people are driving worse and repair costs are going up.

Also, car design requirements for safety usually leave the car as totaled from almost any accident. It’s basically always cheaper to total out a car, but of course that still isn’t a cheap thing to do.

Healthcare costs keep doubling every few years as well.

The UK motor insurance market is one of the most competitive in the world. Aggregators have created a situation where every insurer is looking for the slightest competitive advantage to drive themselves up the comparison table.

I don't have the most up to date figures but in 2022, combined ratio was forecast to be 115% for motor insurance - this means for every £1 in premium, £1.15 was paid out in claims and expenses. There is some income from investments but it's minimal compared to the pre 2008 situation.

Consequentially several insurers have exited the personal lines market as they cannot make money from it - RSA for example. 2022 is forecast to be the worst year for insurers since 2010.

The market does suffer from a cycle of 'hard' and 'soft' markets and there will be an overcorrection in the short term - over a few years, we'll see insurers seeing an opportunity to undercut the market and gain market share and premiums increases will ease.

TLDR - whilst it is painful to see premiums rising so quickly, it is not an industry that is awash with profits.

That's quite an eye opener, thanks. I hadn't also thought about the recent conveyor belt of pretty nasty storms, that definitely would have an knock on effect on insurance. I think it is in the insurers' own interest that the Govt should implement NetZero measures asap to reduce the impact of these storms.

West coast of the US here. Mine more than doubled this year and shopping around has been an eye-opening exercise in the sense that it seems to be an across-the-board increase, not just my insurance company. I've been driving for over two decades and have a spotless driving record, so it's really painful to see such a dramatic increase in a short amount of time.

Looking at the comments here, the UK is incredibly cheap for car insurance compared to the USA.

Some of the monthly prices mentioned in the US are similar to an annual price in the UK, and a lot more is covered on a UK policy.

Anyone who thinks insurance is too cheap does not have a teenage driver.

Also, if rates are increased (to afford bigger payouts) there will be more deadbeat uninsured drivers. (Recently had to pay a large deductable when one such driver smashed into my son's car.)

Don't get me wrong, the insurance industry writ large played a huge and active role in shaping the current hellscape. But this is still putting the onus on auto insurers for what is fundamentally an issue with the healthcare system.

It’s the healthcare costs, plain and simple. In my opinion, driving hasn’t changed much during the pandemic era.

Healthcare costs have continued to balloon and they will spill into other areas of society as a natural consequence.

State minimums are too low.

I carry a shit-ton of insurance. If you're in the tech biz and have a fat 401k, you should be thinking about umbrella liability as well. At a minimum, drop the extra $50 to max out uninsured motorist and medical payments coverage.

A friend's wife was hit while walking by a dude about to retire. She's on her 12th surgery, and has been inpatient for almost 3 months his $50k limit was exhausted in days. Dude isn't gonna be retiring by the time the lawyers are done.

401k balances are safe from (non-divorce) litigation per ERISA.

If you have a fat income or other assets, umbrella insurance is wise.

> According to the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (apcia), a trade association, last year insurers paid out $1.08 in claims for every $1 in premiums they took in.

Grading your own work as usual

Oh that's why no one's looking when they're making a turn. All the incredibly stupid car accident clips I've ever seen make sense now.

We pay an insane $1500/year and often more in Australia just to deal with the worst customer service you could imagine. Don't follow our model.

The day after the crash, Seamus died. The hospital charged the couple’s insurance $180,000 for his care.

Focussing on the wrong issue..

Other recent (real! verbatim!) headlines from The Economist:

“Your pay is still going up too fast”

“Why you should never retire”

I tend to take their pronouncements with a massive grain of salt and a massiver eye roll.

The former is an accurate reflection of central bank policies in many countries - raise interest rates to keep pay rises (aka wage inflation) down.

Quite likely, but I have never, not once, found myself thinking "thank heavens we're not getting raises anymore".

True. The aims of central banks very often reflect those of the business paying you than yours.

My point is that the headline quoted is not a bad summary of an influential point of view.

Those are both satire pieces.

This sounds to me like the king of XY problems: it shouldn’t cost 25k to go to the ER in the first place.

A close friend of mine who is an American feels strongly that this is a health insurance thing and not a car insurance thing. It’s interesting to see her reaction being offended by the article. The Economist is a British newspaper. Could there be a cultural issue writing the article?

Also, car insurances are different in many states.

I am Dutch, so no clue here.

The unseen side effect of increasing car insurance coverage across the board would be the hospital would charge $360k for a single day of trauma care instead of $180k.

I have to admit that I stopped reading the article after this line "The day after the crash, Seamus died. The hospital charged the couple’s insurance $180,000 for his care."

One day of care added up to $180k. Their actual costs could not have been a tenth of that. How can the author seriously say that car insurance is the issue in this situation.

Get an umbrella policy. They are remarkably inexpensive for what you get.

Indeed, the cost of most car-related goods and services is too cheap

This article sounds more like a car insurance ad. Fear mongering at its best. Yea it’s probably only a a $10-20 increase in premiums if you are in a class of “very very low risk” drivers. But people with poor credit, high number of at fault accidents, or just living in the wrong zip code (higher accidents means higher premiums!) will result in much higher increases.

Most people here probably fall into idgaf category and can pay the increased premiums for the “peace of mind”. But if you are living at or near the federal poverty line. Paying for peace of mind is much less important.

Personally I have the maximum limits myself since the increase in 6 month premiums is only about $20.

I do wish I did not have to own a car though. No more car maintenance, car insurance, ongoing gas costs, yearly registration fees to local/state entities, tire replacement, brake replacements, …

I very much prefer to use my bike, walk, or use public transportation where possible. Much better for personal health (more active), environment, and my mental health (dealing with other drivers inattentiveness, poor driving skills, drunk mofos at night). Plus it’s nice to multitask while taking the bus or train home.

> Paying for peace of mind is much less important.

Sure, but it's pretty important from the perspective of the people you might seriously injure and their families.

Insurance run for profit has to be a scam by definition. You can't turn a profit from a risk pool without ensuring that you can avoid paying at least a good chunk of the time. It should be as illegal as ponzi schemes

"what is drawdown and how much will i pay to avoid it"

Wait till you find out about free market competition!

Let me know when there's a free market somewhere

Strictly speaking I don’t think that’s true. If premiums are sufficiently high then an insurance company could pay out every valid claim and still make a profit.

When you get to decide what claims are valid and profit from deciding they're not, the incentives just don't stack up to actually covering people adequately, and by this same property as well as the obfuscated nature of the internal judgments that lead to these conclusions and the infrequent occurrence of incidents built into... why risk-pooling makes sense for anyone, buyers don't have good enough information in advance to drive any selection pressures on acting against these incentives

There is no honest insurance company because the mechanism design implications of making it possible to be one would effectively destroy or nationalize the sector. Thus, it's a business that can't not be a scam

Lawyers, courts, regulators have a more powerful word against insurance company decisions on claims. Consumer organizations could also apply plenty of pressure. Granted none of these are worthy solutions for individual small claims. And the US don't exactly strive for functional all of the above. So - yes in theory the insurance companies don't have the last word - and sure, in practice that theory feels like it never helps. It should help in a serious accident.

Insurance companies can decide what they’re willing to pay without being sued. At the end of the chain, if they decline to pay a valid claim, a lawsuit is the next step. It’s not like they are the final arbiter (pun intended).

So our check against making the financially obvious decision to try to get out of the obligation to save people from disasters they paid into a risk pool to mitigate because they are infrequent enough that adequate individual preparation is impractical but devastating enough that insuring against them is rational is to hope that people who have been stiffed by these companies to weather those disasters on their own resources despite having paid into the risk pool will then be able to muster the wherewithal and finances to bring suit against an insurance corporation large enough to credibly claim to bulwark that risk afterward

I just can't see why this isn't working

In MA, the small claims limit does not apply for damages from an auto accident. That doesn’t make it easy, but makes it easier and more accessible to fight an insurance company who is acting unreasonably.

I just don't think it's ever going to reach a threshold where the cost of litigation in practice will ever make it not more profitable to harm people by denying claims. The economics simply don't work out

Risk-shifting is a legitimate service. If you buy insurance solely because of some legal (often perceived) legal requirement, then you are probably buying the wrong insurance for your situation. And missing out. After that, yes, the people making this their business can be expected to turn a profit? That doesn't seem unreasonable.

After that the word you should be looking for is competition: competition in keeping costs tight, competition in paying out easily, quickly and fairly.

Competition clearly isn't exerting those pressures on the market, and there are good reasons to believe it can't, which I've already outlined: The failures of an insurance company are too infrequent, ruinous, and obfuscated for customers to make choices at enough of a scale to impose this discipline in practice

The problem when someone is killed by a car and their family gets $0 of the $100,000 per person payout is not the lack of auto insurance. It's a crooked hospital who decided to cheat everyone involved.

Why can't it be both? I mean the coverage limits in the US are still ridiculously low by Western standards and would hardly cover serious treatment throughout much of Europe despite healthcare being cheaper there.

The title should have been "Health insurance in America is too expensive".

Don't insurance companies have to make a maximum profit from insurance policies because of laws?

Many states cap the profit, yeah. But that’s not the issue raised by this article. The states’ minimum required liability limits are.

There’s not a fixed federal limit on loss ratio or profit for car insurance like there is for some types of health insurance. But they need to get approval for rate increases from state regulators for every state that they issue policies in, and some states can be extremely hard to get rate increases through, even when insurers are breaking even or losing money in those states. It’s a tragedy of the commons - each state regulator would benefit from keeping premiums low within their state, but in reality any losses need to be subsidized by higher premiums somewhere else.

This article is 100% planted industry nonsense designed to prime the public for entirely unjustified price hikes being set by monopolists.

If you don’t know the playbook for industry to jack prices by colluding, time to educate yourself.

This is PR.

The economist is not your friend, it is a corporate : government mouthpiece.

The entire argument is because healthcare costs too much then car insurance should cost more.

Argument for back door inflation of insurance.

You already have health insurance why do you need more expensive car insurance on top of your more expensive health insurance.

This is total bullshit. Don’t believe it.

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