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Comment by michael_vo | Hacker News Reader

"Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome" - Charlie Munger. Car companies don't need to care, if your car gets stolen the insurance company buys you a new one. You do lose some customers who won't buy your car if it's in the top ten most stolen list.

We could implement a law that fines car companies who are in the top ten list, and pays out to the car companies who are at the bottom.

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There is no requirement for insurance companies to write policies or to sell them at reasonable rates. Try selling an uninsurable car, it’s really hard.

Or you require dealers to make a disclosure at the time of sale to the effect that the car does not meet modern security standards.

Incentives work both ways. Most new cars have the computer hardware to solve this problem with a firmware update.

Uninsurable cars sell pretty well from what I heard from UK... Where they had large number of issues with Land Rovers. People only notice they can't insure something after they buy it...

And as a result, Range Rover has now increased security on new vehicles, have invested 8 figure sums in retrofitting older vehicles and have now started to offer their own insurance product -almost certainly at a loss- for owners that can't find separate insurance, according to this article (https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-13024481/Ra...).

Sounds like the cars were made nearly uninsurable, and the manufacturer pulled it back from the brink, perfectly illustrating my point.

Fine car companies? Isn’t that just madness? Do we really need to think there criminals have superior rights over law-abiding citizens? What do we get at the end of leftist madness? I don’t know if it’s something those that are espousing such positions will actually want.

You're missing the point. This has nothing to do with politics. I'm demonstrating how economic incentives could be used to change the outcome.

And car companies DO get fined. Kia was fined (lawsuit) $200MM in USA for not using modern standard anti-theft tech in order to save money.

Insurance companies DO give you a discount if you use the chubb or install other anti theft devices.

Economic incentives work!

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