Hacker News Reader

Comment by concordDance | Hacker News Reader

Whats the current total liability cost for all Tesla drivers?

The average for all USA cars seems to be around $2000/year, so even if FSD was half as dangerous Tesla would still be paying $1000/year equivalent (not sure how big insurance margins are, assuming nominal) per car.

Now, if legally the driver could avoid paying insurance for the few times they want/need to drive themselves (e.g. snow? Dunno what FSD supports atm) then it might make sense economically, but otherwise I don't think it would work out.

View on HN

Liability alone isn’t nearly that high.

Car insurance payments include people stealing your car, uninsured motorists, rental cars, and other issues not the drivers fault. Further insurance payments also include profits for the insurance company, advertising, billing, and other overhead from running a business.

Also, if Tesla was taking on these risks you’d expect your insurance costs to drop.

How much would every death or severe injury caused by FSD cost Tesla? We probably won’t know anytime soon but since unlike anyone else they can afford to pay out virtually unlimited amounts and courts will presumably take that into account

Yeah any automaker doing this would just negotiate a flat rate per car in the US and the insurer would average the danger to make a rate. This would be much cheaper than the average individual’s cost for liability on their insurance.

And it would be supplementary to the driver’s insurance, only covering incidents that happen while FSD is engaged. Arguably they would self insure and only purchase insurance for Tesla as a back stop to their liability, maybe through a reinsurance market.

Somehow I doubt those savings would be passed along to the individual car buyer. Surely buying a car insured by the manufacturer would be much more expensive than buying the car plus your own individual insurance, because the car company would want to profit from both.

What if someone gets killed because of some clear bug/error and the jury decides to award 100s of millions just for that single ? I’m not sure it’s trivial to insurance companies to account for that sort of risk

It is trivial and they've done it for ages. It's called reinsurance.

Basically (_very_ basically, there's more to it) the insurance company insures itself against large claims.

I’m not sure Boeing etc. could have insured any liability risk resulting from engineering/design flaws in their vehicles?

Not trivial, but that is exactly the kind of thing that successful insurance companies factor into their premiums, or specifically exclude those scenarios (e.g. not covering war zones for house insurance).

Good points, thanks.

Also I wouldn’t be surprised if any potential wrongful death lawsuits could cost Tesla several magnitudes more than the current average.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com