Welcome to the Era of the $20k Family Car Insurance Bill
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We gathered a ton of quotes, and yea there are crazy prices at the end of the tail (see: https://www.coveragecat.com/cheapest-car-insurance/texas#quo...) but otherwise the distribution skews to the left. When we trained a simple model on that data (https://www.coveragecat.com/calculator/carrier-comparison) it was pretty obvious that age is the primary variable in premium. You can fiddle with the variables and see what changes, spoiler alert, age has the highest correlation with premium.
Anyone who has met a teenager in 2024 would not be surprised by this.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8134...
The metric is useless in the first place, this is "per licensed drivers", not "per driver-miles".
It's a certainty that men drive more miles than women, primarily for job purposes. The NHTSA doesn't give enough data to determine this. My guess is that it's split almost exactly evenly per-mile, but who knows, without the data?
We all pay the price when new cars are priced in the upper 5-digit and 6-digit range and a fender-bender costs $5K - $10K.
Is that an euphemism for "refusing to pay a livable wage"?
Turns out we live in a built environment, not everyone can sit in a cube.
I think the used car market might be crazy right now.
When COVID hit and everyone was clamoring for used cars because new cars couldn't be made/imported, I took my wife's low-end car to CarMax for an appraisal. It was a fair offer, but I didn't bite.
All these years, and 25,000 miles later, I brought the same car back to CarMax a couple of weeks ago, and the appraisal was almost double what they offered the first time. This time I let them have it.
I don't see a lot of talk about used car demand anymore, but based on my experience, I think it's still high.
Some states implemented "extreme" used car sales taxes (Ga)
Cash for clunkers,zirp, caused a surge of new cars after 2008.
Cars produced after 1996 (OBD2) and 2003 (wideband, multi fuel), and 2008 (8 speed zf transmissions with full lockup - and dsg for sports cars) are incredibly reliable - especially with a 100k mile warranty and service packages.
Then you have the 2017 tax cuts, compounded with 2020 chips shortage.
Somewhere you also have ev incentives
- $25k bodily injury coverage might cover CT scans and a broken bone at best.
- $25k property damage coverage might cover replacement of the bottom 25% of vehicles sold the last 5 years.
It doesn't matter how young the driver is, if you put them in a cheap small used car, you only need liability coverage which is pretty cheap.
I think it'd be reasonable aside from one obvious edge case: my adult child is blind and will never drive a car, yet I have to sign a new affidavit every time I renew my policy (every 6 months).
Geico's only stated recommendation is that anyone who uses the car more than once a month should be on the policy.
That being said, I'm pretty sure that liability insurance for a family is not USD 20K, unless your idea of 'family' is, well, pretty extensive?
Collision insurance? Sure, with EVs becoming more popular, that will only go up. But, yeah, omelettes, eggs, blah...
What an astonishing statement.
Do I support the ability of people to travel to their job, shopping centers, or any destination they like?
Absolutely!
Do I think a privately owned vehicle, which spends 90%+ of its active life being parked in spaces that could be utilized much better otherwise, is the best way to achieve those abilities?
Nope. Sorry.
Cool. Because if you were suggesting that in the real world then, at least in America, you're suggesting a complete overhaul of almost all transportation infrastructure and saying that no average person will have to spend an extra dollar to pay for it somehow. Is Mexico paying for it or something?
Even in many parts of America (which are not that different from many parts of, say, France, which I'm very familiar with, thankyouverymuch), private car ownership is not an absolute requirement.
Can people there get around with Public Transport<tm>? Nope. Do they require their Own Private Sardine Can At All Times<tm>? No, not necessarily either.
And I'm firmly in the "No Sardine Cans Ever!" camp, and I have solutions. If you're somewhere else, that's fine with me, but you're not so convincing as you might feel...
I've been to France as well, outside of major cities. Perhaps not as well traveled as you, but I remember seeing plenty of private cars in driveways and on roads as we passed by various dwellings. I doubt they'd take kindly to your suggestion either. Weren't there riots over the price of gasoline not that long ago?
Whatever, be a flat-earther of transportation policy if you wish. You clearly aren't serious.
[1] https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/transportation-infra... -- note that rail expenditure isn't all public transport, the majority of US rail infrastructure is freight transport.
The OP also didn’t suggest or implement the change, but only commented that they liked the results with regard to car ownership and use
How about we eminent-domain wherever you live to build a train line? Oh that wouldn't be a problem for you? Congrats on being in the top 10% at least.
Nah, its not a problem because I'm fine contributing to society. If you need everything to stay exactly as it is or you think your life will fall apart, then I have no sympathy for you.
I do believe if we need to do something like eminent domain then people should be compensated and cases like Kelo v. City of New London were pretty disgusting, but I am not going to pretend that we cant change because people were inconvenienced
I mean, everyone (well mostly everyone) is absolutely mortified by commercial aviation, which, like, commits literally 0.01% of those sins on a global scale?
Sounds like a problem we are all responsible for solving by voting for people who will address this problem.
You will either need to pay the cost or live somewhere you don’t need a car.
Also "suboptimal" is a matter of opinion.
Once you've built timely safe replacement infrastructure that can carry me from my home to my place of employment as fast or faster than my current commute, and take me to any of the shops I frequent, and do that for all of my neighbors, and do all of the above in a way that costs less than car ownership, we can talk.
I want you to be able to reliably get transport to where-ever you need to go, an what-ever time you need to go there, without the need to keep a 1000-pound pile of junk in (semi-)public spaces at all times.
Where I live, that's pretty much a possibility already. I want everyone to have that same freedom!
This is the case in many areas. When I was in Romania, between buses, trams, and rail I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. There was always an option available, typically multiple overlapping options. Keep in mind this is a poor eastern European country.
Keep in mind it's also fast, like very fast. Going across the city was a 10-minute affair. Try driving across a big city like Dallas.
It's only 22 miles. A replacement for a car should be able to do this in about 32 minutes. But it would have to go point-to-point on demand, they can't cover the spanning tree of n^2 possible trips with any reasonable frequency (mostly because n^2 taxpayers don't exist, nor housing for them).
> A replacement for a car should be able to do this in about 32 minutes
Right, again, I was able to go across the capital of Romania in maybe 10 minutes end-to-end. Because Bucharest isn't car centric. And I'm able to reach any arbitrary point in the city trivially.
Also, as a side note, your car couldn't do that in 32 minutes. There're people in CA that commute MUCH LESS than 22 miles that spend 1.5+ hours in traffic a day. Because, again, cars are the most inefficient means of transportation imaginable, so they have awful throughput and bandwidth.
This is mostly a case of US car brain. There're countless examples of places all over the world that are able to achieve this, and more, without a car. The biggest factor to remember is that distance doesn't scale like you think it does - due to the extreme inefficiency of motor vehicle infrastructure, the majority of our space is wasted on not-useful things. 22 miles in the US isn't equivalent to 22 miles somewhere else, because somewhere else those 22 miles have 10x as much stuff, so you wouldn't need to travel 22 miles in the first place.
> would have been fifteen-minute drives
Yes, if everyone on Earth magically disappeared. If you've never driven in a dense city, it's often faster to just walk alongside the cars than be in the cars.
This is because, again, cars are so unbelievably space inefficient that the space saving of human people versus cars can make up for the multiple order of magnitude difference in speed.
Cars are a privacy bubble and a shield, not just a transport mechanism; no form of mass transit will ever be an acceptable substitute in the way that, for me, is the most important factor.
But if you live in an urban area, the "cost tradeoff" of having everything close is there's more likelihood to be around people. It's untenable to have the desire to have 10 grocery stores, 5 banks, 3 schools etc within 5 miles of you and also have no people interaction. Who runs those places? And who goes to them? The privacy cars provide is therefore mostly an illusion.
Also, I wouldn't describe an automobile as a shield, considering it's by far the thing most likely to kill you. It's a sword, if anything.
Hence my point; liberty is expensive. Liberty includes the liberty to risk it. There's no illusion. Cars do not rule me. They're not binding, or addictive. They're a tool that physically extend my liberty to go where I please, and I can use them or leave them as I please.
They do, that's what you're missing. They're both binding and addictive, because we have to build our entire society to revolve around them. You've lost countless liberties, as have many Americans, due to the concessions around cars.
The reason your grocery store is 5 miles away is because of cars. The reason you can't have a job without a car is because of cars. The reason you don't have a right to reasonable noise is because of cars. The reason you don't have a right to not inhale tire fumes is because of cars.
Cars have taken away your ability to do a lot of things. And no, you cannot "leave them" as you please, you are required to keep one otherwise you will most likely not have a job. Go ahead, try this out. Get rid of your car for one year, without moving, and come back.
You're suggesting everyone just move to a city, or what? Because we can't just litter a grocery store every mile across the entire American continent. We know that cars are neither binding nor addictive because people regularly move to cities and sell their only car with little difficulty. The car increases my liberty, my choice to not live in a city. Have you ever actually lived outside of a city?
The way you're looking at it is upside-down. The car doesn't push opportunities away as if ridding ourselves of cars would magically make everything close, no, it increases my reach. We know this because of historical evidence. Before the car, going to town was an all-day affair in the horse drawn carriage. Now it's a 30 minute trip. Freeing up my day to do whatever else I choose to do.
Maybe you're suggesting that if we didn't have the car, there would be train tracks within walking distance everywhere? I love trains. Rather than trying to kill cars, why not attempt to build better rail infrastructure? Then I could join you.
Little difficulty? Is this a joke or do we have different definitions of difficulty?
There're hardly any cities in the US with adequate transportation, number 1. I live in a city; you probably do to. You REQUIRE your car, as do 99.9999% of all cities in the US. Some don't, like NYC - but even there you're pushing it. It's not London.
> as if ridding ourselves of cars would magically make everything close
That's exactly what it does, because everything is far because of the car. It's urban sprawl. We don't have more "stuff", rather we waste the majority of our spaces on infrastructure for cars. Roads, parking, etc.
> Before the car, going to town was an all-day affair in the horse drawn carriage
That's just not true. People live in the town, that's why it's a town. Are you a farmer or something? No, you live in an urban area. You're IN the town, your town is just car centric and therefore it sucks ass to navigate.
> Rather than trying to kill cars, why not attempt to build better rail infrastructure
Sigh... okay:
1. Nobody on Earth is trying to kill cars, including me.
2. The reason rail is bad and isn't getting better is BECAUSE of cars and car-centric infrastructure. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on car infrastructure. That's money not going to public transportation, despite being public funds. If we divert even a fraction of that money, we can have a huge impact. But there's blockers, people like you. In addition, to make rail effective you have to not waste miles and miles of space on urban sprawl. But people love their automobiles and 2 hour commutes.
To elaborate, maybe: I would fully support a robo-taxi scheme to ferry people to and from their job, shopping, or whatever. Where I live, shared e-vehicles are as good as it gets right now, but that's definitely a promising step already.
No need to be dramatic here. First, it's not "forbidden," just expensive. And the cost reflects the level of risk. Insurance companies aren't charities, and the marketplace is competitive, at least.
The US is still far cheaper to drive in, by comparison.
Since walkable areas are often near a hospital, it's probably faster than an ambulance.
And if the situation is truly urgent, they'll send an ambulance, which should take less than 15 minutes, and will offer the best care available in that time window anyway.
And I'm absolutely sure the situation is entirely different where you live, but isn't that the real problem then?
Personal vehicles are expensive, and historically that cost is hidden from consumers. People were "conned" into believing it was the most economical transportation available personally.
Looking at it from a theoretical standpoint, physically co-locating living space allows for a number of significant cost efficiencies compared to spreading the same number of people over a larger geographic area. For much of history it was the wealthy who could afford to live outside the cities while the poor had no such choice.
My guess is that if suburban and rural residents actually paid the full cost of their roads and other infrastructure (and if zoning didn't prevent organic density from forming) that living in the suburbs (as I do) would become comparatively more expensive.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I have two vehicles, mid range limits, one brand new with full coverage, and one a bit older with liability, and for two drivers the bill is around $1200 a year.
I know kids of course get a higher rate, but even so, $20k seems a bit out there unless you have a dodgy record.
> Leah Carter, a mother of four in Merrick, N.Y., sent me 60 pages of documents that she and her family were trying to make sense of after their annual premium with Travelers Insurance roughly doubled in the space of a year or so, to more than $21,000.
> They added a fourth child and a sixth car to their Travelers policy this year. None of the vehicles are fancy. There had been a few moving violations, including at least one that was her husband’s responsibility.
I do know people who have very very high bills, but they have one of 1) very high end cars (911 GT3 RS, Bentley, etc.) 2) something rare insured at full value of its rare nature or 3) actively stating to the insurer that it's a track car being raced on the weekends. All of those happen around me, but those aren't the modal case.
Not sure if that is permitted/possible everywhere, but the problem is if the parents drive nice cars the insurer presumes the kids will also drive them (and crash them).
Yeah, that's kind of an edge case, there.