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Comment by mindvirus | Hacker News Reader

I think insurance prices will drive adoption of self driving very quickly.

Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for non-self driving cars gets expensive fast as there are more and more self driving cars on the road.

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Insurance for human drivers stays the same. If anything, it goes down, because the more Waymo-level autonomous vehicles on the road, the safer it is overall.

Insurance isn't a zero sum game, where "less insurance spent on autonomous vehicles" means the insurance companies have to make up for it somewhere else.

In a way, "car driving getting safer overall" isn't great for car insurers, because they make money financing auto risk, and if there is 50% less auto risk then they have less addressable market.

Insurance is, however, a for profit corporation, out to maximize profits, so they'll charge both groups a premium, and then add a service fee on top of that.

Nothing about that changes with the introduction of autonomous vehicles though, and it's a very open and highly competitive market. It is extremely easy to switch your auto insurance provider, and anyone who can pay some actuaries can start up a new business. (Though few do, because there isn't a huge margin to take away from the industry as it is.)

And when they post the obscene margins as a result of doing this, other insures can come in and undercut them. That's a key ingredient to making insurance work well. Its also why "insurance" doesn't work for healthcare.

Insurance prices aren’t made up, they’re calculated based on probable costs.

Why would insurance need to get more expensive for manual drivers as self-driving adoption increases?

Ideally, insurance cost for self-driving cars would just be lower than insurance costs now (proportional to risk), and even insurance costs for manual drivers might go down because their risk decreases as well.

Because insurers are in the game to make money, and they will bait and switch.

I think it's more about when the market is still majority manual. 20% self driving might see premiums for manual cars go up significantly because manual drivers would have more at fault accidents per mile than before (assuming the same rate of accidents, but most accidents with a self driving car are the manual driver's fault).

There will also be things like not having DWIs and even cheap parking (since the car can drive away and park) that'll net out for self driving. And feedback loops there- the same size police force only pulling over manual cars from a smaller and smaller pool.

> assuming the same rate of accidents, but most accidents with a self driving car are the manual driver's fault

This is a very shaky assumption in my view; more realistic would be (to me):

1) Overall accident rate reduction even for manual drivers

2) Reduced damage in accidents even for manual drivers

3) Slight increase in "at-fault" allocation toward manual drivers

It seems very likely to me that those would result in net favorable effects even for manual drivers.

I believe a lot of driving will move to full auto once viable, but not all of it because lots of people like to drive recreationally, and I simply don't see insurance rates for manual drivers spiking out of control-- just compare insurance pricing for less-safe vintage cars, which is also perfectly reasonable.

Insurance premiums are higher for higher risk individuals/circumstances and lower for lower risk ones.

If automatic driving lowers the floor of risk due to even lower risk than even the lowest risk human driver, insurance premiums will adjust to compensate and accomodate the now higher risk human driver compared to the now lower risk computer driver.

And here's the kicker: Insurance premiums don't even have to increase for the human drivers. Once owners of automatic driving cars pay even cheaper premiums, that becomes the new baseline for "cheap" car insurance and the rest should be plainly obvious. "Want lower rates? Get an automatic driving car."

I'm not disputing that insurance for full-auto cars is likely to be cheaper in the future, but I don't believe that manual driving insurance will ever get "cripplingly" expensive-- it might even go down compared to now thanks to reduced accident rates (contributed by full-auto cars).

Also compare vintage-car insurance (which are in many cases drastically less safe): Pricing is perfectly viable there and has been for decades.

This is not really how accident liability is sorted. Most countries have a clause in their traffic law that states that even if you're in the right, you must still do everything feasible to prevent an accident. If anything, I would imagine that self-driving cars would be held to a higher standard here, not humans.

The number of drivers that i see get into aggressive non-prevention habits just so they can "be right and angry" is kinda mind blowing. Ie someone goes into a roundabout when they perhaps shouldn't have, and so the other person who likely had rightofway guns the gas to make it even more obvious and risks and accident just to be "right".

If you watch those dashcam communities you see similar behavior in what feels like half of the accidents. Someone else in the wrong but boy oh boy did the camera driver do nearly nothing to prevent the accident.

Outside of mapped and heavily driven teritory? Good luck.

> Outside of mapped and heavily driven teritory?

Why wouldn't rates go up for drivers driving outside mapped and well-driven territory?

Believe it or not, a lot of driving takes place in heavily driven territory :)

And I'm sure the autonomous vehicle will have a go-very-slowly mode for navigating people's driveways and similar places the mapping cars haven't been yet.

The world is pretty well mapped at this point I don't think this will be a showstopper.

And the nice thing about driver less cars is that they can drive wherever and whenever pretty cheaply. There's no driver to pay. Just the electricity bill for charging the vehicle and some servicing/vehicle depreciation and other fixed cost. That's a race to the bottom in terms of cost.

There's no good economical reason to limit this to just small areas. You might charge passengers a bit extra if they are further out or even for the distance the car has to drive to pick them up. But there's no good reason for that to be very expensive as it would be with a paid driver.

This. The boomer generation can not be outvoted of rights, even when they will crawl the streets being traffic hazzards with dementia. So they will be pushed howling and screaming towards automated driving.

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