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Comment by zerd | Hacker News Reader

The old system was horrible though, you had to sue to get compensation, and could get sued for a fender-bender. The old system was _great_ for lawyers.

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In the old system, you only had to sue for compensation if / when the government wasn't offering you what you were due. It was entirely the government's choice to drag so many cases through the courts instead of paying. But at least the judicial system eventually made you whole, if you were able to navigate it. If the government cared about us so much that they wanted to fix the system, they could have simply chosen to pay what was due from the start, saving everyone the time and the legal expenses. But they didn't.

Fraud was another concern. Huge payouts from parking lot whiplash were indeed not uncommon, with the help of lawyers. However, I fail to see how the new system was the best solution for that. They went from one extreme, where fraud was rampant, to another extreme, where we have no rights. At least the first extreme cost us only a few hundred bucks per year on average. The new extreme saves you a bit of money but leaves people injured for life with no meaningful compensation for the harm done to them.

Kind of beside the point though, regarding self-driving cars.

But clearly the positive of preventing scoundrels/maniacs/etc. from dragging ordinary people through the courts on every fender bender is huge…?

You need to actually form a credible argument for why the downsides outweigh the upsides, or else nobody will know who to believe.

Clearly, eh? Spoken like someone who didn't get debilitating whiplash for years from being rear ended on a highway. My friend's vestibular system has been shot for 8 years and counting from that accident, and she still can't drive / bike / do much requiring balance/hand-eye coordination anymore. She was "lucky" this accident happened under the old system, she will at least get compensation ("will", because it's only now getting to trial, because the government insurance wouldn't pay what is due on its own, and the same government wouldn't fund the courts to provide a speedier resolution). If this accident happened today, she would have gotten peanuts that aren't enough to even offset the increased costs of life, let alone get any meaningful compensation for pain and suffering.

Do you want to tell me more about how you saving ~$500/year outweighs people like her being absolutely shafted under the new system? Please don't, I don't care. That's not why I commented.

The main purpose of my original comment wasn't to say that the new ICBC system is shitty – enough was said about that elsewhere already. It was to illustrate with a real life example that laws regarding liability can and are changed in very significant ways when the situation calls for it. Petty political reasons being as good a call as any, apparently, so I'm not worried about self-driving cars being stiffled by that. There's a sprinkle of "be careful what you wish for" in there as well, for those who see manufacturers' liability as a problem.

You could spend the rest of your life, writing anecdotes and stories, but how it will be meaningful in determining the net sum of upsides and downsides…?

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