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Comment by tspike | Hacker News Reader

As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if computer driven cars become ubiquitous, insurance rates on person driven cars will become prohibitively high or the act of driving a car on public roads will be banned outright.

As someone who enjoys nothing more than riding my motorcycle on mountain road trips, I can't help but dread that. The privacy and liberty implications make me uneasy as well, in much the same way as the NSA's overreach.

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Why would insurance become prohibitively high? Insurance is priced at the mean probability of getting into an accident * mean cost of restitution from an accident + insurance risk premium. I can't see self driving cars measurably affecting any of these numbers upwards significantly. Especially not by the factor of 10 it would require to make insurance prohibitively expensive.

Low-n probabilities become harder to assess, so if human-controlled vehicles are really rare, risks might be hard to assess.

How human drivers interact with otherwise automated traffic flows might similarly increase risks. Much as largely horse-drawn or bicycle traffic is generally pretty safe, but mixed-mode traffic with cars, trucks, busses, etc., tends to produce (often fatal) accidents.

Someone recently mentioned horses as a good analogy. Cars replaced horses; now horses are mostly not allowed on roads, and most people do not own horses. However, horse enthusiasts are still able to own horses and ride them, albeit in certain areas. As someone who enjoys driving, I can definitely see this same sort of thing happening with cars. Fortunately, it gives me hope that manually-driven cars won't become completely extinct.

I don't think liability insurance on motorcycles goes up very much. You still can't cause too much damage to a car, even if a human driver is much more likely to crash than computer.

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