0
0

[–] rwbj ago 

I think with fully self driving cars manufacturers will end up taking on all insurance obligations. If not for the sake of law, then for the sake of competition. Volvo has gone on the record stating that they themselves will take on fully liability for any at-fault accidents. That's actually a lot more relevant than it might seem at first. When the manufacturer is covering at fault accidents and everybody else is also required to have liability insurance you effectively end up getting full-coverage auto insurance for free.

The only delay here will be insurance companies lobbying. They'll try to bribe "donate" to enough politicians to make this illegal because 'reasons.' Similar to how many states decided to make it illegal for Tesla to offer direct-to-consumer sales again for 'reasons.' Nonetheless like Tesla can now sell to consumers in nearly all states, in the end corrupt politicians don't change anything - just delay it. So too will it be with vehicle insurance.

0
0

[–] thrus ago 

Those reasons for Tesla some make sense, I'm in MI so historically we had a lot of cars made here and if they could have sold directly out the factory door they could have priced in a way that people in other states would have no way of matching due to low storage costs no dealer and even no shipping costs. Any location with an auto factory near by would have been able to destroy the ability for anyone else to sell near there. Ford didn't want Dodge to have and advantage in some markets and Dodge didn't want Ford to have an advantage in others so they wound up with a process to cut both off and make it fair through a dealer.

0
0

[–] rwbj ago  (edited ago)

Interesting! I wasn't aware of the backstory there. However, I'm still not seeing how that's reasonable at all. Without such arrangements the companies would seemingly have been obligated to build even more manufacturing plants in a wide array of areas. So you'd have more jobs and cheaper vehicles. And similarly companies that wanted to effectively compete would also be incentivized into localizing their production instead of building them in just Detroit at the time, places like Mexico now, and then shipping them out around the world.

This also could have opened up the door to more competitors which is something we've long since needed in the auto market. The recent auto bail out showed they, alongside banks, have now gotten so bloated that they've reached the pinnacle of crony capitalism - 'too big to fail.'

0
1

[–] Chimaira92 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Im guessing the goal is to centralise the insurance of self-driving cars which in turn will make it cheap as chips because they aren't going to be on the roads until they are close to perfect, meaning far less accident then human drivers.

On the other side, im guessing they will sky rocket insurance premiums of people still choosing to drive.