They'd still at least buy reinsurance etc anyway.

All unlimited liability insurance companies (e.g. motor insurers in the UK) have reinsurance to take the hit on claims over a certain level - e.g. 100k, 1m etc.

For extreme black swan risks, this is how you prevent the insurance company just going bankrupt.

Reinsurers themselves then also have their own reinsurance, and so on. The interesting thing is that you then have to keep track of the chain of reinsurers to make sure they don't turn out to be insuring themselves in a big loop. A "retrocession spiral" could take out many of the companies involved at the same time, e.g. the LMX spiral.

If it's cheaper for them to pay lawyers a few tens or hundreds of millions to bury any such case in court, in settlements, or putting the agitator through any of the myriad forms of living hell they can legally get away with, then they'll go that route.

You'd need an immensely rich or influential opponent to decide they wanted to march through hell in order to hold Google's feet to the fire. It'd have to be something deeply personal and they probably have things structured to limit any potential liability to a couple hundred million. They'll never be held to account for anything that goes seriously wrong.

The provider of the insurance can always insure itself for that catastrophic case. It's called Reinsurance.

They know it’s cheaper to buy/lobby congress to limit their liability and will do so long before they payout real money.

> Auto insurers don't face a "catastrophic liability" bankrupting scenario like home insurers might in the case of a natural disaster or fire.

This changes with self-driving. Push a buggy update and potentially all the same model cars could crash on the same day.

This is not a threat model regular car insurers need to deal with since it'll never happen that all of their customers decide to drive drunk the same day, but that's effectively what a buggy software update would be like.

I think you’re right, but this thread did bring to mind the LA Northridge quake (1994):

https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/a553905/2147483...

I can easily imagine auto insurers facing exactly that kind of liability if a self-driving car release is bad enough.

A bad hail storm comes close. Hail damage can total a car.

Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.

Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.

I think parent might be implying that a 10 mph collision can total a car just as effectively as a 100 mph collision. There might be more left of the occupants, but the car itself might be still a total loss from a cost-to-repair perspective

> I'd very much love to see people who cause accidents have their insurance go through the roof.

Life is hard and people make mistakes. Let the actuaries do their job, but causing an accident is not a moral failure, except in cases like drunk driving, where we have actual criminal liability already.

> the insurance companies will force self-driving on everybody through massive insurance rate increases for manual driving.

Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).

> Given that we do not have protections against companies that can make you a Digital Non-Person with a click of a mouse, I have significant problems with that.

I absolutely think this is going to be one of the greater social issues of the next generation.

Yes, imagine you bought a Google self-driving car for $70,000, and one day their algorithm gets mad at you due to a glitch, and your Google account is locked, your car can no longer be unlocked, can't be sold, and your appeals are instantly rejected and you have no recourse. Just a typical day in Google's world.

Even just paying for the roads for these cars to drive on is a challenge with the lack-of-density they require. So many suburbs with large lot sizes just learn to live with the potholes.

I'm really doubting this is the case. It seems much more likely to be due to zoning laws.

It already has!

Ethnic food has thoroughly suburbanized, as has shopping.

> What's one to do if they like becoming familiar with a place, rather than watching place after place whiz by?

They stop at that place and become familiar with it?

There are a bunch of it depends. A large part of traffic is because someone messes up - accidents cause large delays, but even a small mistake in merging can slow down several others. Though human drivers regularly tailgate, if self driving cars maintain their proper 3 second following distance we could need a lot more space. (though perhaps self driving can safely maintain even a closer distance than humans do - I don't know)

>> no more traffic

> How?

There would be no more traffic for the driver, who would be sleeping or watching Netflix

> If your car isn't packed to capacity on every single trip, it is less efficient and worse than public transit.

Cost is a great proxy for costs versus benefits. People choose cars because they are efficient for them.

In theory public transit is efficient. In practice, only if you live in a very high density area, or you value your time at $0.

> I hope to god this never ever happens.

Then I'll never buy an autonomous vehicle.

I get that most people just want short trips around a major city, but given we, I'm sure it's shocking, don't all live in places like that, or want to spend our time in places like that, it might behoove y'all to solve for other use cases if you want widespread adoption (or at least accept that it's ok to solve for those use cases).

Or, I guess, you can hope that everyone will suddenly decide that all they want is to live in modern Kowloon City because "roads are awful" or whatever memetic nonsense is trending on TikTok.

Public transit is a dream turned nightmare consistently for seventy-five years. Autonomy will be less efficient -- but not that much less efficient given closer car spacing, speed, and remote parking -- but it will be spectacularly more convenient and comfortable. I'm all for it. You'll survive the tire pollution.

human drivers are inconvenient. They need sleep, and food, and probably won't be willing to take a 5 month trip south of the border for giggles. They poop. Inevitably they will try to do weird shit like have a conversation.

I would hope geohot is exploring options to partner with one of the automakers. Because it sure looks like the future is not bright for their device. Cars are steadily switching to encrypted canbus and don't work with Comma. It's a dead end unless they work a deal with someone to be allowed on the bus.

George Hotz has done some interesting work, but Comma is far too indie/hacker. It's not at a scale where it can be 100% autonomous.

I think a fully autonomous car has to be designed around LiDAR and autonomy from the ground up. That's a hugely capital intensive task that integrates a lot of domains and data. And so much money and talent.

This is more in the ballpark of Google Waymo, Amazon Zoox, Tesla/xAI, Rivian, Apple, etc.

And as the other folks have mentioned, this becomes a really good prospect if one company can manage the autonomy, insurance, maintenance, updates, etc. A fully vertically integrated subscription offering on top of specially purposed hardware you either lease or purchase.

Incredible startup idea. While we wait for the self driving tech, maybe we could pay specially trained people to drive these vehicles?

I get your joke. But I like paying more to ride by myself.

It’s the driving I don’t like.

15 years ago we were supposed to have self driving cars in three years

> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month

This is terrible. In Germany (major city) I pay 166 Eur a month for two cars, one normal (premium brand) family car and second being V8 coupe. I make about 25000km a year in total and have 6 years no claims. No accidents in my driving history (over 15 years). Price is for full coverage with low excess.

Wow.That a bit high even for NYC. Are you male? I have a join policy with my wife with Geico for $166 a month. This includes upgraded $100,000 liability limit roadside assistance and windshield insurance.

I have a crossover/wagon 330 horsepower V6 engine.

> In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.

You're taking about full coverage, right?

Wow that is crazy, also in the US my wife & I pay about $30/each a month.

Similar here. In Atlanta, have never had an at-fault accident in my life. I pay just under $400/mo for full coverage on my 2019 coupe and my wife's 2015 crossover.

The liability-only insurance is around $70 a month.

Why would you forego bodily injury liability coverage? Most states require it, and it makes sense if you have even modest assets.

The medical portion of my insurance that covers me (unlimited PIP) is like $17 a month, I can't see driving much and not spending that, even with relatively limited expectations for how much easier it might make things.

That's not surprising, the nominal break-even time (e.g. not accounting for the time value of money) is over eight years if you blow 10K on FSD as a one-time purchase. And when Tesla isn't feeling desperate to convince people to upgrade, the 10K license you bought stays with the car. The average new car owner would spend less with the monthly option.

And of course there's the fact that you can turn monthly FSD off if you feel the value isn't there. The commitment is much lower, so it's easier to convince people to give it a trial run.

I don't pay for it, though. I still haven't been that impressed with it (we've gotten a couple free months to play around with it). I think in some areas it works pretty well, but in my neighborhood it makes regular attempts to scratch the car.

While that is true, that’s only a small percentage of drivers. Most Tesla drivers do not pay for FSD at all. About 12% of Tesla owners pay for FSD in one form or another [0].

So even though paying monthly is more amenable, the vast majority don’t want to pay anything.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-full-self-driving-sale...

Tesla fsd is far from complete enough to be a data point; people who pay the 10k are gambling that when fsd is improved the cost will be much higher.

The $10k price exists to make the $100/mo seem like a good deal.