Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.

We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.

But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.

I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.

I meant they aren't political in their pricing. They don't charge less or more for something because it is considered liberal or conservative.

> If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.

Wouldn't the accident rate for humans go down as well as the percentage of SDV increase? After all, the humans won't be exclusively having accidents with each other.

I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road.

We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.

They have a reason: profit.

The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving.

Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point where I'm not actually sure that robotaxis can reliably beat them yet.

Yeah, a hundred years from now fewer people will drive themselves, but considering how many people DESPISE driving and only do it because it's required of them, that isn't bad.

It is understandable that you think this is the case as someone who is not above the age of 50. You will see that health and life insurance premiums rise precipitously once you reach certain milestones. Once you reach 90 years old, you will find that car insurance companies will discontinue your policy based on a single traffic ticket.

We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.