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Self Driving Car Insurance

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Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#81

Post by Marsymars »

2III7 wrote: post #67
kjksf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's the law of the land currently. The product you buy is called "FSD Supervised". It clearly states you're liable and must supervise the system. I don't think there's law that would allow Tesla (or anyone else) to sell a passenger car with unsupervised system. If you take Waymo or Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, you are not liable for accidents, Google or Tesla is. That's because they operate on limited state l…

Without LIDAR and/or additional sensors, Tesla will never be able to provide "real" FSD, no matter how wonderful their software controlling the car is. Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property. Waymo and others are providing a taxi service where the driver is not a human. You don't pay insurance when you ride Uber or Bolt…

> Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property.

Well practically speaking, there’s nothing stopping anyone from voluntarily assuming liability for arbitrary things. If Tesla assumes the liability for my car, then even if I still require my “own” insurance for legal purposes, the marginal cost of covering the remaining risk is going to be close to zero.

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#82

Post by kittikitti »

I have Lemonade for my home insurance. It's been reliable for several years and the customer service is great. I don't have a self-driving car but I wouldn't hesitate to sign up. Their rates are very affordable.

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#83

Post by nine_k »

BarryMilo wrote: post #69
hamdingers wrote: post #55

The whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.

Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized... Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS…

This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house.

The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.

Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.

Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#84

Post by nine_k »

dfabulich wrote: post #75
BarryMilo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized... Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS…

Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic.

Also, a real nightmare for the municipal trade unions. (Do you know why every NYC subway train needs to have not one but two operators, even though it could run automatically just fine?)

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#85

Post by Veserv »

mullingitover wrote: post #40
kjksf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is cooperating with Lemonade on this by providing them necessary user driving data. If Tesla didn't want Lemonade to provide this, they could block them. Strategically, Tesla doesn't want to be an insurer. They started the insurance product years ago, before Lemonade also offered this, to make FSD more attractive to buyers. But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla sh…

> But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things. If the math was mathing, it would be malpractice not to expand it. I'm betting that their scheme simply wasn't workable, given the extremely high costs of claims (Tesla repairs aren't cheap) relative to the low rates that they were collecting on premiums. The cheap premiums are probably a form of…

It was not workable. They have a loss ratio of >100% [1], as in they paid out more in claims than received in premiums before even accounting for literally any other costs. Industry average is ~60-80% to stay profitable when including other costs.

They released the Tesla Insurance product because their cars were excessively expensive to insure, increasing ownership costs, which was impacting sales. By releasing the unprofitable Tesla Insurance product, they could subsidize ownership costs making the cars more attractive to buy right now which pumped revenues immediately in return for a "accidental" write-down in the future.

[1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#86

Post by theLiminator »

Sayrus wrote: post #72
BarryMilo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized... Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS…

Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware. Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

> Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

Yeah, this would rely on robust competition.

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#87

Post by close04 »

jgbuddy wrote: post #7
jasoncartwright wrote: post #5

If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?

Because the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?

The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.

Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.

A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#88

Post by bluGill »

Sayrus wrote: post #72
BarryMilo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized... Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS…

Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware. Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

Cars and personal computers have advantages over shared resources that often make them worth the cost. If you want your transport/compute in busy times you may find limitations. (ever got on the train and had to stand because there are no seats? Every had to wait for your compute job to start because they are all busy? Both of these have happened to me).

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#89

Post by jtbayly »

bluGill wrote: post #77
hamdingers wrote: post #55

The whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.

For the vast majority of people who own a car, continuing to own the car will remain the better deal. Most people need their car during "rush hour", so there isn't any savings from sharing, and worse some people have "high standards" and so will demand the rental be a clean car nicer than you would accept - thus raising the costs (particularly if you drive used cars) Any remaining argument for a shared car dies when…

> sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.

Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.

Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.

Hertz will hurts you.

Re: Self Driving Car Insurance

#90

Post by cyberax »

dfabulich wrote: post #75
BarryMilo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized... Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS…

Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic.

Why would you need buses?
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