Self Driving Car Insurance

If FSD is going to be a subscription and you will never own our fancy autopilot feature. Why should the user pay for insurance?

The user is paying for a service that they do not control and which workings are completely opaque. How can responsibility ever lie with the user in such a situation?

It kind of is. They're responsible for something like 30% of traffic fatalities despite being a far smaller percentage of drivers.

> People who can't afford self driving cars (now the insurance industry has a good proxy for income that they couldn't tap into before)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30172108/

But also, wouldn't they already have this by using the vehicle model and year?

> Enthusiasts who like driving their cars (cruisers, racers, Helcat revving, people who like doing donuts, etc...)

Again something that seems like it would already be accounted for by vehicle model.

> Older people who don't trust technology.

How sure are we that the people who don't trust technology are older? And again, the insurance company already knows your age.

> Also, if self driving cars go mainstream, they are bound to include the safest drivers overnight

Are they? They're more likely to include the people who spend the most time in cars, which is another higher risk pool, because it allows those people to spend the time on a phone/laptop instead of driving the car, which is worth more to people the more time they spend doing it and so justifies the cost of a newer vehicle more easily.

> Oh, and those self driving cars are expensive

Isn't that more of a problem for the self-driving pool? Also, isn't most of the cost that the sensors aren't as common and they'd end up costing less as a result of volume production anyway?

> Self driving cars have a lot of sensors/recorders. While this could work to your advantage (proving that you aren't at fault), it often isn't (they have evidence that you were at fault). Whereas before fault might have been much more hazy (both at fault, or both no fault).

Which is only a problem for the worse drivers who are actually at fault, which makes them more likely to move into the self-driving car pool.

> The biggest factor comes if self driving cars really are much safer than human drivers.

The biggest factor is which drivers switch to self-driving cars. If half of human drivers switched to self-driving cars but they were chosen completely at random then the insurance rates for the remaining drivers would be essentially unaffected. How safe they are is only relevant insofar as it affects your chances of getting into a collision with another vehicle, and if they're safer then it would make that chance go down to have more of them on the road.

What does it mean to tear down software, exactly? Are you thinking of something like decompilation?

You can do that, but you're probably not going to learn all that much, and you still can't use it in any meaningful sense as you never bought it in the first place. You only licensed use of it as a consumer (and now that it is subscription-only, maybe not even that). If you have to rebuild the whole thing yourself anyway, what have you really gained? Its not exactly a secret how the technology works, only costly to build.

> Except that they could just buy one themselves.

That is unlikely, unless you mean buying Tesla outright? Getting a license to use it as a manufacturer is much more realistic, but still a license.