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Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

maxmautner.com

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Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#41

Post by charlieyu1 »

jjav wrote: post #32
mrtesthah wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in order words, non-drivers are forced to subsidize drivers (who risk the lives and property of others)? Here’s a comparison of US public subsidization of the costs of driving, from the same blog: https://maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/paying-for-driving.html

Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group? The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes. If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance. Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having t…

So why is someone who is not an employer, subsiding other employers in their purchase of employee insurance?

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#42

Post by caminante »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16
stouset wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umbrella insurance is intended to give you coverage in excess of those numbers.

You can get $3M-$5M in personal liability umbrella coverage (“plup”) for under $1k/year, but have to max out the underlying policy limits first.

And to add, you're already close to maxing out the underlying limits by default as required by auto lenders. If not financing, you should still...get similar levels to add umbrella.

For the parent, an extra 1M umbrella is an extra $2-300/y and covers beyond auto!

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#43

Post by delichon »

Mark my words, in 2036 this story will read like a blast from the past. I read somewhere on this site recently that Waymo is about 9x safer than human drivers, and that number isn't going anywhere but up. What accidents remain will mostly be the responsibility of self driving car makers and fleet operators, and those don't deal with strip mall insurance agents. Please join me in a moment of silence for the dissolving business model of the automotive insurance industry over the next decade. And several moments of joy for tens of thousands of fewer crippled and killed people per year.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#44

Post by deepsun »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #26
deepsun wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet at the same time federal government allowed home insurance to be non-actuarial (aka insolvent) for natural disasters like hurricanes. So essentially the rest of the country subsidise residents in disaster-prone areas. So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians.

>So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians. More like some the people in Ohio or Maine or Wisconsin pays for both. CA and FL are both natural disaster dense compared to the colder states.

Yes even better. Parent just compared insurance cost in CA vs FL, so I brought CA here.

PS: California, not cyanoacrylate.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#45

Post by expedition32 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #27
kube-system wrote: post #3

You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever -- 20% or more in some states.

lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.

It doesn't help that literally every medical procedure in America is automatically 10 times more expensive than anywhere else in the world.

And any US hospital administrator will pump that injured foreigner for all he or she's worth. At least the quality of care is decent.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#46

Post by philip1209 »

delichon wrote: post #43

Mark my words, in 2036 this story will read like a blast from the past. I read somewhere on this site recently that Waymo is about 9x safer than human drivers, and that number isn't going anywhere but up. What accidents remain will mostly be the responsibility of self driving car makers and fleet operators, and those don't deal with strip mall insurance agents. Please join me in a moment of silence for the dissolving…

I think you’ve gotten things confused.

Automative insurance has entered the “regulatory capture” stage, which is the highest form of actualization in capitalism.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#47

Post by what »

jjav wrote: post #32
mrtesthah wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in order words, non-drivers are forced to subsidize drivers (who risk the lives and property of others)? Here’s a comparison of US public subsidization of the costs of driving, from the same blog: https://maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/paying-for-driving.html

Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group? The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes. If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance. Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having t…

Did you know that you could charge people different rates for insurance based on risk profiles or deny them outright? You used to be able to anyway.

I’m fine subsidizing people of a similar risk profile that have a hit by a bus moment. I’m not fine subsidizing the obese and chronically ill.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#49

Post by jeffbee »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #31
jeffbee wrote: post #23

> In-car dongles that track jerky driving, crash event recorders, and driver monitoring systems now let an insurer observe behavior directly and price it. Uh, but not in California, because of 1988's Prop. 103. Telematics for insurance pricing are completely unavailable in California.

Because of Prop 103 California has reasonable insurance rates especially considering cost of living. California's laws and regulations are oriented around forcing people to have at least some coverage. I suspect that the laws annoy insurance companies because they conflict with MBAs craven impulses. But those impulses when not pushed back against eventually result in collapse.

Some aspects of Prop. 103 work. The definition of "good driver" as everyone who hasn't caused a fatality in the last 3 years is not one of those aspects.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#50

Post by throwworhtthrow »

encrypted_bird wrote: post #48
bix6 wrote: post #20

I cannot stand AI writing ffs.

As someone who doesn't know most of the tells but genuinely wants to know, what are some of the things that tells you it's AI-generated?

There's the punctuation and word choice tells. And the overall voice. But let's set that aside because some human writing shows similar traits, or perhaps a human used an LLM to "fix the grammar". So I'll point out another tell that this article is pure slop:

This article is overflowing with links, numbers, and graphs. When a human writes that densely, it takes effort to incorporate all those details. So the human only does that if each detail contributes to their argument. In this article it's mostly irrelevant. It's LLM filler to pad out an article that really has nothing to say beyond its (also LLM-scented) title.

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