Wow, thanks for the explanation. That's a ball-of-yarn-shaped collection of problems :( Here, if you don't pay your insurance premiums, the insurance company s

Wow, thanks for the explanation. That's a ball-of-yarn-shaped collection of problems :( Here, if you don't pay your insurance premiums, the insurance company still has to cover for any damage you cause, until you return your plates (deregister the car) and I think you face a nice fine if you have unpaid premiums at that point. This means insurance companies have a great incentive to hunt you down like hounds if you don't pay. I could see this working in the US, but I think the next part is also required for the trick to work: Not paying is hard. If the insurance company goes to court against you, it can do things like demand that a part of your wage be seized in order to pay for your debt. There are cantonal registers of previous enforcements against someone (you get an entry there for any situation where a creditor requested and enforcement of payment). Having any entries in the register is social suicide because you'll have a much harder time finding an apartment (almost all landlords demand a copy of your entries). So if you have no assets, you won't be driving a car for long, removing you from the pool of people who can cause damage. Plus, we don't put people in jail too easily (we only have capacity for ~7000 people nationwide, and about 6900 people out of a population of 8 million are in jail right now: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/crime-criminal-justice.assetdetail.1780909.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/crime-crimin... I can't imagine the stereotypical American we know from bad TV to be in favor of so much government involvement, but I think the system works well. Of course it's ridiculously hard to get by in the (non-urban) parts of the US without a car, which again changes the whole perspective. It's interesting that the two systems in place here produce such different results. Vehicle regulations are not uniform even in Switzerland, by the way (e.g. in Zürich you don't pay tax on electric vehicles, in St. Gallen you pay by weight (!!!) for your heavy Tesla). But the insurance rules are the same for everyone.