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Welcome to the Era of the $20k Family Car Insurance Bill
- sharpshadow 2y agohttps://archive.is/F1lmU https://archive.is/F1lmU
- legitster 2y agoThis article isn't very useful because it doesn't distinguish between liability and collision coverage. It doesn't matter how young the driver is, if you put them in a cheap small used car, you only need liability coverage which is pretty cheap.
- dkhenry 2y agoIf you have a child on your policy, and you have a collision on your policy, then your child will be required to be included in that policy. Insurance companies don't accept that you can live in a household, but won't be allowed to drive the new car, so they will charge you like the child is driving the new car under any circumstance.
- buffington 2y agoMy insurance company requires me to sign an affidavit affirming that my adult child will not drive a car insured by said company. If my adult child does drive my car and gets in a collision, the affidavit is used by the insurance company to absolve themselves of any financial responsibilities related to the collision. I think it'd be reasonable aside from one obvious edge case: my adult child is blind and will never drive a car, yet I have to sign a new affidavit every time I renew my policy (every 6 months).
- potato3732842 2y agoThat doesn't work in states where the insurance industry has successfully lobbied for laws requiring that all vehicles in a household be cross-insured for every driver in the household.
- legitster 2y agoI've never heard of such a thing. Which states are those? Geico's only stated recommendation is that anyone who uses the car more than once a month should be on the policy.
- potato3732842 2y agoNew Jersey.
- kccqzy 2y agoIs it legal to put a young driver on their own insurance policy with a cheap small used car, while the rest of the family has a different policy with fancier cars and collision coverage?
- legitster 2y agoThat's how my family did it. You can even keep them all on the same plan, but you specify who the primary drivers for each vehicle when you set up each policy.
- taylodl 2y agoDistracted driving + expensive new cars = "crazy" premiums. We all pay the price when new cars are priced in the upper 5-digit and 6-digit range and a fender-bender costs $5K - $10K.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoAutomakers charge what the be auto market can support. They can limit supply to keep prices high. Used car market is limited by new car market sales. Structural demographics means there are less workers every year (auto repair labor costs). Costs are unlikely to decline.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gosub100 2y ago> Structural demographics Is that an euphemism for "refusing to pay a livable wage"?
- reaperducer 2y agoMaybe it means fewer people being born in car-producing and exporting countries.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoIt is wages accelerating to a living wage and past that because of the fertility rate curve. Similar to a bond curve, but expressing productivity available.
- l1tany11 2y agoOr it is a reference to everyone apparently needing to go to college etc, and there being a nationwide shortage of people entering into trades, mechanics, fabrication, machining, etc. All the “bad” jobs you should stay in school to avoid. Turns out we live in a built environment, not everyone can sit in a cube.
- 2y ago
- PreInternet01 2y agoWell, the more expensive driving a car is, the better! That being said, I'm pretty sure that liability insurance for a family is not USD 20K, unless your idea of 'family' is, well, pretty extensive? Collision insurance? Sure, with EVs becoming more popular, that will only go up. But, yeah, omelettes, eggs, blah...
- baggy_trough 2y ago> Well, the more expensive driving a car is, the better! What an astonishing statement.
- PreInternet01 2y agoWhy? I'm against private car ownership. Ask me all about it...
- scottLobster 2y agoNo shit. And you're suggesting lots of financial pain for people who can't afford it in the name of your ideology.
- PreInternet01 2y agoNo, I'm not suggesting any kind of financial pain at all. Do I support the ability of people to travel to their job, shopping centers, or any destination they like? Absolutely! Do I think a privately owned vehicle, which spends 90%+ of its active life being parked in spaces that could be utilized much better otherwise, is the best way to achieve those abilities? Nope. Sorry.
- scottLobster 2y agoOh, so you're in favor of playing Sim-City with the infinite money cheat codes. Cool. Because if you were suggesting that in the real world then, at least in America, you're suggesting a complete overhaul of almost all transportation infrastructure and saying that no average person will have to spend an extra dollar to pay for it somehow. Is Mexico paying for it or something?
- dragonwriter 2y ago"Have several children, a driveway full of cars, and a few moving violations..." Yeah, that's kind of an edge case, there.
- Hilift 2y agoMultiple recent moving violations is a red flag. There's probably a better story here, such as "my insurance company is prevented from or unable to cancel my policy, where I would normally end up on expensive state subsidized insurance which is probably less expensive than $20k".
- rozap 2y agoThe 20k price tag in the article is pretty clickbait-y. It talks about families with 4 kids, and, if you have 4 16-20 year olds all driving, the chance of a 20k bill is not far fetched. If someone wanted to make a bet with me that their 4 kids wouldn't cause >$20k of damage over a year, and I get $20k if they don't, I'm not sure I'd take that bet. We gathered a ton of quotes, and yea there are crazy prices at the end of the tail (see: https://www.coveragecat.com/cheapest-car-insurance/texas#quote-chart-wrapper https://www.coveragecat.com/cheapest-car-insurance/texas#quo...) but otherwise the distribution skews to the left. When we trained a simple model on that data (https://www.coveragecat.com/calculator/carrier-comparison https://www.coveragecat.com/calculator/carrier-comparison) it was pretty obvious that age is the primary variable in premium. You can fiddle with the variables and see what changes, spoiler alert, age has the highest correlation with premium. Anyone who has met a teenager in 2024 would not be surprised by this.
- lordnacho 2y agoWhat about male/female? Are young men more likely to cause damage than young women?
- rozap 2y agoThere was less of a correlation than you'd think, almost none. But we also operate in states where it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender so it makes sense that this plays out in the data. So, important to note that we are gathering premium prices, which may not accurately reflect risk for particular subgroups due to regulation. So whether or not teenage boys are riskier than teenage girls would require a different set of data.
- tastyfreeze 2y agoYes, young men are twice as likely to get in an accident than young women. On top of that young men are 7 times more likely to get in an accident that all men. Unsurprisingly the data does support higher insurance premiums for young drivers. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813492 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8134...
- 2y ago
- hampelm 2y agoThat doesn't seem an absurd price for owning six cars?
- lbwtaylor 2y agoMy parents transferred an old car to my older brother and insured me and him on it and signed something saying we were not permitted to drive the other cars. Not sure if that is permitted/possible everywhere, but the problem is if the parents drive nice cars the insurer presumes the kids will also drive them (and crash them).
- wcunning 2y agoI have two vehicles, my girlfriend has another one, and despite living in one of the higher insurance premium areas in one of the highest insurance premium states in the country (Oakland County, Michigan), our total bill with full coverage and relatively low deductibles is around $7k/yr. A family with 4 cars total (two driving age kids, two parents with cars to drive to different jobs) should not be massively more expensive, likely only $3~4k more than my bill, making it about half of the headline number. To do worse than that, you'd have to live in the worst part of inner city Detroit with the highest insurance rates and have full coverage or massively more expensive vehicles... I don't think the math checks out, really. I do know people who have very very high bills, but they have one of 1) very high end cars (911 GT3 RS, Bentley, etc.) 2) something rare insured at full value of its rare nature or 3) actively stating to the insurer that it's a track car being raced on the weekends. All of those happen around me, but those aren't the modal case.
- mdbmdb 2y agowow $7k/yr for 2 cars. That's crazy expensive
- xnx 2y agoThese aren't quite the last gasps, but the end is definitely in sight for the car insurance industry. Self-driving cars are an extinction level event for car insurance. $20K would buy a lot of Waymo rides.
- silisili 2y agoI keep reading about ridiculous insurance prices the last few years, but it seemingly never affects me. Do most people tend to get lots of moving violations and in accidents or something? I have two vehicles, mid range limits, one brand new with full coverage, and one a bit older with liability, and for two drivers the bill is around $1200 a year. I know kids of course get a higher rate, but even so, $20k seems a bit out there unless you have a dodgy record.
- kccqzy 2y agoI have the same bill as yours, $1200 per year, for two adult drivers. The $20k is for four kids, which is believable, since $5000 for a young driver is reasonable.
- silisili 2y agoI guess I didn't realize insurance for kids was now that expensive. That's insane! I have a few years til mine is able to drive, that's going to be a fun conversation...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tredre3 2y agoThat's because no single person is paying 20k in insurance for a car. The 20k quote covers 6 cars driven by 6 people with a dodgy record. > Leah Carter, a mother of four in Merrick, N.Y., sent me 60 pages of documents that she and her family were trying to make sense of after their annual premium with Travelers Insurance roughly doubled in the space of a year or so, to more than $21,000. > They added a fourth child and a sixth car to their Travelers policy this year. None of the vehicles are fancy. There had been a few moving violations, including at least one that was her husband’s responsibility.
- spencerchubb 2y agoThe family has 6 drivers and 6 vehicles, they live in california, and don't have the best driving record. That's $278 per person per month, so really not that outrageous
- occz 2y agoCars are quite simply not a good basis for a societal transportation system, and this is yet another condemning data point.
- Ekaros 2y agoWonder if they had any claims. As well those reasonably can affect the rates. Which could explain things specially with 6 cars... And what does fancy mean?
- JojoFatsani 2y agoYou can order quite a few Ubers or zip car rentals for 20k.
- penguin_booze 2y agoMore and more, I feel like insurance has become a scam. The original idea was that of pooling risk. Now, it's as much of a daylight robbery as it can get. Premiums have shot up up. You can only make a claim at most once in your lifetime. Once past that, forget getting insurance anymore (at a reasonable premium, that is). Insurance is practically a zero-loss business [citation needed].