11 ms·

Agreed, it seems inevitable that autonomy and insurance are going to be bundled. 1. Courts are finding Tesla partially liable for collisions, so they've alread

• apercu 11mo ago
  Curious where you live? The only place I ever paid insurance premiums that high (and not quite that high) was in Ontario. I pay $70.
  • bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    The average car insurance premium in the US is over $2000/year, and over $2500/year for full coverage. I imagine that has an outlier effect and the median is lower, but I'd be surprised if the median was under $100/month. I'm paying just under $1000/year (and yes, in Ontario).
    • deleted 11mo ago
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    • cyberax 11mo ago
      The liability-only insurance is around $70 a month.
      • devmor 11mo ago
        You must own your vehicle in its entirety to be able to downgrade to liability-only. If you are still making payments on your car (which most people are), your lender requires that you maintain full coverage.
      • seanmcdirmid 11mo ago
        It depends where you live and how much coverage you get. The real kicker these day is uninsured motorist coverage, because so many people are driving without insurance and they are much more likely to get into accidents.
  • ics 11mo ago
    In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average.
    • mcny 11mo ago
      > In NYC with clean 15+ year driving record my premium is $270 a month after discounts with USAA. Geico, Allstate, Progressive all quote me $400/mo minimum. Have driven everything from old beaters to brand new economy cars with little difference. Friends who also drive are paying around $350/mo on average. You're taking about full coverage, right?
      • ics 11mo ago
        Yes but when I tried to switch to liability only it was $20 cheaper. What I pay seems to be the floor, it’s definitely the lowest of anyone I know so far who isn’t claiming to live outside of NYC. Meanwhile my motorcycle insurance, liability only, for an older sport bike was only $400/year with Progressive.
        • apercu 11mo ago
          Interesting, when I was in high school I could not afford car insurance so I didn't't even bother with a drivers license, motorcycle license and insurance was like $80/yr. (that was a while back though).
    • devmor 11mo ago
      Similar here. In Atlanta, have never had an at-fault accident in my life. I pay just under $400/mo for full coverage on my 2019 coupe and my wife's 2015 crossover.
      • apercu 11mo ago
        Damn, that's Ontario costs (where the insurance industry is locked in to "No fault" which whether good or bad costs good drivers more.
  • lotsofpulp 11mo ago
    I always chuckle when discussions start comparing insurance premiums without defining the insurance itself. Might as well compare the prices of apples and oranges and vacuums and space stations. These comments could be quoting liability only insurance or comprehensive/collision for a kia or comprehensive/collision with bodily injury for a rivian R1S. The insured amount would differ by hundreds of thousands of dollars. For reference, I have only ever paid for maximum liability only insurance including uninsured/underinsured coverage ($500k/$250k), but not bodily injury, and my premium for 10k miles per year is less than $50 per month. Used to be less than $40 per month before 2022.
    • maxerickson 11mo ago
      Why would you forego bodily injury liability coverage? Most states require it, and it makes sense if you have even modest assets. The medical portion of my insurance that covers me (unlimited PIP) is like $17 a month, I can't see driving much and not spending that, even with relatively limited expectations for how much easier it might make things.
      • lotsofpulp 11mo ago
        Sorry, I meant I forego Personal Injury Protection, not Bodily Injury. I purchase the maximum amount of bodily injury (I forget if it’s $250k or $500k, but it’s up there).
  • jjav 11mo ago
    Sounds like insurance in Canada is very cheap. Here in California we pay about $400/month. This is for a couple with no accidents in 30 years, in the sweet spot of old enough to have plenty of driving record with zero accidents but not too old to have any age-based penalties, so that's about as cheap as it gets. Apparently when our child reaches driving age we should expect to be paying about $1000/month for insurace. We'll see when the time comes.
• phkahler 11mo ago
  >> Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside. If you can insure the car for less, the car company can charge more for the car. I don't want to pay a subscription (rent) for a car I buy.
  • bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    I think you're in the minority. I can't find the reference, but I believe more customers are willing to pay $100/month for Tesla FSD than are willing to pay $10K once.
    • typewithrhythm 11mo ago
      Tesla fsd is far from complete enough to be a data point; people who pay the 10k are gambling that when fsd is improved the cost will be much higher.
      • Alive-in-2025 11mo ago
        And today only fools pay the 10K one time cost. Tesla even priced the monthly amount to encourage you to go monthly. There's lots of reasons, including that they're not going to be able to upgrade people who got cars with the previous hardware, so endless lawsuits trying to get a promised but never provided upgrade from 3 to 4.
    • rootusrootus 11mo ago
      That's not surprising, the nominal break-even time (e.g. not accounting for the time value of money) is over eight years if you blow 10K on FSD as a one-time purchase. And when Tesla isn't feeling desperate to convince people to upgrade, the 10K license you bought stays with the car. The average new car owner would spend less with the monthly option. And of course there's the fact that you can turn monthly FSD off if you feel the value isn't there. The commitment is much lower, so it's easier to convince people to give it a trial run. I don't pay for it, though. I still haven't been that impressed with it (we've gotten a couple free months to play around with it). I think in some areas it works pretty well, but in my neighborhood it makes regular attempts to scratch the car.
• echelon 11mo ago
  I would pay so much for my own SUV to self-drive as well as Waymo. Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so. The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip. If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and skip flying. It's almost as romantic as a California Zephyr or Coast Starlight trip. And I can camp out of it. No cramped airlines. No catching colds by being packed in a sardine can with a stressed out immune system. No sharing space with people on public transit. I can work and watch movies and listen to music and hang out with my wife, my friends. People won't stare at me, and I can eat in peace or just be myself in my own space. I might even work in a nomadic lifestyle if I don't have to drive all the time. Our country is so big and there's so much to see. One day you might even be able to attach a trailer. Bikes, jet skis, ATVs. People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time. Big cars seem preferable. Lots of space for internal creature comforts. Laying back, lounging. Watching, reading, eating. Changing clothes, camping, even cooking. Some people might even buy autonomous RVs. I'm sure that'll be a big thing in its own right. It's bidirectional too! People can come to you as you go to them. Meet in the middle. Same thing with packages, food, etc. This would be the biggest thing in travel, transport, logistics, perhaps ever. It's a huge unlock. It feels downright revolutionary. Like a total change in how we might live our lives. This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper - because the commute falls apart. This honestly sounds better than a house, but if you can also own an affordable large home in the suburbs as your home base - that's incredible. You don't need a tiny expensive place in the city. You could fall asleep in your car and wake up for breakfast in the city. Spend some time at home, then make a trek to the mountains. All without wasting any time. No more driving, no more traffic. Commuting becomes leisure. It becomes you time. This is also kind of a super power that big countries (in terms of area) with lots of roads and highways will enjoy the most. It doesn't do much in a dense city, but once you add mountains and forests and streams and deserts and oceans - that's magic. Maybe our vast interstate highway infrastructure will suddenly grow ten times in value. Roads might become more important than ever. We might even start building more. If the insurance and autonomy come bundled as a subscription after you purchase or lease your vehicle, that's super easy for people to activate and spend money on. This is such a romantic dream, and I'm so hyped for this. I would pay an ungodly sum to unlock this. It can't come soon enough. Would subscribe in a heartbeat.
• deleted 11mo ago
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• harikb 11mo ago
  History suggests it won't be that clean. 1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments. 2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash. It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.
  • Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
    I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this. My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.
    • bobthepanda 11mo ago
      Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy. Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.
      • SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago
        > Auto companies have long had financing arms I have in fact heard it said that VW group is a financing company with a automobile arm. From some points of view, that seems correct.
      • ghaff 11mo ago
        Auto companies, yes. As I understand it, airline credit cards are mostly just co-branded cards with existing banks like Chase.
• neodymiumphish 11mo ago
  I think there will actually be a couple interesting adjustments/market forces acting in the car companies' favor. First, if the insurance applies to fully autonomous driving only, then I suspect they’ll reach a point where the cost of insurance+automation ends up being less than just insurance through third parties. Second, cutting into the traditional insurance market share is likely to increase costs for those who remain on traditional insurance, assuming there’s a significant enough number of people jumping ship. Combined, this creates a huge incentive for more users to jump on the self-driving bandwagon.
• deleted 11mo ago
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• darkstar_16 11mo ago
  I actually I'd be even willing to downgrade my car one level if I'm not driving and just sitting in the back seat. Will likely be cheaper for me to own even with the increased subscription.
• potato3732842 11mo ago
  Waymo does a lot of urban miles and they do so fairly timidly. The flip side of the that coin is Tesla FSD and you don't hear people simping for their safety record much around here. What if the difference between human and computer is basically nil (for the next ten years or so) and turns out to cost as much as glass coverage? Furthermore, it's not like you can slap this stuff on a 2000 Ford Tarus. You're inherently incurring the insurance burden of a fancy modern car with obscenely expensive everything to even get into the kind of vehicle that could/would be equipped with autonomy.
• dv_dt 11mo ago
  Maybe, but it might just push many would-be car owners to just use a service and forego buying a car altogether. What's the point of paying the capital expense, and a subscription expense for a car vs just calling up a Waymo. The traditional car makers should really be wary as they've historically been terrible at service offerings.
  • wongarsu 11mo ago
    In the next step, somebody will notice that many people drive to the same destination (like a large shopping mall or an airport) and try to offer to take them in the same self-driving car for a discount. Over time those vehicles might grow to seat as may as 30-100 people and stop at multiple destinations
    • barnas2 11mo ago
      Incredible startup idea. While we wait for the self driving tech, maybe we could pay specially trained people to drive these vehicles?
      • rangestransform 11mo ago
        Labour is over 50% of the cost for the MTA, we could run more routes and shorter headways with autonomy Who am I kidding, the NYC unions would rather burn down waymos than accept autonomy
    • prepend 11mo ago
      I get your joke. But I like paying more to ride by myself. It’s the driving I don’t like.
  • strange_quark 11mo ago
    People said this about Uber 15 years ago, and well, that didn’t happen.
    • dv_dt 11mo ago
• rconti 11mo ago
  Autonomy + insurance is an interesting way to arrive at what the insurers are already trying to push with their tracker dongles, where they encourage you to drive like a mouse by putting bits of carrot in front of you. I had been worried that non-tracked insurance would become increasingly expensive once we reached a tipping point where more and more drivers accepted the devil's bargain, but likely the trackers will be obsoleted by autonomy.