8 ms·
If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?
by jasoncartwright 8mo ago
If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?
- jgbuddy 8mo agoBecause the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?
- throw20251220 8mo agoWho’s the “operator” of an “autonomous” car? If I sit in it and it drives me around, how am I an “operator”?
- renewiltord 8mo agoIf you get on a horse and let go of the reins you are also considered the operator of the horse. Such are the definitions in our society.
- kyleee 8mo agoGreat analogy, lol
- jasoncartwright 8mo agoSounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.
- scottbez1 8mo agoYeah, Tesla gets to blame the “driver”, and has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible. And the system is designed to set up drivers for failure. An HCI challenge with mostly autonomous systems is that operators lose their awareness of the system, and when things go wrong you can easily get worse outcomes than if the system was fully manual with an engaged operator. This is a well known challenge in the nuclear energy sector and airline industry (Air France 447) - how do you keep operators fully engaged even though they almost never need to intervene, because otherwise they’re likely to be missing critical context and make wrong decisions. These days you could probably argue the same is true of software engineers reviewing LLM code that’s often - but not always - correct.
- redanddead 8mo ago> has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible Really? Thats crazy.
- thelastgallon 8mo agoIts neither self-driving, nor autonomous, eventually not even a car! (as Tesla slowly exits the car business). It will be 'insurance' on Speculation as a service, as Tesla skyrockets to $20T market cap. Tesla will successfully transition from a small revenue to pre-revenue company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJdKW-UnFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJdKW-UnFQ The last few years of Tesla 'growth' show how this transition is unfolding. S and X production is shutdown, just a few more models to shutdown.
- rubyfan 8mo agoI wonder if they will try to sell off the car business once they can hype up something else. It seems odd to just let the car business die.
- redanddead 8mo agoWild prediction, would love to hear the rest of it
- iwontberude 8mo agoEspecially since they can push regressions over the air and you could be lulled into a sense of safety and robustness that isn’t there and bam you pay the costs of the regressions, not Tesla.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- close04 8mo agoThe point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite. Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help. A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.
- throw20251220 8mo agoIt’s because you bought it. Don’t buy it if you don’t want to insure.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoYep, you bought it, you own it, you choose to operate it on the public roads. Therefore your liability.
- 9rx 8mo agoIf you bought and owned it, you could sell it to another auto manufacturer for some pretty serious amounts of money. In reality, you acquired a license to use it. Your liability should only go as far as you have agreed to identify the licenser.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- recursive 8mo agoYou can actually do that. Except that they could just buy one themselves. Companies exist that buy cars just to tear them down and publish reports on what they find.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 9rx 8mo ago> Companies exist that buy cars just to tear them down and publish reports on what they find. 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.
- davidhunter 8mo agoSeems like the role of the human operator in the age of AI is to be the entity they can throw in jail if the machine fails (e.g. driver, pilot)
- jimt1234 8mo agoNot an expert here, but I recall reading that certain European countries (Spain???) allow liability to be put on the autonomous driving system, not the person in the car. Does anyone know more about this?
- bluGill 8mo agoThat is the case everywhere. It is common when buying a product for the contract to include who has liability for various things. The price often changes by a lot depending on who has liability. Cars are traditionally sold as the customer has liability. Nothing stops a car maker (or even an individual dealer) from selling cars today taking all the insurance liability in any country I know of - they don't for what I hope are obvious reasons (bad drivers will be sure to buy those cars since it is a better deal for them an in turn a worse deal for good drivers), but they could. Self driving is currently sold as customers has liability because that is how it has always been done. I doubt it will change, but it is only because I doubt there will ever be enough advantage as to be worth it for someone else to take on the liability - but I could be wrong.
- kjksf 8mo agoBecause that's the law of the land currently. The product you buy is called "FSD Supervised". It clearly states you're liable and must supervise the system. I don't think there's law that would allow Tesla (or anyone else) to sell a passenger car with unsupervised system. If you take Waymo or Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, you are not liable for accidents, Google or Tesla is. That's because they operate on limited state laws that allow them to provide such service but the law doesn't allow selling such cars to people. That's changing. Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.
- jasoncartwright 8mo agoI see. So not Tesla's product they are using to sell insurance around isn't "Full Self-Driving" or "Autonomous" like the page says.
- FeloniousHam 8mo agoMy current FSD usage is 90% over ~2000 miles (since v14.x). Besides driving everywhere, everyday with FSD, I have driven 4 hours garage to hotel valet without intervention. It is absolutely "Full Self-Driving" and "Autonomous". FSD isn't perfect, but it is everyday amazing and useful.
- jasoncartwright 8mo agoYet still on relying you to cover it with your insurance. Again, clearly not autonomous.
- gizmo686 8mo agoGenerally speaking, liability for a thing falls on the owner/operator. That person can sue the manufacturer to recover the damages if they want. At some point, I expect it to become somewhat routine for insurures to pay out, then sue the manufacturer to recover.
- amelius 8mo agoOr at some point subscribing to a service may be easier than owning the damn thing.
- DaSHacka 8mo agoAll according to plan
- koakuma-chan 8mo agoIt already doesn't make sense to own a car for me. It's cheaper to just call an Uber.
- paulddraper 8mo agoDepends how often. Multiple Ubers per day are expensive. ($55 x 365 = $20,000) All in, a budget car costs less than half of that per year. But if you replace some of that with public transportation, or a car is otherwise impractical, the math changes.
- gffrd 8mo agoFor some this is the case. For others, this is not the case.
- amelius 8mo agosome -> most ?
- 8mo ago
- loeg 8mo agoIt isn't fully autonomous yet. For any future system sold as level 5 (or level 4?), I agree with your contention -- the manufacturer of the level 5 autonomous system is the one who bears primary liability and therefore should insure. "FSD" isn't even level 3. (Though, there is still an element of owner/operator maintenance for level 4/5 vehicles -- e.g., if the owner fails to replace tires below 4/32", continues to operate the vehicle, and it causes an injury, that is partially the owner/operator's fault.)
- Night_Thastus 8mo agoWouldn't that requirement completely kill any chance of a L5 system being profitable? If company X is making tons of self-driving cars, and now has to pay insurance for every single one, that's a mountain of cash. They'd go broke immediately. I realize it would suck to be blamed for something the car did when you weren't driving it, but I'm not sure how else it could be financially feasible.
- AlotOfReading 8mo agoThe way it works in states like California currently is that the permit holder has to post an insurance bond that accidents and judgements are taken out against. It's a fixed overhead.
- loeg 8mo agoNo? Insurance costs would be passed through to consumers in the form of up-front purchase price. And probably the cost to insure L5 systems for liability will be very low. If it isn't low, the autonomous system isn't very safe.
- abtinf 8mo agoYou insure the property, not the person.
- redanddead 8mo agowell it's the risk, the combination .. it's why young drivers pay more for insurance
- ck2 8mo agoThe coder and sensor manufacturers need the insurance for wrongful death lawsuits and Musk for removing lidar so it keeps jumping across high speed traffic at shadows because the visual cameras can't see true depth 99% of the people on this website are coders and know how even one small typo can cause random fails, yet you trust them to make you an alpha/beta tester at high speed?
- djoldman 8mo agoThat's probably the future; Mercedes currently does do this in limited form: https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-mercedes-drivepilot-causes-a-crash/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...
- jdminhbg 8mo agoNot "currently," "used to": https://www.theverge.com/transportation/860935/mercedes-drive-pilot-level-3-scrapped https://www.theverge.com/transportation/860935/mercedes-driv... It was way too limited to be useful to anyone.
- charcircuit 8mo agoNot all insurance claims are based off of the choices of the driver.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance? Why surely? Turning on cruise control doesn't absolve motorists of their insurance requirement. And the premise is false. While Tesla does "not maintain as much insurance coverage as many other companies do," there are "policies that [they] do have" [1]. (What it insures is a separate question.) [1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/000162828026003952/tsla-20251231.htm#fact-identifier-640 https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...
- forgetfreeman 8mo agoCruise control is hardly relevant to a discussion of liability for autonomous vehicle operation.
- fragmede 8mo agoIn the context of ultramodern cruise control (eg comma.ai), which has a radar to track the distance to the car (if any) in front of you, and cameras so the car can wind left or right and track the freeway, I think it does.
- sroussey 8mo agoNot unless they are marketing it as “autopilot” or some such that a random consumer would reasonably assume meant autopilot. And I’d include “AI driver” as an example.
- olyjohn 8mo agoA random consumer doesn't actually understand what Autopilot means. Most people don't have pilot's licenses. And cars don't fly. Did you not see all the debacles around it when it first came out?
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoI think there is an even bigger insurance problem to worry about: if autonomous vehicles become common and are a lot safer than manual driven vehicles, insurance rates for human driven cars could wind up exploding as the risk pool becomes much smaller and statistically riskier. We could go from paying $200/month to $2000/month if robo taxis start dominating cities.
- mavhc 8mo agoThe fact you think $200 per month is sane is amusing to people in other countries
- theodric 8mo agoHell, I was paying €180/yr for my New Beetle a decade ago...
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoHaha, yes, today already sucks badly in many US markets. Imagine what will happen when the only people driving cars manually are "enthusiasts".
- wavesquid 8mo agoIs that low or high?
- raisedbyninjas 8mo agoI'm guessing that other developed countries don't need 6-7 figure injury coverage.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago> if autonomous vehicles become common and are a lot safer than manual driven vehicles, insurance rates for human driven cars could wind up exploding as the risk pool becomes much smaller and statistically riskier. The assumption there is that the remaining human drivers would be the higher risk ones, but why would that be the case? One of the primary movers of high risk driving is that someone goes to the bar, has too many drinks, then needs both themselves and their car to get home. Autonomous vehicles can obviously improve this by getting them home in their car without them driving it, but if they do, the risk profile of the remaining human drivers improves. At worst they're less likely to be hit by a drunk driver, at best the drunk drivers are the early adopters of autonomous vehicles and opt themselves out of the human drivers pool.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago> If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance? Suppose ACME Corporation produces millions of self-driving cars and then goes out of business because the CEO was embezzling. They no longer exist. But the cars do. They work fine. Who insures them? The person who wants to keep operating them. Which is the same as it is now. It's your car so you pay to insure it. I mean think about it. If you buy an autonomous car, would the manufacturer have to keep paying to insure it forever as long as you can keep it on the road? The only real options for making the manufacturer carry the insurance are that the answer is no and then they turn off your car after e.g. 10 years, which is quite objectionable, or that the answer is "yes" but then you have to pay a "subscription fee" to the manufacturer which is really the insurance premium, which is also quite objectionable because then you're then locked into the OEM instead of having a competitive insurance market.
- childintime 8mo agoI like your thesis, but what about this: all this self driving debate is nonsense if you require Tesla to pay all damages plus additional damages, "because you were hit by a robot!". That should make sure Tesla improves the system, and that it operates above human safety levels. Then one can forget about legislation and Tesla can do its job. So to circle back to your thesis: when the car is operating autonomously, the manufacturer is responsible. If it goes broke then what? Then the owner will need to insure the car privately. So Tesla insurance might have to continue to operate (and be profitable). The question this raises is if Tesla should sell any self-driving cars at all, or instead it should just drive them itself.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago> That should make sure Tesla improves the system, and that it operates above human safety levels. There are two problems with this. The first is that insurance covers things that weren't really anyone's fault, or that it's not clear whose fault it was. For example, the most direct and preventable cause of many car crashes is poorly designed intersections, but then the city exempts itself from liability and people still expect someone to pay so it falls to insurance. There isn't really much the OEM can do about the poorly designed intersection or the improperly banked curve or snowy roads etc. The second is that you would then need to front-load a vehicle-lifetime's worth of car insurance into the purchase price of the car, which significantly raises the cost to the consumer over paying as you go because of the time value of money. It also compounds the cost of insurance, because if the price of the car includes the cost of insurance and then the car gets totaled, the insurance would have to pay out the now-higher cost of the car. > The question this raises is if Tesla should sell any self-driving cars at all, or instead it should just drive them itself. This is precisely the argument for not doing it that way. Why should we want the destruction of ownership in lieu of pushing everyone to a subscription service? What happens to poor people who could have had a used car but now all the older cars go to the crusher because it allows the OEMs to sustain artificial scarcity for the service?
- stubish 8mo agoRisk gets passed along until someone accepts it, usually an insurance company or the operator. If the risk was accepted and paid for by Tesla, then the cost would simply be passed down to consumers. All consumers, including those that want to accept the risk themselves. In particular, if you have a fleet of cars it can be cheaper to accept the risk and only pay for mandatory insurance, because not all of your cars are going to crash at the same time, and even if they did, not all in the worst way possible. This is how insurance works, by amortizing lots of risk to make it highly improbable to make a loss in the long run.
- ponector 8mo agoWhy ship owner is paying for the insurance while it's a captain making all decisions?
- zugi 8mo agoIf your minor child breaks something, or your pet bites someone, you are liable. This analogy may be more apt than Tesla would like to admit, but from a liability perspective it makes sense. You could in turn try to sue Tesla for defective FSD, but the now-clearly-advertised "(supervised)" caveat, plus the lengthy agreement you clicked through, plus lots of lawyers, makes you unlikely to win.
- paulryanrogers 8mo agoCan a third party reprogram my dog or child at any moment? Or even take over and control them?