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It won't be outlawed; it'll just be priced out of existence. When autos are good enough, insurance costs for manual driving will skyrocket. Only the very rich

by daeken 11y ago

It won't be outlawed; it'll just be priced out of existence. When autos are good enough, insurance costs for manual driving will skyrocket. Only the very richest will be able to afford driving on roads.

BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
That doesn't seem to follow. Insuring a manual driver wouldn't carry any more risk than it does today (on the contrary, there may even be fewer payouts due to other drivers being replaced with safer autonomous counterparts).
mjmahone17 11y ago
It's possible they don't really skyrocket. However, right now insurance rates are not at all cheap. It's not at all uncommon to have to pay $100+/month on insurance, per driver. For most families, there aren't many things they're willing to spend $1,000+/year on. When it's no longer a necessity, I would suspect that even if prices don't go up, because the marginal cost of driving yourself will have increased (cost to drive - cost of next best alternative, i.e. autonomous driving), most people will choose not to self-insure. Just like in some cities, the marginal cost of car ownership is so large (even if it's only a few thousand dollars more than in a suburb) that it makes more sense to rely on public transit.
jerf 11y ago
The wildcard is lawsuits. In theory, being one of the (say) .1% drivers on the road that is human ought to be safer than driving today, but if you do hit anybody or anything and cause any sort of significant distress you're going to be looking at a negligence lawsuit that could be wildly larger than anything we'd see today "because they shouldn't have been driving"/"because they should have been in a self-driving car". But other wildcards could cancel that out. A law could be passed shielding humans from excessive payouts, in which case insurance could stay low. If you were demonstrated to be a safe driver by the automotive panopticon, you might still be able to get cheap insurance, although that one raises its own questions. And of course the ultimate wildcard is that they get sued out of existence entirely somehow, despite being provably safer at some point.
crocowhile 11y ago
It won't be just insurance prices. With self driving cars, you will not need to own a car. Self driving cabs are the future.

by daeken 11y ago

BHSPitMonkey 11y ago

That doesn't seem to follow. Insuring a manual driver wouldn't carry any more risk than it does today (on the contrary, there may even be fewer payouts due to other drivers being replaced with safer autonomous counterparts).

mjmahone17 11y ago

It's possible they don't really skyrocket. However, right now insurance rates are not at all cheap. It's not at all uncommon to have to pay $100+/month on insurance, per driver. For most families, there aren't many things they're willing to spend $1,000+/year on. When it's no longer a necessity, I would suspect that even if prices don't go up, because the marginal cost of driving yourself will have increased (cost to drive - cost of next best alternative, i.e. autonomous driving), most people will choose not to self-insure. Just like in some cities, the marginal cost of car ownership is so large (even if it's only a few thousand dollars more than in a suburb) that it makes more sense to rely on public transit.

jerf 11y ago

The wildcard is lawsuits. In theory, being one of the (say) .1% drivers on the road that is human ought to be safer than driving today, but if you do hit anybody or anything and cause any sort of significant distress you're going to be looking at a negligence lawsuit that could be wildly larger than anything we'd see today "because they shouldn't have been driving"/"because they should have been in a self-driving car". But other wildcards could cancel that out. A law could be passed shielding humans from excessive payouts, in which case insurance could stay low. If you were demonstrated to be a safe driver by the automotive panopticon, you might still be able to get cheap insurance, although that one raises its own questions. And of course the ultimate wildcard is that they get sued out of existence entirely somehow, despite being provably safer at some point.

crocowhile 11y ago

It won't be just insurance prices. With self driving cars, you will not need to own a car. Self driving cabs are the future.