Driverless Cars Threaten to Crash Insurers’ Earnings

Re:Driverless Cars Threaten to Crash Insurers’ Earnings by seizethecheese on Tuesday July 26, 2016 @02:09PM (#12167608)

The end state for driverless cars is most likely not individual ownership. Large companies will probably own fleets of cars available for hail. In this world, the fleet owners would probably develop a rigorous process to cost effectively fight traffic tickets.

Even if local governments tried to increase the complexity of traffic laws, the fleet owners would increase spending on fighting tickets; this would result in an arms race which would be costly for the local government. It's much easier to extract rent from the little guys.

The worry I have is of increased enforcement of local non-traffic laws to make up revenue.

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Re:Driverless Cars Threaten to Crash Insurers’ Earnings by ryandrake on Tuesday July 26, 2016 @02:17PM (#12167664)

I'd expect it would be cheaper in the long run for those large companies to influence laws to move ticket liability over to their customers rather than take on the expense of fighting traffic tickets themselves.

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Re:Driverless Cars Threaten to Crash Insurers’ Earnings by seizethecheese on Tuesday July 26, 2016 @02:20PM (#12167685)

Possibly, but that's assuming no aspect of consumer choice in the survival of ride hailing systems. If customers had to worry about tickets, they would quickly migrate to a competitor which assumed liability.

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Re:Driverless Cars Threaten to Crash Insurers’ Earnings by pyre on Tuesday July 26, 2016 @05:46PM (#12168955)

The same way that competition ensures things like Net Neutrality because consumers vote with their wallets?

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Re:Driverless Cars Threaten to Crash Insurers’ Earnings by seizethecheese on Tuesday July 26, 2016 @06:03PM (#12169048)

Most people don't care about net neutrality. Most people will care about having to pay tickets in self-driving car fleets.

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