You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever -- 20% or more in some states.
> Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever
Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.
Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
Something people that bitch about the high cost of California vs Florida won't mention is how high auto and home owners insurance is in Florida. Florida is a high risk state with a lot of fraud.
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
Yet at the same time federal government allowed home insurance to be non-actuarial (aka insolvent) for natural disasters like hurricanes. So essentially the rest of the country subsidise residents in disaster-prone areas. So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians.
It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.
The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.
The reforms that were passed a few years ago are actually working somewhat OK. I'm 3 miles from the beach on the coast and pay under $2k for private home owners insurance.
lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.
Apparently not because you can’t even get a $2m liability car insurance policy in the US that I am aware of. Most top out at 500k and to get anything more you’ll need an umbrella policy.
Most US states require proof of insurance to register a car. Some people just cancel their insurance after registration, and other simply don’t register it.
That is tiny. I just checked Uk legislation and it seems to require £1.2m cover for damage to property and unlimited cover for personal injury and deaths.
I have $500,000 in coverage for bodily injury liability and $100,000 for property damage and I feel like that’s not enough but those are the highest options to select for coverage.
I’d prefer to be covered at double those amounts in case of some crazy and unlikely scenario like getting in an accident with a G Wagon where the other driver dies. There’s also $40M aggregate of personal injury protection.
There is a program in California that offers even lower limits...
The California Low Cost Auto Insurance (CLCA) program provides liability coverage limits of up to $10,000 for bodily injury or death per person, $20,000 per accident, and $3,000 for property damage. This program is designed to help income-eligible residents afford basic auto insurance.
The blog's About page says Max "writes" about transportation, but I'm skeptical he's even read his own slop here, or he would have presumably fixed some of the worst nonsense sentences before posting it. I doubt he even had the courtesy to ask Claude to run a fact-check on its output. Curse anyone who wastes my reading time like this.
There's the punctuation and word choice tells. And the overall voice. But let's set that aside because some human writing shows similar traits, or perhaps a human used an LLM to "fix the grammar". So I'll point out another tell that this article is pure slop:
This article is overflowing with links, numbers, and graphs. When a human writes that densely, it takes effort to incorporate all those details. So the human only does that if each detail contributes to their argument. In this article it's mostly irrelevant. It's LLM filler to pad out an article that really has nothing to say beyond its (also LLM-scented) title.
> In-car dongles that track jerky driving, crash event recorders, and driver monitoring systems now let an insurer observe behavior directly and price it.
Uh, but not in California, because of 1988's Prop. 103. Telematics for insurance pricing are completely unavailable in California.
Because of Prop 103 California has reasonable insurance rates especially considering cost of living. California's laws and regulations are oriented around forcing people to have at least some coverage. I suspect that the laws annoy insurance companies because they conflict with MBAs craven impulses. But those impulses when not pushed back against eventually result in collapse.
Some aspects of Prop. 103 work. The definition of "good driver" as everyone who hasn't caused a fatality in the last 3 years is not one of those aspects.
Isn’t that exactly the problem pointed out on the article? In an attempt to make driving more affordable, the state causes the victims of drivers to pay for their own victimization. Par the course for a CA law but still.
As a side n ote,curious if people have takes on why CA creates so many objectively garbage laws.
I've long thought that black boxes for drivers can also act to detect various diseases. If someone's smoothness of driving suddenly starts to deteriorate, then it's often a sign of early dementia or eye diseases.
is that accurate? Here in Germany minimal Kfz-Haftpflichtversicherung is I believe 7 million in personal injuries and 1 million in property damages. So if a broke guy in the US runs you over and causes you half a million in health damages, puts you out of work and totals your car you'll get 30k from their insurance? How can you legally let people on the road like this
And in Germany if you somehow cause more damage than that, you have to pay the remainder out of pocket, and Germany is much better at enforcing payment than any other country. That's right, if you crash into a billionaire's 2 million dollar Ferrari and total it, the state will extract one million dollars from you.
Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis.
We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.
It's better to use the term "collision" as "accident" is loaded and implies that no-one is at fault or to blame. There's a long history of car industry bodies changing the narrative around traffic collisions in reporting (e.g. use of passive voice and not mentioning a driver).
I read somewhere on this site recently that Waymo is about 9x safer than human drivers, and that number isn't going anywhere but up. Please join me in a moment of silence for the business model of the automotive insurance industry over the next decade.
They aren't "accidents", but collisions in the vast majority of cases. Using "accident" is a loaded term that implies no fault, no blame and that it's just one of those uncontrollable facts of life. An actual road traffic accident would be something like a tree falling down onto your vehicle.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 6.9 ms ] threadPaying for Driving - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665196 - September 2026
Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.
We're on track for an annual deficit that exceeds everything but the 2020/2021 covid era. The politicians of the present are the issue.
Between his first term and his second term to date (2+ more years), Trump is responsible for more that one quarter (29%) of US debt (USD 11.6T / 40T):
* https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-bide...
There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.
The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.
--
0: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/hp548
And any US hospital administrator will pump that injured foreigner for all he or she's worth. At least the quality of care is decent.
I’d prefer to be covered at double those amounts in case of some crazy and unlikely scenario like getting in an accident with a G Wagon where the other driver dies. There’s also $40M aggregate of personal injury protection.
The California Low Cost Auto Insurance (CLCA) program provides liability coverage limits of up to $10,000 for bodily injury or death per person, $20,000 per accident, and $3,000 for property damage. This program is designed to help income-eligible residents afford basic auto insurance.
This article is overflowing with links, numbers, and graphs. When a human writes that densely, it takes effort to incorporate all those details. So the human only does that if each detail contributes to their argument. In this article it's mostly irrelevant. It's LLM filler to pad out an article that really has nothing to say beyond its (also LLM-scented) title.
Uh, but not in California, because of 1988's Prop. 103. Telematics for insurance pricing are completely unavailable in California.
As a side n ote,curious if people have takes on why CA creates so many objectively garbage laws.
We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.
Automative insurance has entered the “regulatory capture” stage, which is the highest form of actualization in capitalism.