General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
Because humans are terrible drivers and would be responsible for the vast majority of crashes. And the fact that self driving cars don’t need insurance would drive up the costs since the premium pool would be much smaller.
That makes zero mathematical sense.
It does if you understand how insurance works.
The insurance companies pool all of the premiums they receive and pay claims out of that. The more people paying into the pool, the lower the financial burden of a single payout.
With auto insurance specifically, everyone with a different insurance company paying into that company’s pool is further mitigating the risk.
If self driving cars aren’t required to carry insurance, then the number of people paying into the pool is going to shrink but the total cars on the road won’t at the same rate.
Since fully autonomous vehicles are going to be way more expensive than manually driven vehicles, the premiums will need to rise dramatically.
There’s a limit to the gains from pooling insurance risk. Sure, you gain a lot by going from 1000 people in a pool fo 10000. But 10 million to 20 million? You reach a point where the law of large numbers takes over and adding more people doesn’t produce further gains.