- potato3732842It's a numbers game. Those people basically don't exist compared to cheapskates who want to drive old cars and people who crash cars driving distracted. It's gonna come down to how many people who want to text and drive or do other sketchy stuff want to make the jump to autonomous cars. Classic car insurance is already stupid cheap just because it implicitly excluded a bunch of risky demographics.
- >Why would manual driving be more expensive to insure in the future? The same risks exist today, at today's rates, but with the benefit that over time the other cars will get harder to hit, reducing the rate of accidents even for humans (kinda like herd immunity).
I think it will get cheaper because people who want to do risky things that detract from driving will self select to drive autonomous vehicles.
- Waymo does a lot of urban miles and they do so fairly timidly. The flip side of the that coin is Tesla FSD and you don't hear people simping for their safety record much around here.
What if the difference between human and computer is basically nil (for the next ten years or so) and turns out to cost as much as glass coverage?
Furthermore, it's not like you can slap this stuff on a 2000 Ford Tarus. You're inherently incurring the insurance burden of a fancy modern car with obscenely expensive everything to even get into the kind of vehicle that could/would be equipped with autonomy.
- It's not the overall range that gets you. It's when all the chargers in the work parking lot are taken and you need to go somewhere that doesn't have chargers after work and it's also winter that results in an inconvenient stop or cutting it uncomfortably close. It's absolutely surmountable but it requires planning you didn't have to do before.
IMO what you save by not going to the gas station is a wash if you have to habitually charge more than just at home. You're replacing one habit with another.
I still think they're worth it since you basically never get hit with an exorbitant repair bill for the engine/trans.
- They put one in front of my friend's house. It's a big plastic one almost as big as a speed table. The complainer Karens drive .03mph over it and get honked at or driven around. The trucks and vans, anything driven by an employee or a teenager just speeds right over and a small number of people go for air time. 11/10. Highly entertaining. And this is all in addition to having to listen to every vehicle accelerate after it of course.
- >My assumption is that stop signs act somewhat as a way to enforce the lower speed limits in residential areas.
At the expense of basically training people to roll them.
- Because a hard long wearing tire is a low grip tire and the direct tradeoff between safety and the environment is not something either crowd wants to deal with because there's so much overlap.
- >Yes, they're banned, but nobody is checking aftermarket brake pads..
On one hand you've got the people who insisted on regulating all of our manufacturing out of the country on environmental and safety grounds. On the other hand you've got the people who want to band asbestos and lead and all manner of other dangerous chemicals in consumer products. Both these people are dressed like Spiderman and they're pointing at each other. <facepalm>
- And you gotta have soft tires to harness that EV torque people expect. Not like the old days where they put hard stiff tires on Priuses to wring out every MPG.
- >Interesting. If not to reduce CO2 emissions, what was the rationale presented to the voters for having high taxes on fuel 40 yr ago?
Energy security. They didn't have north sea oil back then. Buying from Russia or the ME was fraught with political peril. And of course the .gov is never gonna pass up a chance to increase revenue.
- >They are also heavily subsidized by the US government in the form of relaxed regulations. The profit margins are higher which...
Look in the mirror, that's who's responsible for this.
You people levied regulations. You levied them in half baked ways that resulted in the demise of sedans and station wagons. And now you complain that SUVs are "subsidized". Get out of here with that nonsense and take your stupid regulations with you so the rest of us can have diversity of vehicle choice back.
None of this stuff is a subsidy, construing "exempt from the screwing some other product category gets" is just a lie.
- >What do you mean by a worse time?
Inconvenience when taking long trips.
When operating beyond your comfortable range you have to strategically plan charging the way shitbox owners have to stop and top up fluids. If it's your only car it's absolutely a degradation in the ~monthly ownership experience though you (in my opinion) make it back not doing oil changes and the like.
Even without the tax credit I still think that EVs are a great buy for most though. Charging shenanigans is simple and a "known known" whereas ICE maintenance is far more unclear at the time of purchase
- Nobody was even thinking about CO2 when the policies that got Europe where they are were enacted.
Europe began embracing diesels 40yr ago when they were noisy and stinky and they did it because they taxed the crap out of fuel so people rightfully prioritized buying vehicles that got better fuel economy.
Giving a crap about CO2 is a recent thing.
- The fundamental difference in how the engine operates by throttling fuel only instead of air and fuel accounts for a large fuel economy savings
- >The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.
It's expressly incentivized by their tax system.
Imagine the year is 1988 and you're some snooty jerk in Europe about to buy a Mercedes. Why on earth would you go with the noisy, smelly diesel option if not to save A TON of money over the life of the vehicle?
- Speeds are fundamentally a tradeoff between risk and reward. In nominally democratic societies we place these thresholds based on some approximation of social consensus. The general public literally cannot be wrong because their rough consensus, the fat part of the bell curve if you will, is what determines what the right speed is.
Your comment is literally the principal Skinner "no it's everyone else who's wrong" meme.
- Sure, some people will get hit with the reds. Some people will learn the timing and learn that you can run just one red and then hit all greens, or that it will save you 5+min if you hammer down and pull a "clearly not ok" pass to get around some idiot who's going too slow to make the green timing.
So yeah, you're reducing speeding, number go up, pat yourself on the back. But you're also increasing the incidence of something rarer than speeding, but way worse.
This is the same problem that 4-way stops at roads that don't deserve them create, you're basically teaching people that the signage is bullshit.
- Upping the speed limit reduces the incidence of the latter because just about everyone has a "fuck this I'm weaving" threshold and the number of people who hit it goes down when you reduce the incidence of rolling clusters of traffic caused by the handful of people who religiously follow the speed limit even when not appropriate.
- The speeds are appropriate for the roads generally. I mean, at the lowest level speed limits are a matter of social consensus so the broad public is tautologically correct.
The problem is that knocking the magic number on the sign down by 5-15 and then simply not enforcing it too seriously results in less screeching Karens harassing the politicians who then harass the bureaucracy than taking a hard line about "well akshually this is the engineered speed for the road".
- Pitting people against each other in the service of the state is likely to cause problems at scale and in the long run.
Frankly, I think it's a miracle that nobody has been beaten into a coma or killed over NYC's bounty program yet.