[akira2501]

Insurance is based on the coverage I purchase. Are you saying the insurance company is instead selling me an unlimited amount of liability based on the price of _other_ cars and not the $50k of coverage that I selected when I bought the policy?

How is that justified? $50k is $50k.

[mattkrause]

Perhaps it would make more sense to think of it as buying “up to $50k”;they’re certainly not paying out the whole amount every time.

If more expensive cars leads to more expensive claims on average, the price of insurance might reasonably go up even if the worst-case exposure is the same…

[akira2501]

It does somewhat but that coverage also extends to medical injuries that I may cause. Those costs have been skyrocketing for years without seeming like they made a similar impact in insurance prices.

I guess underwriting is less a game of building an appropriate liability shield but undercutting that liability shield as much as is profitable without at the same time bringing the company into insolvency.

I had always wished the idea of "open source" would have translated to some of these industries. Particularly given the level of technology available, instead of making the system easier to use and more transparent, they've made the easier to manipulate while blinding the consumer to any part of the process.

[Ekaros]

I wonder if the spike in prices of used cars have also affected this. If average "book value" of car has gone up, then the write off cost has also gone up substantially. So cars might be same, but their value is now substantially higher, while still being under the 50k.

[Scoundreller]

Used cars went up in value because new cars went up in value. There's no sudden interest in driving used.