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by JumpCrisscross 374 days ago
> if you get into an accident in NYC, you’re pretty much screwed. Uber will not cover you and you have to rely on “bankrupt” commercial insurance

What is your source on TLC commercial insurance not paying out for medical expenses sustained in an accident?

And going back to Waymo, wouldn’t having one of the world’s wealthiest companies as the beneficial counterparty solve the problem you’re raising?
1 comments
lvl155 374 days ago
Aren’t you PE? Just look up the lawsuits bro. On a serious note, I don’t think Google or Tesla will take on that liability once we get to scale. That basically defeats the purpose of autonomous. Their legal and ops team will do everything to push an alternate business model similar to lease. This is why I really think autonomous has to be at least two orders of magnitude “safer” to be viable at scale (more than 10% on the road).
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Dylan16807 374 days ago
Comparing to taxi rates and positing a car that's pretty good by human terms, $500 a month for insurance defeats the purpose of autonomous? It doesn't seem like a big issue to me. That's less than a dollar per ride at unimpressive safety levels, so I can't imagine why it would need to be 100x safer.
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lvl155 369 days ago
Because you’re going to amplify “errors” and “failures” if you have a system of cars running same or similar autonomous models.
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Dylan16807 366 days ago
Amplified meaning if you have 1000x as many cars you have 1000x as many failures?

That's fine. Insurance is built on that model. What's the issue?

Or do you mean something else?

(If amplify means a ton of the cars crash on the same day because they share code, I doubt that being a big effect, because all the cars are in different places working on different data feeds. And even moderately high spikes would be absorbed fine.)

(If amplify means the crash rate of each car goes up when you add more cars to the fleet... why would that happen?)

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JumpCrisscross 374 days ago
> Aren’t you PE?

No. VC.

> Just look up the lawsuits bro

Can you name one? I’ve been in a single taxi accident. Liability was never even questionably mine.

> don’t think Google or Tesla will take on that liability once we get to scale

Based on what? Centralising liability tends to facilitate its transfer.

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