this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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We don't have self-driving cars because no corporation is insane enough to take on the liability for driving a fleet of cars on our highways - it's a bloodbath out there (when you look at it from the large-scale view), and anyone operating 10,000+ vehicles out there is going to be involved in multiple fatal accidents per year.
When it's UPS operating a fleet of trucks, the liability for the 30-ish people killed per year in collisions with their trucks is handled driver-to-driver. When "the robot" is out there up against the world, who's the jury going to side with?
Yep juries will pick the person every time. You only need ONE that hits the headlines... bus load of kids, famous person etc and your brand is annihilated
If they have a similar rate of accidents as regular people, wouldn’t it be easier to mitigate risk through insurance since they are at scale?
You can go as far as to say that self driving manufacturers could insure their cars themselves since they have thousands of vehicles.
If what your saying is true, then insurance wouldn’t be profitable today
Insurance companies have resorted to denying everything and forcing their customers to sue them for their money. I'd say that's a pretty good sign it isn't actually profitable today.
Insurance is a numbers game: actuarial tables, predictable risk, predictable liability, and they do pay out occasionally, they even pay out ridiculously over-valued claims occasionally, as part of a numbers game that keeps their overall costs as low as possible.
Isn't profitable? Insurance companies are definitely making profits because of their tactics of doing that to their customers,