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  • Hacker News
  • I cannot stand AI writing ffs.
    by bix6
  • It could have been an interesting article
  • The blog's About page says Max "writes" about transportation, but I'm skeptical he's even read his own slop here, or he would have presumably fixed some of the worst nonsense sentences before posting it. I doubt he even had the courtesy to ask Claude to run a fact-check on its output. Curse anyone who wastes my reading time like this.
  • As someone who doesn't know most of the tells but genuinely wants to know, what are some of the things that tells you it's AI-generated?
  • Related:

    Paying for Driving - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665196 - September 2026

  • i'm not sure that the minimum should be 1.6M, but it should be more than $30k, when the average vehicle is well above that.
  • > In-car dongles that track jerky driving, crash event recorders, and driver monitoring systems now let an insurer observe behavior directly and price it.

    Uh, but not in California, because of 1988's Prop. 103. Telematics for insurance pricing are completely unavailable in California.

  • I've long thought that black boxes for drivers can also act to detect various diseases. If someone's smoothness of driving suddenly starts to deteriorate, then it's often a sign of early dementia or eye diseases.
  • Because of Prop 103 California has reasonable insurance rates especially considering cost of living. California's laws and regulations are oriented around forcing people to have at least some coverage. I suspect that the laws annoy insurance companies because they conflict with MBAs craven impulses. But those impulses when not pushed back against eventually result in collapse.
  • Mark my words, in 2036 this story will read like a blast from the past. I read somewhere on this site recently that Waymo is about 9x safer than human drivers, and that number isn't going anywhere but up. What accidents remain will mostly be the responsibility of self driving car makers and fleet operators, and those don't deal with strip mall insurance agents. Please join me in a moment of silence for the dissolving business model of the automotive insurance industry over the next decade. And several moments of joy for tens of thousands of fewer crippled and killed people per year.
  • I think you’ve gotten things confused.

    Automative insurance has entered the “regulatory capture” stage, which is the highest form of actualization in capitalism.

  • They aren't "accidents", but collisions in the vast majority of cases. Using "accident" is a loaded term that implies no fault, no blame and that it's just one of those uncontrollable facts of life. An actual road traffic accident would be something like a tree falling down onto your vehicle.
  • is that accurate? Here in Germany minimal Kfz-Haftpflichtversicherung is I believe 7 million in personal injuries and 1 million in property damages. So if a broke guy in the US runs you over and causes you half a million in health damages, puts you out of work and totals your car you'll get 30k from their insurance? How can you legally let people on the road like this
  • And in Germany if you somehow cause more damage than that, you have to pay the remainder out of pocket, and Germany is much better at enforcing payment than any other country. That's right, if you crash into a billionaire's 2 million dollar Ferrari and total it, the state will extract one million dollars from you.
  • Yes, it is accurate. Welcome to USA!
  • As a German living in the US, it's also interesting to me how dramatically more expensive insurance in the US is compared to Europe. The best explanation I could come up with is that 1) traffic laws are barely enforced, at least in Los Angeles you see most people driving with phone in hand and we have virtually no speed cameras or speeding enforcement, whereas in Germany, even tiny villages may have two speed cameras, one at each side of town 2) there seem to be no enforced maintenance requirements for cars in the US, whereas in Germany there's a mandatory check of the car's proper functioning every 2 years 3) insurance in the US is probably is cross-subsidizing lawyers as signified through the ubiquitous accident lawyer ads on billboards, radio etc.
  • That is tiny. I just checked Uk legislation and it seems to require £1.2m cover for damage to property and unlimited cover for personal injury and deaths.
  • I have $500,000 in coverage for bodily injury liability and $100,000 for property damage and I feel like that’s not enough but those are the highest options to select for coverage.

    I’d prefer to be covered at double those amounts in case of some crazy and unlikely scenario like getting in an accident with a G Wagon where the other driver dies. There’s also $40M aggregate of personal injury protection.

  • You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever -- 20% or more in some states.
  • In Sweden if you register a car and have no insurance you're automatically on the governments but it's 3x more expensive than normal.
  • Something people that bitch about the high cost of California vs Florida won't mention is how high auto and home owners insurance is in Florida. Florida is a high risk state with a lot of fraud.
  • lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.
  • > Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever

    Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.

  • There is a program in California that offers even lower limits...

    The California Low Cost Auto Insurance (CLCA) program provides liability coverage limits of up to $10,000 for bodily injury or death per person, $20,000 per accident, and $3,000 for property damage. This program is designed to help income-eligible residents afford basic auto insurance.

  • Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis.

    We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.

  • It was not a mistake, it was done deliberately.
    by Gud
  • If people can’t afford to pay for an accident then they should not be driving
  • In the US. Rest of the world has functioning public transport.
  • Its not juat investment, *ts rules overhaul to make the regulatory burden of development of public transit as small as possible because that is mostly what is screwing up inv#sting in public transport
  • I agree, plus we need to make public transit safer and cleaner (I live in Los Angeles and love the metro, but it can be edgy).