Berkshire Hathaway owns Geico the car insurance company. In one of his annual letters Buffett said that autonomous cars are going to be great for humanity and bad for insurance companies.
“If [self-driving cars] prove successful and reduce accidents dramatically, it will be very good for society and very bad for auto insurers.”
Actuaries are by definition bad at assessing new risk. But as data get collected they quickly adjust to it. There are a lot of cars so if driverless cars become even a few percent of cars on the road they will quickly be able to build good actuarial tables.
machinin@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I believe Mercedes takes responsibility if there is an accident while driving autonomously.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
Which is how it should be. The company creating the software takes on the liability of faults with said software.
Sizzler@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
And this is how they will push everyone into driverless. Through insurance costs. Who would insure 1 human driver vs 100 bots, (once the systems have a few billion miles on them)
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
And that will probably be safer for everyone, honestly. Better or worse will vary by individual perspective.
Rinox@feddit.it 2 months ago
Will it pull a Tesla and switch off the autopilot seconds before an accident?
Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
No. I don’t think this is a good solution. Companies will put a price on your life and focus on monetary damage reduction. If you’re about to cause more property damage than your life is worth (to Mercedes) they’ll be incentivized to crash the car and kill you rather than crash into the expensive structure.
Your car should be you property, you should be liable for the damage it causes. The car should prioritise your life over monetary damage. If there is some software problem causing the cars to crash, you need to be able to sue Mercedes through a class action lawsuit to recover your losses.