History suggests it won't be that clean.

1. High-severity accidents might drop, but the industry bleeds money on high-frequency, low-speed incidents (parking lots, neighborhood scrapes). Autonomy has diminishing returns here; it doesn't magically prevent the chaos of mixed-use environments.

2. Insurance is a capital management game. We’ll likely see a tech company try this, fail to cover a catastrophic liability due to lack of reserves, and trigger a massive backlash.

It reminds me of early internet optimism: we thought connectivity would make truth impossible to hide. Instead, we got the opposite. Tech rarely solves complex markets linearly.

Autonomy + insurance is an interesting way to arrive at what the insurers are already trying to push with their tracker dongles, where they encourage you to drive like a mouse by putting bits of carrot in front of you.

I had been worried that non-tracked insurance would become increasingly expensive once we reached a tipping point where more and more drivers accepted the devil's bargain, but likely the trackers will be obsoleted by autonomy.

I would pay so much for my own SUV to self-drive as well as Waymo.

Keyword: my own SUV. Not a rental. With the possibility for me to take over and drive it myself if service fails or if I want to do so.

The significant unlock is that I get to haul gear, packages, family. I don't need to keep it clean. The muddy dogs, the hiking trip, the week-long road trip.

If my car could drive me, I'd do way more road trips and skip flying. It's almost as romantic as a California Zephyr or Coast Starlight trip. And I can camp out of it.

No cramped airlines. No catching colds by being packed in a sardine can with a stressed out immune system.

No sharing space with people on public transit. I can work and watch movies and listen to music and hang out with my wife, my friends. People won't stare at me, and I can eat in peace or just be myself in my own space.

I might even work in a nomadic lifestyle if I don't have to drive all the time. Our country is so big and there's so much to see.

One day you might even be able to attach a trailer. Bikes, jet skis, ATVs. People might simply live on the road, traveling all the time.

Big cars seem preferable. Lots of space for internal creature comforts. Laying back, lounging. Watching, reading, eating. Changing clothes, camping, even cooking.

Some people might even buy autonomous RVs. I'm sure that'll be a big thing in its own right.

It's bidirectional too! People can come to you as you go to them. Meet in the middle. Same thing with packages, food, etc.

This would be the biggest thing in travel, transport, logistics, perhaps ever. It's a huge unlock. It feels downright revolutionary. Like a total change in how we might live our lives.

This might turn big suburbs from food/culture deserts into the default places people want to live as they have more space for cheaper - because the commute falls apart.

This honestly sounds better than a house, but if you can also own an affordable large home in the suburbs as your home base - that's incredible. You don't need a tiny expensive place in the city. You could fall asleep in your car and wake up for breakfast in the city. Spend some time at home, then make a trek to the mountains. All without wasting any time. No more driving, no more traffic. Commuting becomes leisure. It becomes you time.

This is also kind of a super power that big countries (in terms of area) with lots of roads and highways will enjoy the most. It doesn't do much in a dense city, but once you add mountains and forests and streams and deserts and oceans - that's magic.

Maybe our vast interstate highway infrastructure will suddenly grow ten times in value.

Roads might become more important than ever. We might even start building more.

If the insurance and autonomy come bundled as a subscription after you purchase or lease your vehicle, that's super easy for people to activate and spend money on.

This is such a romantic dream, and I'm so hyped for this.

I would pay an ungodly sum to unlock this. It can't come soon enough. Would subscribe in a heartbeat.

I think there will actually be a couple interesting adjustments/market forces acting in the car companies' favor.

First, if the insurance applies to fully autonomous driving only, then I suspect they’ll reach a point where the cost of insurance+automation ends up being less than just insurance through third parties.

Second, cutting into the traditional insurance market share is likely to increase costs for those who remain on traditional insurance, assuming there’s a significant enough number of people jumping ship. Combined, this creates a huge incentive for more users to jump on the self-driving bandwagon.

Maybe, but it might just push many would-be car owners to just use a service and forego buying a car altogether. What's the point of paying the capital expense, and a subscription expense for a car vs just calling up a Waymo. The traditional car makers should really be wary as they've historically been terrible at service offerings.

I actually I'd be even willing to downgrade my car one level if I'm not driving and just sitting in the back seat. Will likely be cheaper for me to own even with the increased subscription.

Waymo does a lot of urban miles and they do so fairly timidly. The flip side of the that coin is Tesla FSD and you don't hear people simping for their safety record much around here.

What if the difference between human and computer is basically nil (for the next ten years or so) and turns out to cost as much as glass coverage?

Furthermore, it's not like you can slap this stuff on a 2000 Ford Tarus. You're inherently incurring the insurance burden of a fancy modern car with obscenely expensive everything to even get into the kind of vehicle that could/would be equipped with autonomy.

Curious where you live? The only place I ever paid insurance premiums that high (and not quite that high) was in Ontario. I pay $70.

>> Waymo data shows a significant injury reduction rate. If it's true and not manipulated data, it's natural for the car companies to want to capture some of this upside.

If you can insure the car for less, the car company can charge more for the car. I don't want to pay a subscription (rent) for a car I buy.