If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?
You insure the property, not the person.
Generally speaking, liability for a thing falls on the owner/operator. That person can sue the manufacturer to recover the damages if they want. At some point, I expect it to become somewhat routine for insurures to pay out, then sue the manufacturer to recover.
Or at some point subscribing to a service may be easier than owning the damn thing.
All according to plan
It isn't fully autonomous yet. For any future system sold as level 5 (or level 4?), I agree with your contention -- the manufacturer of the level 5 autonomous system is the one who bears primary liability and therefore should insure. "FSD" isn't even level 3.
(Though, there is still an element of owner/operator maintenance for level 4/5 vehicles -- e.g., if the owner fails to replace tires below 4/32", continues to operate the vehicle, and it causes an injury, that is partially the owner/operator's fault.)
Because that's the law of the land currently.
The product you buy is called "FSD Supervised". It clearly states you're liable and must supervise the system.
I don't think there's law that would allow Tesla (or anyone else) to sell a passenger car with unsupervised system.
If you take Waymo or Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, you are not liable for accidents, Google or Tesla is.
That's because they operate on limited state laws that allow them to provide such service but the law doesn't allow selling such cars to people.
That's changing. Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.
I imagine insurance would be split in two in that case. Carmakers would not want to be liable for e.g. someone striking you in a hit-and-run.
You can sell autonomous vehicles to consumers all day long. There's no US federal law prohibiting that, as long as they're compliant with FMVSS as all consumer vehicles are required to be.
I see. So not Tesla's product they are using to sell insurance around isn't "Full Self-Driving" or "Autonomous" like the page says.
My current FSD usage is 90% over ~2000 miles (since v14.x). Besides driving everywhere, everyday with FSD, I have driven 4 hours garage to hotel valet without intervention. It is absolutely "Full Self-Driving" and "Autonomous".
FSD isn't perfect, but it is everyday amazing and useful.
If it was full self driving, wouldn't your usage be 100%?
Yet still on relying you to cover it with your insurance. Again, clearly not autonomous.
Liability is a separate matter from autonomy. I assume you'd consider yourself autonomous, yet it's your employer's insurance that will be liable if you have an accident while driving a company vehicle.
If the company required a representative to sit in the car with you and participate in the driving (e.g. by monitoring and taking over before an accident), then there's a case to be made that you're not fully autonomous.
You keep posting the same thing across the thread. Do better.
Disagree. I appreciate their viewpoint tethering corporate claims to reality by illustrating Tesla is obfuscating the classification of their machines to be autonomous, when they actually aren't. Their comments in other thread chains proved to be fruitful when lacking agitators looking to dismiss critique by citing website rules, like the post adding additional detail to how Tesla muddles legal claims by cooking up cherry-picked evidence that work against the driver despite being the insurer.
Waymo is also a livery service which you normally aren’t liable for as a passenger of taxi or limousine unless you have deep pockets. /IANAL
> Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.
This is news to me. This context seems important to understanding Tesla's decision to stop selling FSD. If they're on the hook for insurance, then they will need to dynamically adjust what they charge to reflect insurance costs.
Without LIDAR and/or additional sensors, Tesla will never be able to provide "real" FSD, no matter how wonderful their software controlling the car is.
Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property.
Waymo and others are providing a taxi service where the driver is not a human. You don't pay insurance when you ride Uber or Bolt or any other regular taxi service.
> Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property.
Well practically speaking, there’s nothing stopping anyone from voluntarily assuming liability for arbitrary things. If Tesla assumes the liability for my car, then even if I still require my “own” insurance for legal purposes, the marginal cost of covering the remaining risk is going to be close to zero.
Never say never—it’s not physically impossible. But yes, as it stands, it seems that Tesla will not be self driving any time soon (if ever).
Seems like the role of the human operator in the age of AI is to be the entity they can throw in jail if the machine fails (e.g. driver, pilot)
Because the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?
Sounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.
Yeah, Tesla gets to blame the “driver”, and has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible.
And the system is designed to set up drivers for failure.
An HCI challenge with mostly autonomous systems is that operators lose their awareness of the system, and when things go wrong you can easily get worse outcomes than if the system was fully manual with an engaged operator.
This is a well known challenge in the nuclear energy sector and airline industry (Air France 447) - how do you keep operators fully engaged even though they almost never need to intervene, because otherwise they’re likely to be missing critical context and make wrong decisions. These days you could probably argue the same is true of software engineers reviewing LLM code that’s often - but not always - correct.
> has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible
Really? Thats crazy.
Its neither self-driving, nor autonomous, eventually not even a car! (as Tesla slowly exits the car business). It will be 'insurance' on Speculation as a service, as Tesla skyrockets to $20T market cap. Tesla will successfully transition from a small revenue to pre-revenue company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJdKW-UnFQ
The last few years of Tesla 'growth' show how this transition is unfolding. S and X production is shutdown, just a few more models to shutdown.
You think their insurance division is a big deal? Wild prediction though, would love to hear the rest of it
I wonder if they will try to sell off the car business once they can hype up something else. It seems odd to just let the car business die.
Who’s the “operator” of an “autonomous” car? If I sit in it and it drives me around, how am I an “operator”?
If you get on a horse and let go of the reins you are also considered the operator of the horse. Such are the definitions in our society.
The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.
Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.
A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.
Not an expert here, but I recall reading that certain European countries (Spain???) allow liability to be put on the autonomous driving system, not the person in the car. Does anyone know more about this?
That is the case everywhere. It is common when buying a product for the contract to include who has liability for various things. The price often changes by a lot depending on who has liability.
Cars are traditionally sold as the customer has liability. Nothing stops a car maker (or even an individual dealer) from selling cars today taking all the insurance liability in any country I know of - they don't for what I hope are obvious reasons (bad drivers will be sure to buy those cars since it is a better deal for them an in turn a worse deal for good drivers), but they could.
Self driving is currently sold as customers has liability because that is how it has always been done. I doubt it will change, but it is only because I doubt there will ever be enough advantage as to be worth it for someone else to take on the liability - but I could be wrong.
It’s because you bought it. Don’t buy it if you don’t want to insure.
Yep, you bought it, you own it, you choose to operate it on the public roads. Therefore your liability.
If you bought and owned it, you could sell it to another auto manufacturer for some pretty serious amounts of money.
In reality, you acquired a license to use it. Your liability should only go as far as you have agreed to identify the licenser.
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I don't think Tesla lets you buy FSD
They do, until Feb 14th.
Tesla have their own Insurance product which is already very competitive compared to other providers. Not sure if lemonade can beat them . Tesla's insurance product has similar objective in place already where it rewards self driving over manual driving.
Tesla is cooperating with Lemonade on this by providing them necessary user driving data.
If Tesla didn't want Lemonade to provide this, they could block them.
Strategically, Tesla doesn't want to be an insurer. They started the insurance product years ago, before Lemonade also offered this, to make FSD more attractive to buyers.
But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.
In conclusion: Tesla is happy that Lemonade offers this. It makes Tesla cars more attractive to buyers without Tesla doing the work of starting an insurance company in every state.
> But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.
If the math was mathing, it would be malpractice not to expand it. I'm betting that their scheme simply wasn't workable, given the extremely high costs of claims (Tesla repairs aren't cheap) relative to the low rates that they were collecting on premiums. The cheap premiums are probably a form of market dumping to get people to buy their FSD product, the sales of which boosts their share price.
It was not workable. They have a loss ratio of >100% [1], as in they paid out more in claims than received in premiums before even accounting for literally any other costs. Industry average is ~60-80% to stay profitable when including other costs.
They released the Tesla Insurance product because their cars were excessively expensive to insure, increasing ownership costs, which was impacting sales. By releasing the unprofitable Tesla Insurance product, they could subsidize ownership costs making the cars more attractive to buy right now which pumped revenues immediately in return for a "accidental" write-down in the future.
The math should've mathed. Better data === lower losses right? They probably weren't able to get it to work quite right on the tech side and were eating fat losses during an already bad time in the market.
It'll come back.
Hey Lemonade or Tesla if you find this, let's collab, i'm a founder in sunnyvale, insurtech vertical at pnp
You'd be very surprised. Distribution works wonders. You could have a large carrier taking over Tesla's own vehicles. The difference then would be loss ratios on the data collection, like does LIDAR data really beat Progressive Snapshot?
Hmmm. The source for the "FSD is safer" claim might not be wholly independent: "Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving"
I would be surprised if that was what they were actually looking at. They are an established insurance company with their own data and the actuaries to analyze it. I can't imagine them doing this without at least validating a substantial drop in claims relating to FSD capable cars.
Now that they are offering this program, they should start getting much better data by being able to correlate claims with actual FSD usage. They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future.
> They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future
What do you mean?
They are a grossly unprofitable insurance company. Your actuaries can undervalue risk to the point you are losing money on every claim and still achieve that.
In fact, Tesla Insurance, the people who already have direct access to the data already loses money on every claim [1].
> "Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving"
Teslas only do FSD on motorways where you tend to have far fewer accidents per mile.
Also, they switch to manual driving if they can't cope, and because the driver isn't paying attention this usually results in a crash. But hey, it's in manual driving, not FSD, so they get to claim FSD is safer.
FSD is not and never will be safer than a human driver.
The whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.
For the vast majority of people who own a car, continuing to own the car will remain the better deal. Most people need their car during "rush hour", so there isn't any savings from sharing, and worse some people have "high standards" and so will demand the rental be a clean car nicer than you would accept - thus raising the costs (particularly if you drive used cars) Any remaining argument for a shared car dies when you realize that you can leave your things in the car, and you never have to wait.
For the rest - many of them live in a place where not enough others will follow the same system and so they will be forced to own a car just like today. If you live in a not dense area but still manage to walk/bike almost everywhere (as I do), renting a car is on paper cheaper the few times when you need a car - but in practice you don't know about that need several weeks in advance and so they don't have one they can rent to you. Even if you know you will need the car weeks in advance, sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.
If you live in a very dense area such that you almost regularly use transit (but sometimes walk, bike), but need a car for something a few times per year, then not owning a car makes sense. In this case the density means shared cars can be a viable business model despite not being used very much.
In short what you say sound insightful, but reality of how cars are used means it won't happen for most car owners.
> sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.
Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.
Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.
Hertz will hurts you.
Hertz this time, but things like that have happened with every rental company I know of.
Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized...
Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS services so far.
Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic.
Also, a real nightmare for the municipal trade unions. (Do you know why every NYC subway train needs to have not one but two operators, even though it could run automatically just fine?)
Why would you need buses?
Believe it or not, in some cities that have near grid-lock rush-hour traffic - there's between 50-100%+ as many people traveling by bus as by car.
If all of those people switch to cars, you end up with it taking an hour to travel 1 mile by car.
It's almost as if they have busses for a reason.
This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house.
The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.
Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.
Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.
> Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though
Efficient for who, is the problem
Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware.
Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Nah, I don't want to share my car with anyone. It's my own personal space where I can keep some of my stuff and set it up exactly the way I want.
> But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Even better — charge 10% less and corner the market! As long as nobody charges 10% less than you…
Cars and personal computers have advantages over shared resources that often make them worth the cost. If you want your transport/compute in busy times you may find limitations. (ever got on the train and had to stand because there are no seats? Every had to wait for your compute job to start because they are all busy? Both of these have happened to me).
I ran the numbers, and for most non-braindead cities something like a fleet of 6-seater minivans will easily replace all of local transit.
And with just 6 people the overhead if an imperfect route and additional stops will be measured in minutes.
And of course, it's pretty easy to imagine an option to pay a bit more for a fully personal route.
This exists in a way -- I'd wager every city has a commercial service that will shuttle you to, say, the airport. They're not cheap, however.
you made too many false assumptions if you came up with those routes. Experts have run real numbers including looking at what happens in the real world. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit - (as I write this you need to scroll to the second article to find the useful rebuttal of your idea)
> Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Yeah, this would rely on robust competition.
This is the nightmare scenario for me. A forever subscription for the usage of a car.
Subscription for self driving will almost be a given with so many bad actors in tech nowadays, but never even being allowed to own the car is even worse.
I think this is purely psychological. The notion of paying for usage of some resource that you don't own is really rather mundane when you get down to it.
Subscription for changes to maps and the law makes sense. I'd also pay for the latest safety improvements (but they better be real improvements). However they are likely to add a number of unrelated things and I object to those.
How do maps changes make sense to subscribe to when they are on OSM?
And what do you even mean by subscription to changes to the law?
If OSM is up to date - many places it is very outdated. (others it is very good).
Law - when a government changes the driving laws. Government can be federal (I have driven to both Canada and Mexico. Getting to Argentina is possible though I don't think it has ever been safe. Likewise it is possible to drive over the North Pole to Europe), state (or whatever the country calls their equivalent). When a city changes the law they put up signs, but if a state passes a law I'm expected to know even if I have never driven in that state before. Right turn on red laws are the only ones I can think of where states are different - but they are likely others.
Laws also cover new traffic control systems that may not have been in the original program. If the self driving system can't figure out the next one (think roundabout) then it needs to be updated.
I think part of the issue in California at least is that you must have insurance. You gonna get a giant fine if you don't.
I own a Model Y with hardware version 4. FSD prevented my from getting in an accident with a drunk driver. It reacted much faster to the situation than I could have. Ever since, I’m sold that in a lot of circumstances, machines can drive better than humans.
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Hacker News likes to keep conversations focused on the topic at hand. I doubt anyone here thinks politics are irrelevant. We just understand basic courtesy. If your goal is indeed to influence change, you do a massive disservice to the cause by acting immature and injecting your politics into other conversations.
Money is apolitical. Politics is not allowed on HN.
This is ridiculous wrong and demonstrates a profound lack of insight into both the history of economics[1] and the current political calculus.
Please don't use rules as a cudgel or at least have more tact doing so.
Well, as everyone points out: Musk uses Tesla’s stock to fund things and Tesla’s stock is decoupled from fundamentals like revenue so that means that buying his car is decoupled from funding things. Practically a syllogism.
> mass human displacement campaign (a.k.a. Genocide)
genocide /jĕn′ə-sīd″/
noun
The systematic and widespread extermination or attempted extermination of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group. The systematic killing of a racial or cultural group.
Great, I’m glad your dictionary is happy about deporting 5 year olds.
“Uhm aktually it’s not a genocide it’s just a fascist police state”
Multiple humanitarian organizations define mass displacement as genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
The holocaust literally started with mass deportations/detentions. Then the nazis figured out that it was easier to kill detainees.
If you have some point to make about deporting 5 years olds or whatever, don't you think it would be more persuasive without provoking a tangential discussion about your idiosyncratic definition of genocide regardless of whatever organizations agree with you?
So does AEB in any modern car.
Tesla fans have not realized that every car made since 2021ish can do this.
Generally known as AES, for example from BMW available with Active Driving Assistant or Driving Assistant Plus packages.
My 2016 Honda Civic has automatic braking (and it has lanekeep assist, so it's technologically superior to a 2026 Tesla).
AEB has been around since ages. Even my 2010 Mazda had it. It's nowhere near Tesla's capabilities tho. Not sure what are you trying to achieve with such dunks?
Obviously.
Lemonade purchased Metromile and significantly increased prices. 2.5x if I recall correctly. This has forced me to move to Geico. Now, since prices have increased and new self driving car insurance is giving a discount, are you effectively paying same old rate?
Just curious about this, this was Lemonade's integrated insurance to the Tesla right? How's Geico like for you? Probably just fine right? Any differences?
A 50% discount is pretty damning empirical evidence for FSD being better at driving your Tesla than you are.
No it does not. A 50% discount and the insurance still having industry average profit, or at least being profitable at all, would tell you that. Selling at a loss does not indicate your costs are actually lower. You need to wait until we learn if it is actually at a loss.
Ah yes, posting well documented video evidence of reality is bias. How silly of me. The only unbiased take is to ignore my lying eyes and make logically unsound arguments in favor of endangering the public. That is what unbiased people do.
We don't know if 50% makes it actually cheaper than other car insurance companies, or the coverage is comparable, or if they have comparable service. Or if they sell your location information to marketers.
Assuming this discount is offered broadly and indefinitely. Otherwise these might just be marketing dollars.
Or a price hike if the fleet API tattles on you for negative driving behaviors.
It may not be on the marketing copy but it’s almost certainly present in the contract.
99/month is more than I have been willing to pay for FSD, but if it lowers my insurance by 200/month, I could be convinced.
Lowering by $200? Full coverage on two recent model cars here and that's nearly three quarters of my monthly insurance bill. Insane what people are paying for insurance these days.
It would be interesting to see if Lemonade requires a Driver Monitoring System (DMS) to see if the driver/operator is actually paying attention (or, like sleeping / watching Netflix / whatever) while at the driver's seat.
Anybody know??
Tesla FSD is still a supervised system (= ADAS), afaik.
What happens if you have FSD turned off and like to drive fast on public roads. Will they see this telemetry and raise your rates?
It seems the answer is yes. From their web site:
> Fair prices, based on how you drive [...] Get a discount, and earn a lower premium as you drive better.
Bummer.. its super fun to floor them off the line.
Someone with a Plaid will need to test this out to see how high they can make their Lemonade premium.
This (instant torque) is exciting for about the first week of electric car ownership, it gets old very fast. I have far more fun driving my much slower gas-engined cars.
MT gas cars are very fun to drive!
Speak for yourself. Over 3 years and 100k km and still enjoying it.
It doesn't get old. What a ludicrous statement.
I did get lots of traction issues with FWD EV, any sort of wet - you need to baby it.
There’s much more to enjoying cars than speed in a straight line, which I do not disagree at all most EVs are exceptional at.
Booting the go pedal at every stop sign or light just feels like being a bit of a childish jerk after a short while on public roads once the novelty wears off.
I have Lemonade for my home insurance. It's been reliable for several years and the customer service is great. I don't have a self-driving car but I wouldn't hesitate to sign up. Their rates are very affordable.
I've had their Home Insurance since they started up and grabbed their car insurance a couple years ago. Competitive price, excellent customer service, no notes.
> automatically tracking FSD miles versus manual miles through direct Tesla integration.
No thanks. I unplugged the cellular modem in my car precisely because I can't stand the idea that the manufacturer/dealer/insurance company or other unauthorized third parties could have access to my location and driving habits.
I also generally avoid dealers like the plague and only trust the kind of shops where the guy who answers the phone is the guy doing the work.
One's first thought is that they ought to be running away from underwriting this as fast as they can go. But then one realizes that it is all profit -- they need never pay a claim, because in accidents involving autonomous vehicles, it will never be possible to establish fault; and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility.
I think there's a narrow unregulated space where this could be true. I'm exercising my creativity trying to imagine it - where automations are built with the outcome of obscured responsibility in mind. And I could understand profit as a possible driving factor for that outcome.
As an extreme end of a spectrum example, there's been worry and debate for decades over automating military capabilities to the point where it becomes "push button to win war". There used to be, and hopefully still is, lots of restraint towards heading in that direction - in recognition of the need for ethics validation in automated judgements. The topic comes up now and then around Tesla's, and impossible decisions that FSD will have to make.
So at a certain point, and it may be right around the point of serious physical harm, the design decision to have or not have human-in-the-middle accountability seems to run into ethical constraints. In reality it's the ruthless bottom line focused corps - that don't seem to be the norm, but may have an outsized impact - that actually push up against ethical constraints. But even then, I would be wary as an executive documenting a decision to disregard potential harms at one of them shops. That line is being tested, but it's still there.
In my actual experience with automations, they've always been derived from laziness / reducing effort for everyone, or "because we can", and sometimes a need to reduce human error.
You're not making any sense. In terms of civil liability, fault is attached to the vehicle regardless of what autonomous systems might have been in use at the time of a collision.
Or even who was driving it, in the case of ordinary cars.
One might imagine that lower courts won’t determine fault, one would be wrong.
> and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility.
Are you saying that the investments in FSD by tesla have been with the goal of letting drivers get a way with accidents? The law is black and white
Marketing stunt
Fleet API gives location data, no? I bet this discount will be paid for by this location data
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TL;DR: 50% insurance discount for Tesla vehicles driven by Tesla FSD.
On the surface, this looks like an endorsement of Tesla's claims about FSD safety.
If it autonomous or self-driving then why is the person in the car paying for the insurance? Surely if it's Tesla making the decisions, they need the insurance?
You insure the property, not the person.
Generally speaking, liability for a thing falls on the owner/operator. That person can sue the manufacturer to recover the damages if they want. At some point, I expect it to become somewhat routine for insurures to pay out, then sue the manufacturer to recover.
Or at some point subscribing to a service may be easier than owning the damn thing.
All according to plan
It isn't fully autonomous yet. For any future system sold as level 5 (or level 4?), I agree with your contention -- the manufacturer of the level 5 autonomous system is the one who bears primary liability and therefore should insure. "FSD" isn't even level 3.
(Though, there is still an element of owner/operator maintenance for level 4/5 vehicles -- e.g., if the owner fails to replace tires below 4/32", continues to operate the vehicle, and it causes an injury, that is partially the owner/operator's fault.)
Because that's the law of the land currently.
The product you buy is called "FSD Supervised". It clearly states you're liable and must supervise the system.
I don't think there's law that would allow Tesla (or anyone else) to sell a passenger car with unsupervised system.
If you take Waymo or Tesla Robotaxi in Austin, you are not liable for accidents, Google or Tesla is.
That's because they operate on limited state laws that allow them to provide such service but the law doesn't allow selling such cars to people.
That's changing. Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.
I imagine insurance would be split in two in that case. Carmakers would not want to be liable for e.g. someone striking you in a hit-and-run.
You can sell autonomous vehicles to consumers all day long. There's no US federal law prohibiting that, as long as they're compliant with FMVSS as all consumer vehicles are required to be.
I see. So not Tesla's product they are using to sell insurance around isn't "Full Self-Driving" or "Autonomous" like the page says.
My current FSD usage is 90% over ~2000 miles (since v14.x). Besides driving everywhere, everyday with FSD, I have driven 4 hours garage to hotel valet without intervention. It is absolutely "Full Self-Driving" and "Autonomous".
FSD isn't perfect, but it is everyday amazing and useful.
If it was full self driving, wouldn't your usage be 100%?
Yet still on relying you to cover it with your insurance. Again, clearly not autonomous.
Liability is a separate matter from autonomy. I assume you'd consider yourself autonomous, yet it's your employer's insurance that will be liable if you have an accident while driving a company vehicle.
If the company required a representative to sit in the car with you and participate in the driving (e.g. by monitoring and taking over before an accident), then there's a case to be made that you're not fully autonomous.
> Don't be snarky
> https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You keep posting the same thing across the thread. Do better.
Disagree. I appreciate their viewpoint tethering corporate claims to reality by illustrating Tesla is obfuscating the classification of their machines to be autonomous, when they actually aren't. Their comments in other thread chains proved to be fruitful when lacking agitators looking to dismiss critique by citing website rules, like the post adding additional detail to how Tesla muddles legal claims by cooking up cherry-picked evidence that work against the driver despite being the insurer.
Waymo is also a livery service which you normally aren’t liable for as a passenger of taxi or limousine unless you have deep pockets. /IANAL
> Quite likely this year we will have federal law that will allow selling cars with fully unsupervised self-driving, in which case the insurance/liability will obviously land on the maker of the system, not person present in the car.
This is news to me. This context seems important to understanding Tesla's decision to stop selling FSD. If they're on the hook for insurance, then they will need to dynamically adjust what they charge to reflect insurance costs.
Without LIDAR and/or additional sensors, Tesla will never be able to provide "real" FSD, no matter how wonderful their software controlling the car is.
Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property.
Waymo and others are providing a taxi service where the driver is not a human. You don't pay insurance when you ride Uber or Bolt or any other regular taxi service.
> Also, self driving is a feature of a vehicle someone owns, I don't understand how that should exempt anyone from insuring their property.
Well practically speaking, there’s nothing stopping anyone from voluntarily assuming liability for arbitrary things. If Tesla assumes the liability for my car, then even if I still require my “own” insurance for legal purposes, the marginal cost of covering the remaining risk is going to be close to zero.
Never say never—it’s not physically impossible. But yes, as it stands, it seems that Tesla will not be self driving any time soon (if ever).
Seems like the role of the human operator in the age of AI is to be the entity they can throw in jail if the machine fails (e.g. driver, pilot)
Because the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?
Sounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.
Yeah, Tesla gets to blame the “driver”, and has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible.
And the system is designed to set up drivers for failure.
An HCI challenge with mostly autonomous systems is that operators lose their awareness of the system, and when things go wrong you can easily get worse outcomes than if the system was fully manual with an engaged operator.
This is a well known challenge in the nuclear energy sector and airline industry (Air France 447) - how do you keep operators fully engaged even though they almost never need to intervene, because otherwise they’re likely to be missing critical context and make wrong decisions. These days you could probably argue the same is true of software engineers reviewing LLM code that’s often - but not always - correct.
> has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible
Really? Thats crazy.
Its neither self-driving, nor autonomous, eventually not even a car! (as Tesla slowly exits the car business). It will be 'insurance' on Speculation as a service, as Tesla skyrockets to $20T market cap. Tesla will successfully transition from a small revenue to pre-revenue company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJdKW-UnFQ
The last few years of Tesla 'growth' show how this transition is unfolding. S and X production is shutdown, just a few more models to shutdown.
You think their insurance division is a big deal? Wild prediction though, would love to hear the rest of it
I wonder if they will try to sell off the car business once they can hype up something else. It seems odd to just let the car business die.
Who’s the “operator” of an “autonomous” car? If I sit in it and it drives me around, how am I an “operator”?
If you get on a horse and let go of the reins you are also considered the operator of the horse. Such are the definitions in our society.
The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.
Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.
A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.
Not an expert here, but I recall reading that certain European countries (Spain???) allow liability to be put on the autonomous driving system, not the person in the car. Does anyone know more about this?
That is the case everywhere. It is common when buying a product for the contract to include who has liability for various things. The price often changes by a lot depending on who has liability.
Cars are traditionally sold as the customer has liability. Nothing stops a car maker (or even an individual dealer) from selling cars today taking all the insurance liability in any country I know of - they don't for what I hope are obvious reasons (bad drivers will be sure to buy those cars since it is a better deal for them an in turn a worse deal for good drivers), but they could.
Self driving is currently sold as customers has liability because that is how it has always been done. I doubt it will change, but it is only because I doubt there will ever be enough advantage as to be worth it for someone else to take on the liability - but I could be wrong.
It’s because you bought it. Don’t buy it if you don’t want to insure.
Yep, you bought it, you own it, you choose to operate it on the public roads. Therefore your liability.
If you bought and owned it, you could sell it to another auto manufacturer for some pretty serious amounts of money.
In reality, you acquired a license to use it. Your liability should only go as far as you have agreed to identify the licenser.
I don't think Tesla lets you buy FSD
They do, until Feb 14th.
Tesla have their own Insurance product which is already very competitive compared to other providers. Not sure if lemonade can beat them . Tesla's insurance product has similar objective in place already where it rewards self driving over manual driving.
Tesla is cooperating with Lemonade on this by providing them necessary user driving data.
If Tesla didn't want Lemonade to provide this, they could block them.
Strategically, Tesla doesn't want to be an insurer. They started the insurance product years ago, before Lemonade also offered this, to make FSD more attractive to buyers.
But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.
In conclusion: Tesla is happy that Lemonade offers this. It makes Tesla cars more attractive to buyers without Tesla doing the work of starting an insurance company in every state.
> But the expansion stalled, maybe because the state bureaucracy or maybe because Tesla shifted priority to other things.
If the math was mathing, it would be malpractice not to expand it. I'm betting that their scheme simply wasn't workable, given the extremely high costs of claims (Tesla repairs aren't cheap) relative to the low rates that they were collecting on premiums. The cheap premiums are probably a form of market dumping to get people to buy their FSD product, the sales of which boosts their share price.
It was not workable. They have a loss ratio of >100% [1], as in they paid out more in claims than received in premiums before even accounting for literally any other costs. Industry average is ~60-80% to stay profitable when including other costs.
They released the Tesla Insurance product because their cars were excessively expensive to insure, increasing ownership costs, which was impacting sales. By releasing the unprofitable Tesla Insurance product, they could subsidize ownership costs making the cars more attractive to buy right now which pumped revenues immediately in return for a "accidental" write-down in the future.
[1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...
Who the hell was paying for this?
The math should've mathed. Better data === lower losses right? They probably weren't able to get it to work quite right on the tech side and were eating fat losses during an already bad time in the market.
It'll come back.
Hey Lemonade or Tesla if you find this, let's collab, i'm a founder in sunnyvale, insurtech vertical at pnp
You'd be very surprised. Distribution works wonders. You could have a large carrier taking over Tesla's own vehicles. The difference then would be loss ratios on the data collection, like does LIDAR data really beat Progressive Snapshot?
Hmmm. The source for the "FSD is safer" claim might not be wholly independent: "Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving"
I would be surprised if that was what they were actually looking at. They are an established insurance company with their own data and the actuaries to analyze it. I can't imagine them doing this without at least validating a substantial drop in claims relating to FSD capable cars.
Now that they are offering this program, they should start getting much better data by being able to correlate claims with actual FSD usage. They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future.
> They might be viewing this program partially as a data acquisition project to help them insure autonomous vehicles more broadly in the future
What do you mean?
They are a grossly unprofitable insurance company. Your actuaries can undervalue risk to the point you are losing money on every claim and still achieve that.
In fact, Tesla Insurance, the people who already have direct access to the data already loses money on every claim [1].
[1] https://peakd.com/tesla/@newageinv/teslas-push-into-insuranc...
> "Tesla’s data shows that Full Self-Driving miles are twice as safe as manual driving"
Teslas only do FSD on motorways where you tend to have far fewer accidents per mile.
Also, they switch to manual driving if they can't cope, and because the driver isn't paying attention this usually results in a crash. But hey, it's in manual driving, not FSD, so they get to claim FSD is safer.
FSD is not and never will be safer than a human driver.
The whole point of self-driving cars (to me) is I don't have to own or insure it, someone else deals with that and I just make it show up with my phone when I need it.
For the vast majority of people who own a car, continuing to own the car will remain the better deal. Most people need their car during "rush hour", so there isn't any savings from sharing, and worse some people have "high standards" and so will demand the rental be a clean car nicer than you would accept - thus raising the costs (particularly if you drive used cars) Any remaining argument for a shared car dies when you realize that you can leave your things in the car, and you never have to wait.
For the rest - many of them live in a place where not enough others will follow the same system and so they will be forced to own a car just like today. If you live in a not dense area but still manage to walk/bike almost everywhere (as I do), renting a car is on paper cheaper the few times when you need a car - but in practice you don't know about that need several weeks in advance and so they don't have one they can rent to you. Even if you know you will need the car weeks in advance, sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.
If you live in a very dense area such that you almost regularly use transit (but sometimes walk, bike), but need a car for something a few times per year, then not owning a car makes sense. In this case the density means shared cars can be a viable business model despite not being used very much.
In short what you say sound insightful, but reality of how cars are used means it won't happen for most car owners.
> sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.
Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.
Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.
Hertz will hurts you.
Hertz this time, but things like that have happened with every rental company I know of.
Imagine this for a whole neighborhood! Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though. And while we're at it, let's pick up other people along the way, you'll need a bigger vehicle though, perhaps bus-sized...
Half-jokes aside, if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car. This is all but guaranteed based on all SaaS services so far.
Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic.
Also, a real nightmare for the municipal trade unions. (Do you know why every NYC subway train needs to have not one but two operators, even though it could run automatically just fine?)
Why would you need buses?
Believe it or not, in some cities that have near grid-lock rush-hour traffic - there's between 50-100%+ as many people traveling by bus as by car.
If all of those people switch to cars, you end up with it taking an hour to travel 1 mile by car.
It's almost as if they have busses for a reason.
This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house.
The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.
Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.
Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.
> Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though
Efficient for who, is the problem
Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware.
Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Nah, I don't want to share my car with anyone. It's my own personal space where I can keep some of my stuff and set it up exactly the way I want.
> But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Even better — charge 10% less and corner the market! As long as nobody charges 10% less than you…
Cars and personal computers have advantages over shared resources that often make them worth the cost. If you want your transport/compute in busy times you may find limitations. (ever got on the train and had to stand because there are no seats? Every had to wait for your compute job to start because they are all busy? Both of these have happened to me).
I ran the numbers, and for most non-braindead cities something like a fleet of 6-seater minivans will easily replace all of local transit.
And with just 6 people the overhead if an imperfect route and additional stops will be measured in minutes.
And of course, it's pretty easy to imagine an option to pay a bit more for a fully personal route.
This exists in a way -- I'd wager every city has a commercial service that will shuttle you to, say, the airport. They're not cheap, however.
you made too many false assumptions if you came up with those routes. Experts have run real numbers including looking at what happens in the real world. https://humantransit.org/category/microtransit - (as I write this you need to scroll to the second article to find the useful rebuttal of your idea)
> Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?
Yeah, this would rely on robust competition.
This is the nightmare scenario for me. A forever subscription for the usage of a car.
Subscription for self driving will almost be a given with so many bad actors in tech nowadays, but never even being allowed to own the car is even worse.
I think this is purely psychological. The notion of paying for usage of some resource that you don't own is really rather mundane when you get down to it.
Subscription for changes to maps and the law makes sense. I'd also pay for the latest safety improvements (but they better be real improvements). However they are likely to add a number of unrelated things and I object to those.
How do maps changes make sense to subscribe to when they are on OSM?
And what do you even mean by subscription to changes to the law?
If OSM is up to date - many places it is very outdated. (others it is very good).
Law - when a government changes the driving laws. Government can be federal (I have driven to both Canada and Mexico. Getting to Argentina is possible though I don't think it has ever been safe. Likewise it is possible to drive over the North Pole to Europe), state (or whatever the country calls their equivalent). When a city changes the law they put up signs, but if a state passes a law I'm expected to know even if I have never driven in that state before. Right turn on red laws are the only ones I can think of where states are different - but they are likely others.
Laws also cover new traffic control systems that may not have been in the original program. If the self driving system can't figure out the next one (think roundabout) then it needs to be updated.
I think part of the issue in California at least is that you must have insurance. You gonna get a giant fine if you don't.
I own a Model Y with hardware version 4. FSD prevented my from getting in an accident with a drunk driver. It reacted much faster to the situation than I could have. Ever since, I’m sold that in a lot of circumstances, machines can drive better than humans.
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Hacker News likes to keep conversations focused on the topic at hand. I doubt anyone here thinks politics are irrelevant. We just understand basic courtesy. If your goal is indeed to influence change, you do a massive disservice to the cause by acting immature and injecting your politics into other conversations.
Money is apolitical. Politics is not allowed on HN.
This is ridiculous wrong and demonstrates a profound lack of insight into both the history of economics[1] and the current political calculus.
Please don't use rules as a cudgel or at least have more tact doing so.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_economy
Well, as everyone points out: Musk uses Tesla’s stock to fund things and Tesla’s stock is decoupled from fundamentals like revenue so that means that buying his car is decoupled from funding things. Practically a syllogism.
> mass human displacement campaign (a.k.a. Genocide)
genocide /jĕn′ə-sīd″/ noun
Great, I’m glad your dictionary is happy about deporting 5 year olds.
“Uhm aktually it’s not a genocide it’s just a fascist police state”
Multiple humanitarian organizations define mass displacement as genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
The holocaust literally started with mass deportations/detentions. Then the nazis figured out that it was easier to kill detainees.
If you have some point to make about deporting 5 years olds or whatever, don't you think it would be more persuasive without provoking a tangential discussion about your idiosyncratic definition of genocide regardless of whatever organizations agree with you?
So does AEB in any modern car.
Tesla fans have not realized that every car made since 2021ish can do this.
It does more than AEB. It also knows to swerve out of the way during E: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1MWml-81e0
Generally known as AES, for example from BMW available with Active Driving Assistant or Driving Assistant Plus packages.
My 2016 Honda Civic has automatic braking (and it has lanekeep assist, so it's technologically superior to a 2026 Tesla).
AEB has been around since ages. Even my 2010 Mazda had it. It's nowhere near Tesla's capabilities tho. Not sure what are you trying to achieve with such dunks?
Obviously.
Lemonade purchased Metromile and significantly increased prices. 2.5x if I recall correctly. This has forced me to move to Geico. Now, since prices have increased and new self driving car insurance is giving a discount, are you effectively paying same old rate?
Just curious about this, this was Lemonade's integrated insurance to the Tesla right? How's Geico like for you? Probably just fine right? Any differences?
A 50% discount is pretty damning empirical evidence for FSD being better at driving your Tesla than you are.
No it does not. A 50% discount and the insurance still having industry average profit, or at least being profitable at all, would tell you that. Selling at a loss does not indicate your costs are actually lower. You need to wait until we learn if it is actually at a loss.
Sir, your bias is extreme.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Veserv
Ah yes, posting well documented video evidence of reality is bias. How silly of me. The only unbiased take is to ignore my lying eyes and make logically unsound arguments in favor of endangering the public. That is what unbiased people do.
We don't know if 50% makes it actually cheaper than other car insurance companies, or the coverage is comparable, or if they have comparable service. Or if they sell your location information to marketers.
Assuming this discount is offered broadly and indefinitely. Otherwise these might just be marketing dollars.
Or a price hike if the fleet API tattles on you for negative driving behaviors.
It may not be on the marketing copy but it’s almost certainly present in the contract.
99/month is more than I have been willing to pay for FSD, but if it lowers my insurance by 200/month, I could be convinced.
Lowering by $200? Full coverage on two recent model cars here and that's nearly three quarters of my monthly insurance bill. Insane what people are paying for insurance these days.
It would be interesting to see if Lemonade requires a Driver Monitoring System (DMS) to see if the driver/operator is actually paying attention (or, like sleeping / watching Netflix / whatever) while at the driver's seat.
Anybody know??
Tesla FSD is still a supervised system (= ADAS), afaik.
What happens if you have FSD turned off and like to drive fast on public roads. Will they see this telemetry and raise your rates?
It seems the answer is yes. From their web site:
> Fair prices, based on how you drive [...] Get a discount, and earn a lower premium as you drive better.
Bummer.. its super fun to floor them off the line.
Someone with a Plaid will need to test this out to see how high they can make their Lemonade premium.
This (instant torque) is exciting for about the first week of electric car ownership, it gets old very fast. I have far more fun driving my much slower gas-engined cars.
MT gas cars are very fun to drive!
Speak for yourself. Over 3 years and 100k km and still enjoying it.
It doesn't get old. What a ludicrous statement.
I did get lots of traction issues with FWD EV, any sort of wet - you need to baby it.
There’s much more to enjoying cars than speed in a straight line, which I do not disagree at all most EVs are exceptional at.
Booting the go pedal at every stop sign or light just feels like being a bit of a childish jerk after a short while on public roads once the novelty wears off.
I have Lemonade for my home insurance. It's been reliable for several years and the customer service is great. I don't have a self-driving car but I wouldn't hesitate to sign up. Their rates are very affordable.
I've had their Home Insurance since they started up and grabbed their car insurance a couple years ago. Competitive price, excellent customer service, no notes.
> automatically tracking FSD miles versus manual miles through direct Tesla integration.
No thanks. I unplugged the cellular modem in my car precisely because I can't stand the idea that the manufacturer/dealer/insurance company or other unauthorized third parties could have access to my location and driving habits.
I also generally avoid dealers like the plague and only trust the kind of shops where the guy who answers the phone is the guy doing the work.
One's first thought is that they ought to be running away from underwriting this as fast as they can go. But then one realizes that it is all profit -- they need never pay a claim, because in accidents involving autonomous vehicles, it will never be possible to establish fault; and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility.
I think there's a narrow unregulated space where this could be true. I'm exercising my creativity trying to imagine it - where automations are built with the outcome of obscured responsibility in mind. And I could understand profit as a possible driving factor for that outcome.
As an extreme end of a spectrum example, there's been worry and debate for decades over automating military capabilities to the point where it becomes "push button to win war". There used to be, and hopefully still is, lots of restraint towards heading in that direction - in recognition of the need for ethics validation in automated judgements. The topic comes up now and then around Tesla's, and impossible decisions that FSD will have to make.
So at a certain point, and it may be right around the point of serious physical harm, the design decision to have or not have human-in-the-middle accountability seems to run into ethical constraints. In reality it's the ruthless bottom line focused corps - that don't seem to be the norm, but may have an outsized impact - that actually push up against ethical constraints. But even then, I would be wary as an executive documenting a decision to disregard potential harms at one of them shops. That line is being tested, but it's still there.
In my actual experience with automations, they've always been derived from laziness / reducing effort for everyone, or "because we can", and sometimes a need to reduce human error.
You're not making any sense. In terms of civil liability, fault is attached to the vehicle regardless of what autonomous systems might have been in use at the time of a collision.
Or even who was driving it, in the case of ordinary cars.
One might imagine that lower courts won’t determine fault, one would be wrong.
> and then one sees that the primary purpose of most automations is to obscure responsibility.
Are you saying that the investments in FSD by tesla have been with the goal of letting drivers get a way with accidents? The law is black and white
Marketing stunt
Fleet API gives location data, no? I bet this discount will be paid for by this location data
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TL;DR: 50% insurance discount for Tesla vehicles driven by Tesla FSD.
On the surface, this looks like an endorsement of Tesla's claims about FSD safety.