Car insurance prices surge
Car insurance prices surge
www.newsweek.com
Car insurance prices surge
Car insurance rates are surging as Americans struggle to pay for basic necessities and ongoing debt.
The newest Consumer Price Index shows car insurance spiked 20 percent year over year. The surge in pricing occurred after years of gradual price inflation, with earlier reports finding the rates grew by 36 percent since 2020.
That's at the same time debt is soaring for many Americans. While Americans hold around 1.75 trillion in student debt loans alone, they also have $1.05 trillion in credit card balances not paid off.
Add inflation and greedflation, and It’s no wonder insurance rates are higher.
I can't speak for your state, but red light cameras started being a great source of revenue from fines, so people started rigidly adhering to them. So this caused two problems.
Also in my area people started shooting out the redlight cameras cause they were fining people who were following the law to a T. The cops were outright working with the city maintenance guys to cut the wire on the damned things because they were getting pissed having to deal with the complaints.
Red light cameras cause accidents because people slam on their brakes too hard.
Or, someone's following distance is too short.
Which do you think is a costlier and deadlier accident:
Some of these are valid. But speed cameras do fuck all for safety. They are a private company scam to take money from people
The better way to go about it is to redesign roadways to force people to slow down. Narrower lanes, trees on each side, no more 6-lane highways through semi-residential and mixed-use areas. And then invest in public transportation so that fewer people even need to drive their own cars.
But I'm preaching to the choir on Lemmy and hoping for hell to freeze over.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Those first two, the "people" are largely the auto manufacturers.
Smaller and cheaper cars are SUPER popular in the rest of the world and are literally not available at all in the US. The auto mfgs will tell you it is because of US preference, but in a country of 330 million, there doesn't need to be that much demand compared to these vehicles popularity in, say, a cheese-loving nation of 65 million. Even if they are immensely less popular, there is still MORE than enough market for some of these ALREADY-BEING-PRODUCED vehicles.
But the US auto mfgs refuse. They go bigger and more expensive. The US consumer has no real choice.
For your fourth and fifth, the "people" are US civil/transportation engineers. They must be stopped. They are a scourge. There's no culture of safe road engineering in the US. AASHTO are an association of insane fuckwits.
I am incredibly skeptical that the behaviors of US drivers are significantly different than anywhere else in the world. I'm pretty skeptical of worries over inspections or licensing requirements and am CERTAIN that additional police enforcement will only cause more mayhem and death and not protect any life. I believe it's almost entirely a problem of road engineering, urban design, and vehicle design.
Mfgs also don’t produce as many of the base trims so it limits choice further. Then on top of that the dealers tend to mark cars way up. Cars in general are just way overpriced since COVID started and some mfgs are still claiming supply chain issues so they artificially limit supply further.
To the point about manufacturers, it's also an issue with emissions laws, because smaller cars have more restrictions on emissions. So rather than figure out how to make cars run better, everyone is making bigger vehicles so they fall into a lower emissions requirement classes.
It's not like the average US consumer has a say in this. The cheapest car you can drive off a lot is like 25k now. We could have less expensive cars but for half a century we've used tariffs to provide an unfair competitive advantage to our domestic motor companies who only took advantage of it to price gouge.
You’re missing the part where people spend $80k cars on a loan each five years because they are financially illiterate.
Speed limits dont decrease acidents. They are the most famous example of a safety feature not working
If the road is made for 90km/h, wide and with good sight lines, reducing legal speed to 70km/h doesn't do much. There also needs to be made adjustments to the road so you cannot drive faster than 70km/h. Well so you aren't natirally incentiviced to drive faster than you should.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2023/07/13/theres-a-trend-to-raise-speed-limits-but-it-increases-risk-of-death-and-serious-injury/
Another factor (in the US at least) is over-litigation of any and all traffic incidents. Seems like the default practice now is to get lawyers involved for a fender bender that breaks one tail light. The "at fault" drivers insurance ends up using lawyers to go back and forth haggling with the "victim" drivers lawyers and they finally settle on some ridiculous payment that is 10x what the actual damage was. All that cost gets passed on to everybody who buys car insurance.
This list is true and depressing. People in this country should not be running it. It's a daycare run by children.
Electric cars are a contributing factor to both of these trends.
With respect to more expensive cars, people don't have a choice.
The most sold vehicle in the USA are oversized pick-up ....