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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

By the time electric cars are ready for ubiquity, transportation-as-a-utility will have exploded thanks to autonomous vehicles. Why buy an electric car with less maintenance than a gas one when you can just skip out on owning a car entirely? Governments and/or insurance can directly or indirectly subsidize this move for the sake of safety.

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Why would insurance companies do this? They stand to lose a TON by autonomous vehicles. Estimates are in the 60 to 80% of the market to go away.

Risk versus technological change is a dynamical system, yet many of the sky-is-falling estimates for the insurance industry myopically forecast assuming an invariant risk set-point.

For an alternate perspective of a potential (lucrative) future for insurance, see my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12245312

I see but what happens if the parameters of the transportation systems are regulated?

I disagree with you, OP mentions 60% reduction in the civilian insurance market and there's studies to back that up- http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2015/10/23/385...

Any large scale car accidents will be re-simulated, analysed and scoured until they are fixed, the general public will not permit them to persist. This means a complete collapse of the entire industry except for enterprise scale underwriting of the car manufacturers which they may already have for recalls.

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