Comment by psy-q | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psy-q | Hacker News Reader

What kind of country is this where insurance is not mandatory for owning a vehicle? He wrote that the other driver wasn't insured. So in the US, it's legal to drive a car without having insurance? My mind is blown.

This kind of thing would have cost me a maximum of exactly zero if it had happened here (Switzerland, but I'm guessing it's similar in the EU). Insurance is mandatory and the insurer of whoever caused the accident pays. Unless they flee the scene, but that's its own crime, so most people don't.

That said: We had two larger issues with our Model S so far, one time it had to be repaired in an Italian body shop while on holiday, but that was done in less than 48 hours. It wasn't even a Tesla service center, just one of their partners. The other issue involved the drive train, it started making whining noises after two years. They fixed that for free (new motor and drive train) and gave us a free loaner for a week.

One time it didn't recover from a software update and had to be towed -- again, a free loaner, Tesla paid for the towing and even had the vehicle brought back to our door because I was sick with a high fever and couldn't go pick it up. They usually make you pick it up.

Another time I snapped off the windshield wiper by accident because I'm an idiot, it was on our way to France. The service center in Geneva made room to fix this (had to replace the whole wiper assembly) and we were back on our trip less than 30 minutes after arriving at their shop unannounced.

So I guess it all depends on what's broken and where you are.

Disclaimer (do we need to have disclaimers for this now or is that just on Motley Fool?): I have Tesla shares and used to have Solar City shares as well, but the damn thieves switched my Solar City for Tesla at USD 290, so now I'm short 50 Dollars per share. Serious first world problems, eh?

So in the US, it's legal to drive a car without having insurance?

No, of course not.[1] The exact details by state. But there are many problems. Here are some off the top of my head:

1) maximum penalties for allowing insurance to lapse might be light, and if you're a bad driver insurance might be expensive to purchase. Even for much worse than a simple accident, the penalties might be light. For example, for quite a while a nearby city, Portland Oregon, was doing "catch and release" for actual car thieves (I neither know nor care if they still do it). What that meant is if they caught you driving a stolen car the police would write you a citation on the spot and then let you go. You would "promise" to appear in court some number of months later! The argument was that they didn't have enough jail space for such petty criminals.

2) you might be "judgement proof". If you have no assets, even if you are sued, then you just don't pay. People rarely if ever get put in jail if they can't pay a civil judgement. So why bother to continue to pay for insurance if you're driving a crappy car and you don't care what happens to anyone you hit?

3) You might not even have a license, or it might have been suspended for previous bad behavior. (And it's probably difficult to purchase insurance under those circumstances). So, what can the government do, suspend your already suspended license? That probably works about as well as "double secret probation" worked in Animal House.

4) I can think of many similar scenarios, but you get the point

In short, the USA is not at all as homogeneous a country as Switzerland. There are plenty of lowlifes around who just don't give a shit. And very little is ever done by the government to persuade them to change their behavior.

To protect themselves from such situations, many people add "uninsured motorist" coverage to their insurance policy. This means your insurer pays you even if the other guy doesn't have insurance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance_in_the_Unite...

> "catch and release" for actual car thieves... they didn't have enough jail space for such petty criminals.

I suppose their jails are too full of those dangerous plant smokers. Priorities.

Wow, thanks for the explanation. That's a ball-of-yarn-shaped collection of problems :(

Here, if you don't pay your insurance premiums, the insurance company still has to cover for any damage you cause, until you return your plates (deregister the car) and I think you face a nice fine if you have unpaid premiums at that point.

This means insurance companies have a great incentive to hunt you down like hounds if you don't pay. I could see this working in the US, but I think the next part is also required for the trick to work:

Not paying is hard. If the insurance company goes to court against you, it can do things like demand that a part of your wage be seized in order to pay for your debt. There are cantonal registers of previous enforcements against someone (you get an entry there for any situation where a creditor requested and enforcement of payment). Having any entries in the register is social suicide because you'll have a much harder time finding an apartment (almost all landlords demand a copy of your entries).

So if you have no assets, you won't be driving a car for long, removing you from the pool of people who can cause damage. Plus, we don't put people in jail too easily (we only have capacity for ~7000 people nationwide, and about 6900 people out of a population of 8 million are in jail right now: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/crime-crimin...

I can't imagine the stereotypical American we know from bad TV to be in favor of so much government involvement, but I think the system works well. Of course it's ridiculously hard to get by in the (non-urban) parts of the US without a car, which again changes the whole perspective.

It's interesting that the two systems in place here produce such different results.

Vehicle regulations are not uniform even in Switzerland, by the way (e.g. in Zürich you don't pay tax on electric vehicles, in St. Gallen you pay by weight (!!!) for your heavy Tesla). But the insurance rules are the same for everyone.

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