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Comment by AlwaysRock | Hacker News Reader

Never owned a car of my own until two years ago. Our car has been hit three times in the last two years. Once totaled on the high way (another drivers fault) and twice while parked. Roughly 50K in damages across the two cars and 3 months in the shop doing repairs. We spent 20K on a new car after the old one was totaled and insurance paid out a fraction of what a similar car would cost. We've paid close to 2K in deductibles, way too much for car insurance from a company that doesnt give a shit about us, and close to 1k on car cameras and backup batteries.

Thankfully we havnt been hurt but we got lucky. When the car was totaled it was in heavy traffic going 40+ mph and caused a 4 car pile up. I know people who have died in accidents or had their kids die. My immediate family was incredible lucky to not be killed by a drunk driver in a very bad accident early on in my life.

Driving sucks.

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Another anecdote on the other side of this: I've been driving since I was 15 for many thousands of miles and have only been involved in two incidents. Both my fault involving icy roads, but both where so minor that only paint damage occurred (no insurance involved). I live in the north-eastern United States for reference. Edit: I wouldn't say that my driving style is cautious either, I do drive attentively though.

Same here, I drove for 7-8 years (not that much though) and my major "accident" was with a thin and curvy tree that was on a dead spot of the rear mirrors while backing up. Was in 3 close calls where the results would have been much worse.

In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away, 2 minor accidents like that for a total of ~8 weeks driving motorbikes (minor since I knew there was gravel/water and was going really slow).

> In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away

Not a motobiker, but I find this part strange - I see people who commute daily on scooters, sports bikes and choppers too and they don't mind mild rain and wet roads much. They do drive slightly slower through city (and on highways too), but not more than 10kmh less.

If its anything similar to bicycle then you just take care on bends/intersections but thats just about it.

Ah sorry, yes ofc you can drive daily on scooters and deal with the rain and wet roads. With rain/gravel on a motorbike you def need to go more than 10kmh slower. I've had my car slide a couple of times under rain, and a few more under gravel/sand on the floor, and on the car it just moves a meter or two and that's it, normally no issue at all. However on the motorbike that same sliding means you are going down. That's all I mean, that the car is a lot safer than the motorbike for small incidents. Probably also for major accidents, but luckily I haven't been in those.

Kind of similar for me but my cars tend to get hit now and again a lot whilst parked. One time almost written off because it was hit at high speed and the offender kept on going despite leaving several piece of his own car at the scene. The police couldn't do anything because, well, I was insured so 'they can deal with it'.

Driving sucks, in some places.

I've been driving for 21 years in the UK. I've been dinked in a car park while I was shopping, 20 years ago. That's it.

Your description sounds like a solid reason to up and move to somewhere with better road safety.

Where do you live? Driving should be safer, but being involved in that many accidents in only 2 years seems really unlucky

I've been driving for 23 years, in the north, where we have icy roads and blizzards 6 months out of the year. Been in one accident in my entire life.

I like driving.

Where do you live? West coast or South?

My money's on mid-west, honestly.

Nailed it.

Is there no mandatory insurance to cover damages to others in the US?

In my country if I want to drive a car it has to have this insurance so if I crash into someone all of the damage I do to them is covered.

It is mandatory but not everyone follows the rules. Our car has been hit three times in the past 4-5 years and only one of the drivers was insured. (One didn’t even have a license!)

Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway.

I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance and then if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you. (The insurance is tied to the car, not to the driver.)

We have a weird hybrid model in the US (texas, at least) where some aspects of insurance are tied to the driver and some to the car. So I personally have liability insurance that pays out to other people (the legally required part) but also have insurance that covers my car in the event of a wreck.

> Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway.

> if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you

How so? Said cop would have to stop you and check you have insurance. In almost 18 years of driving in France, some of I which I would drive twice a day, I've only been stopped for a police control a whopping 1 time.

Sure, I drive fairly conservatively, but basically I could've driven without license or insurance for all these years.

Also, I'm not sure dealerships have some obligation to check on these. When I bought my first motorcycle, the dealer only ever wanted to see the bank check.

According to [0], it would seem that driving without insurance is quite widespread. They say "over 30000 people have had a crash with an uninsured or runaway driver". Since I'd expect that not everyone without insurance crashes, the number must be higher than that.

Note that in France, the insurance is tied to the car, so if I drive your car, your insurance applies, even if I don't have any insurance of my own.

[0] https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2019/qSEQ190309675.html

There is a missing section in you quoted part

> I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance

I guess the insurance/traffic inspectorate can mark your plate as stolen-like if you stop paying without giving it back

So either the first cop that sees you without a place or the first time your plate is checked by any automated system.

I know that french generally hate travelling to places that don't speak french, but if you ever did by car and didn't have all papers in order, you may be in for a big surprise. Ie Switzerland, they do frequent background checks especially on foreign plates, I'd say you have 20-30% chance of being checked on average as french on each crossing. With covid, practically any border crossing within Europe had 100% mandatory checks for certain parts of 2020 and 2021, and they often went deeper than just valid covid papers.

Also, France is a mess in quite a few aspects so not surprising when some bureaucracy doesn't work as intended (ie colleague who moved from Belgium ended up in dead-end process when migrating his driving license, literally the law covering his situation was so badly written it didn't make it possible at all to migrate his driving license to French one).

In Switzerland, no car dealer would give you keys to the car before having mandatory 3rd party damage insurance. Once you stop paying, all sorts of automated plate scanners would mark you and you would receive a massive fine, and probably a visit to court that would take your license for some time on top of that. I mean they take license for driving more than 20kmh over limit in certain situations.

If you don't have the plates, the cop doesn't have to check anything. It is very visible that you don't have them.

Doesn't France keep the registry of all cars and whether they have an insurance or not?

I've just realized I'm not completely safe though, because — if what you are saying is true — someone from France can drive their non-insured car to my country and crash into me :)

The way it works around here is that every car is registered to a person in central registry to get plates. The registry is crosschecked daily with central insurance database to make sure all vehicles have insurance, which is mandatory by law. If you don't have it you get fine automatically, which might go to collections. People without insurance are unheard of.

This of course requires the government to have central database of vehicles, insurance contracts and citizens.

Yes, actually that would probably happen first here (Slovakia) as well. And then if you continue to not pay, they remove the car from the registry and take the plates back.

Yup. Two times our car got hit the driver ran and left no note. Its fucked because then we pay the $750 deductible. Cops dont even try to find who did it. Really frustrating.

> Yup. Two times our car got hit the driver ran and left no note. Its fucked because then we pay the $750 deductible. Cops dont even try to find who did it. Really frustrating.

If you're complaining about the driver not leaving a note, that implies no one you know was there with your car to witness your crash. How do you expect the cops to even try to find out who did it? Go full CSI?

There must be security camera footage along the street before and after the car's location. It doesn't seem implausible to find the damaged car leaving that wasn't damaged coming. You could also look at the damaged vehicle to figure out the paint of the other car, I'm guessing something would be left behind. You could contact repair shops in the area looking for a match.

I don't know - I'm not a cop but there are certainly many possible avenues of investigation if people were willing to try.

Sure if you have infinite resources to throw at a problem, you can do a lot. The actual question is: how much effort is all that, is it worth it, and what's the chance of success?

Realistically, for a property damage case, you're not going to get ten cops scanning hours of grainy security camera footage (that may not exist) from different angles and running all over town for weeks checking every auto body shop in the city looking for paint matches. Even if they did that, there's a good chance they'd fail (e.g. no video, no legible shot of the plates, culprit doesn't take his care into a shop), so they're not going to try.

Investigating would require some resources, yes though obviously not "infinite" resources. That's why we fund police departments, hire investigators and officers, and give them authority to conduct investigations though.

Ignoring, and tacitly permitting, crime results in more crime which in turn results in greater demand for effort. Thoroughly investigating and resolving crime may be more expensive than ignoring crime in the short term, but long term it pays off.

Yeah it was a hit and run at 3am. Do you watch your car at all times?

Most people have insurance but the ones doing the crashing disproportionately do not, either because their prior crashing resulted in a requirement for expensive bonded insurance or because their habit of crashing made their insurance prohibitively expensive. I think some places also won't insure drivers who don't have a license, which also correlates well with drivers who get drunk and crash into things.

The question is why people who repeatedly crash while drunk are not in prison to protect rest of the society.

Given that vehicles are trivial to get and licensing does nothing to stop driving, you have a fair point. IMO probably better to drop the licensing schemes and then execute / imprison those who recklessly crash into others.

Not sure about execute, but in my mind driving drunk is like firing a gun blindly - you might not kill anyone this time but it is dangerous as hell and you should definitely not be doing it. I think it should be taken more seriously.

Move to Europe - we have good buses, trains and cycle lanes :)

Id love to. Getting work visas for 2 is not easy.

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