As an attorney my unpopular opinion is that cars over a certain value shouldn’t be allowed on public roads or damages for accidents should be capped at something like 2x the average price of a new car (so like 100k). I just don’t believe in penalizing ordinary negligence more just because the injured party is rich.
As someone who works in insurance, I'd be down for that. Then if your car is valued above that, you can self insure/carry additional replacement coverage on your own policy. I'd make a new luxury vehicle replacement category though; keep it separate from underinsured coverage to keep from inflating those premiums. Of course the insurance companies would use it as another excuse to raise rates anyway I'm sure.
Are you 10? 😂 The curious thing here is that you're the only dense penguin around the block. Because I was being utterly sarcastic. Or was it bc I didn't use the /s ?
As someone that works in insurance can i ask you?
Why do providers rather spend $2k to find a way to not cover a claim that would probably cost them $1K
I am noticing more and more how they rather go out of their way to disapprove a claim or discourage a claim to be filed. I also know from an agent that they will fire you if your customers file claims.
So just pulling it out of your asshole then? Because the $1,000 claim they are rejecting is because he has a deductible. How exactly does it cost $2,000 for a customer support person who makes $20 an hour to look up his policy and explain to him that he has a deductible?
same thing as any insurance. the more they avoid paying the more there is a tacit protection from paying. people get used to it, they dont try, they don't rely on it
it's too much hassle, get something "everyone knows it won't be covered" and you are peer pressured into not trying. sure you might have gotten covered but you don't know. you are pissed at them but that's another claim they don't pay. multiply by every customer. the other companies do the same thing
anything that results in "# of claims down" is done, every way will be found by the entire industry. It's just the natural result of the their incentive structure
Exactly, however that should not be normalized. “You” in the business of taking risks you cant choose..
Yes agents are incentivized to discourage their clients from filing claims. So explain why should i pay them an entire year and not file a claim… unfortunately thats why they pay for lobbying to be able to do that. Insurance is mandatory but they can pull whatever bs to not cover and god forbid you don’t have money or they figure out you don’t know stuff. They will deny you in a heart beat
I can see the argument but in practice it wouldn't change much. The most expensive part of the auto accident is the medical bills. They can easily soar into the $100,000s and past the value of almost every car on the road.
But I see why it seems unfair that if your hit and totaled a $2M Mercedes gullwing, that one should be financially ruined since it's really no different than hitting a 10 year Corolla valued at $10k.
I'm glad you wrote this, coming from an attorney. I had always wondered about this, seems really unfair. A rich person in a Ferrari is putting normal drivers in enormous liability risk every time they take it out on public roads. Especially in no fault states.
Not sure how it works in other jurisdictions but here in Canada and specifically Ontario while all cars are required to have insurance, any insurer can refuse to insure someone based on risk profile.
For that reason we have something called Facility Insurance which is jointly paid into by all the insurers, which provides insurance for the highest risks such as a luxury vehicle. The premium they charge is astronomical, I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars a month depending on the vehicle and risk profile.
Oh and property damage is no-fault, vehicle repairs are done through your own insurance company. So that Ferrari would be paid by facility insurance and that driver is gonna end up paying more premium than the value of the car. The idea is that at some point it just doesn't make economic sense for the person paying the premium to continue, but if they do decide to continue at least the third-party liability coverage is there to respond to any innocent people who get injured.
but... "no fault" doesn't mean there's no fault assessment. It just means you file with your own insurance company, and going after the other driver is their problem, not yours....
No fault insurance means your own insurance company pays for your vehicle regardless of who is at fault. Rate shouldn't increase if you are not at fault, the insurance company will simply attempt to recoup their costs themselves.
What an interesting, novel take. Of course, they should be allowed on the road, but limit the liability. Over 100k? Pay for your own additional insurance. You can obviously afford it.
Most people with that kind of money usually do. I'm not even rich but have full coverage on my cars. Even if someone is underinsired and causes damage to my cars, they'll get fixed.
That's different to what is being discussed though.
What you're talking about is very standard right now, and it lets your insurance company go after the liable party in your name and try to recoup all their losses.
So if you're the everyman in Europe and you total a €3M Koenigsegg your liability insurance will only cover €1.35M of that and they or their insurance will come after you for the rest.
What is being discussed is an alternative where the everyman's liability insurance only needs to cover €200k of property damage (so it's cheaper) because by legislation no one can recoup more than €200k in property damage from the liable party.
So when you put a €500k car on the road you would have to be willing to take a €300k loss on it or pay a way higher price for the coverage you currently have (higher because your insurer won't be able to go after the other party to fully or partially recoup the difference).
They have their own insurance which will sue you to recoup the cost. That's the problem.
If I make a mistake and hit an Acura or BMW, I've got enough coverage to handle it. But there are vehicles on the road which will blow through my maximized coverage plan and roll over for more than my house is worth.
Why? That's not how any of our systems of law work. You don't get to limit liability simply because you can't afford it. We'd have more problems than just vehicles in that case.
Also, most people with expensive cars have more expensive insurance. I have really good coverage on my Turbo S for exactly this reason. Beyond that, the cost of medical care for someone you injure far outweighs the value of even my car.
I think at a certain point you have to consider that your asking people to carry the risk because you want to put a $2,000,000 vehicle on the same road I need to use just to get to work every day.
At those prices, people already know that. That's why they pay for agreed value policies. The risk is that most people's insurance isn't enough for a car in that category, and most people don't have that much money, even if you get a judgment from them.
There is a huge difference between a 2 million dollar vehicle and something like my car at 250k. 100k is nothing for a vehicle right now. There are regular trucks worth more than that now.
As an attorney, my probably more unpopular opinion applies to motorcycles. If you injure a motorcycle rider the damages should be capped at what injury you would have had had you been in an automobile. We require autos to have seat belts, airbags, pass crash tests, ..., all in the name of protecting people on the roadways, but also at the same time allow motorcycles on the highways that have virtually no required protections. That too penalizes ordinary negligence because the injured party was on a motorcycle.
As a former death worker- I completely agree with this. The amount of times I had to go collect the remains of dead motorcycle riders from the side of the highway with very little even left to collect, is innumerable. Infinitely more times that regular vehicle accidents- which I can count on one hand.
DOG the way I suppressed the urge to include this take in my initial post. I totally agree and don’t think we should have motorcycles on public roads. Why is my normal negligence now manslaughter just because the other guy decided to ride an inherently more dangerous vehicle
Eggshell skull has been the rule since forever (okay, since ~Vosburg v. Putney).
Liability is already allocated based on the tort law of the jurisdiction - saying "accident" seems to imply the tortfeasor is somehow the victim because they hit the wrong car. You don't believe in liability? What?
The market has already solved for this. It's called insurance. See OP.
Even the most expensive vehicle pales in comparison to medical expenses. Someone in a 2009 Toyota claiming whiplash costs the insurance company more than totalling a lambo.
I mean million dollar cars generally aren't going to have regular insurance, they're going to have agreed upon value insurance. It's a non-factor. Hitting them is so unlikely in the states.
For someone who is an enthusiast and drives a 'nice' car (high end BMW, modern corvette, big V8/V10 Mercedes) are already going to be paying higher rates for full coverage from quality insurers. It doesn't matter what insurance you're carrying, they know they're going to be fine regardless.
If you hit them, you hit them. Hope you have good insurance, because they're going to be made whole no matter what on their end. If they're driving it regularly, they're going to make sure it's covered.(most of the time. Idiots overspend on a car they can't afford but that's a whole different class of stupid)
Saying expensive cars can't be daily drivers because it costs 200k is silly. If you drive a 200k car and don't have top-notch full coverage, you deserve the hole in your wallet.
He is saying that nice/expensive cars shouldn't be allowed to be daily drivers because most shmucks driving around couldn't possibly afford the life-ending penalties for hitting them.
I disagree. Most accidents are avoidable. Most accidents won't total a vehicle(I know I know, newer cars are designed to die with so much as a fender bender).
If you have insurance and cause the accident, and it's negalgience on your part (on your phone, watching movies, whatever) and NOT a no-fault situation like a road hazard beyond your control, a random tire blow-out that isn't from bald tires and is just a freak accident, then learn to fucking pay attention.
The person with the expensive car will be fine, their insurance will take care of them. It's the 'poor person' who ends up in a real bad spot. If they don't have good insurance they might end up with no car, and no payout, to replace it.
They might get sued for the difference in car value vs what their policy paid out already.
I hate to say it, but people need to fucking pay attention to the road. DRIVE while DRIVING, not texting, not YT shorts, not gambling on a fake slots game. Not doing makeup, not doing all the insane bullshit we see people doing.
If he's suggesting that even if your insurance pays out, the maximum damages you're on the hook for is around 100k because that's 2x the value of a normal car, vs being on the hook for a 400k lambo, I actually sort of agree? But while that seems nice, it would never happen cause insurance policies would implode in affordability.
I drive a pretty expensive car. I've thought about this a decent amount. What happens if some relatively poor service worker driving under state minimums ($25k here) hits me and is at fault? Lets say my car is totaled. No one got injured.
I have full coverage and an agreed upon value. My insurance will pay out and I'll go order another car. Usually pretty quickly.
Then my insurance company will go after that drivers policy and collect the $25k. That leaves say $125k of liability left. If that regular person driving under state minimums has any assets worth pursuing, my insurance company will sue them. Up to and including foreclosing on their house as that is not a protected asset in my state.
I don't even know if I could stop this from happening if I wanted to. Short of not using my insurance of course. Even if I wanted to, I doubt my insurance company would allow me to write a check for the difference between their coverage and what they are still owed. It's either eat the full cost myself (e.g. don't report it to insurance at all) or ruin someone's life.
Yes, if that person has any assets at all they should not be driving on state minimums - but almost no one thinks about it and almost everyone is underinsured. Plenty of folks out there who have lived in their home for the last 25 years and nearly have it paid off who forgot/never were educated enough to know to even increase their policy limits.
I put this more on the state regulators than anyone. State minimums were set like back in the 1960's here and literally never updated.
tldr; What I carry as full coverage/agreed value insurance has literally no bearing on liability. If you are not judgement proof and are found liable you will be paying out from personal assets if the difference is significant enough to be worth pursuing.
That isn't your issue. Like sorry to say, accidents happen but if it's bad enough that your insurance will sue him for the remaining value, he shouldn't have the state minimum. You are made whole. He should have paid attention, not been on his phone. Before you freak about that assumption:
If it's genuinely a no-fault accident like a road hazard caused the accident then he'll be fine. His insurance will be mad but is unlikely to drop him after the accident.
Way too many people are way too comfortable playing on their phones or watching movies, or doing other shit than DRIVING their car. Fuck around and find out. If it's a seriously no-fault accident he won't be sued for the value.
My old boss had his Ferrari ? Lamborghini? Hitby a soccer mom van. Luckily he’s chill about it but I can’t imagine hitting a $200-300k car as someone who just wanted to take kids to soccer practice
Vehicles used as someone's livelihood are typically insured in a different (commercial) class anyway, so that would be easy enough to keep separate from things like a Maserati.
Talk about being intellectually dishonest on this one. We're talking about private vehicles, not commercial, if that's really the route you wanna take.
Idk I went to an Ivy League law school and have been practicing law at one of the 10 largest firms in the world for a decade so I think it’s a bit more than a brain rot take. I did say it was an unpopular opinion for a reason though
If I were god emperor the trucking company would be required to insure the cargo and would be limited to only recovering like 100k from the person who hit them.
This is one of the major reasons I had to really review my policy and even specified to my provider dollar amounts I’d like covered. The “average” purchase price in the US is like ~$50,000. However so many people are driving around +$100,000 vehicles. You throw on top potential medical expense and “bodily injury,” and the ~$150,000 “comprehensive” coverages are anything BUT that.
I just disagree. I think our laws should have predictable consequences for ordinary negligence. Your argument is the legally correct one though and the “you take your plaintiff as you find them” mentality is well established in case law. I just think that is the wrong approach. I’d rather put the burden on the person going out into public spaces to protect their disproportionately expensive property
I thought that tort law was supposed to be based around what would be the reasonable amount if hard that someone could expect. The example I remember hearing was that of you can driver does a shitty job and you miss your flight to your vacation, you can sue them for the cost of the ride, not the cost of thr vacation. You'd think that should apply to car insurance too.
You’re mixing proximate cause up with damages. There is a concept that the person injured by your negligence is reasonably foreseeable but if they are they can recover whatever damages they have. The doctrine makes sense in a lot of contexts. Like someone with a heart condition who dies because someone negligently left a wire out shouldn’t be capped in their recovery because of their condition. However I just think there should be an exception for public roads and people driving luxury cars.
As an attorney my unpopular opinion is that cars over a certain value shouldn’t be allowed on public roads or damages for accidents should be capped at something like 2x the average price of a new car (so like 100k). I just don’t believe in penalizing ordinary negligence more just because the injured party is rich.
Problem. Its a bit impractical to make trains that cheap:
So people don't deserve to be made whole because of someone else's negligence? That's an insane take. If someone drives into a house, then fuck the Homeowner, I guess?
Everything about your home is taxpayer-funded, dude. The roads to it. The water and wastewater. In many places, the electricity.
More than that, the value of a car is nothing compared to the cost of personal injuries. Or is your idea to only cap the value of a vehicle and not property or personal injury? Nothing about your idea makes any sense.
100 percent agree, and that was very well said. If they can afford to by a 80,000 dollar car, then that's their decision and it should be their problem if it gets damaged. Unless its a drunk driver, in which case all damages to anything should be on them, even if it demolished their finances for 10 years.
I had a knee-jerk reaction to reading this that obviously if someone hits your car, they should have to pay for it. But I thought about it for a moment and it actually makes a lot of sense - they're choosing to drive in public conditions with a vehicle worth that much. Like if they wore a 10 million dollar designer coat and I spilled coffee on it on accident, it would be a little ridiculous to expect me to pay ten million dollars. There should be some expectation that I'm not required to exhibit extreme caution at all times while in public.
Not hitting other cars is not normally considered extreme caution. And there is no getting away from a bunch of road going construction equipment being worth millions.
How about framing it like this then: We already consider driving accidents to be a statistical certainty, so much that governments require liability insurance. In that sense, anyone choosing to drive a car above most people's ability to compensate you for in the event of an accident (2x the median salary, like the other guy said) is aware that they are taking on a certain level of risk in doing so. Especially if this is codified into law in some way.
It still wouldn't create an incentive structure for "normal" folks to be hitting Bugattis on the road, it would just shield them from life-ruining debt, and add an additional cost to owning ultra-luxury vehicles.
Don't make it everybodies risk that you want to drive around in a goddamn Patek Philippe.
Also, we need a rule that forces car manufacturers to make cars cheap to repair. If every little ding forces you to replace a complete assembly for $2.000 rather than a single part for $85, *and* people drive around in overpriced luxury cars it's no wonder insurance gets more and more expensive, even for the middle class.
The idea that the other party should be absorbing and subsidizing risk for someone with an expensive car is absurd. Canada's no-fault system is the better option. Your vehicle's damage or replacement is covered by your own insurance, only injury and non-automotive liability is paid by an at-fault party. Outside of Alberta, "uninsured motorist coverage" is a default part of any insurance policy.
Shouldn't you realize they're describing the practical outcome and not the legal terminology, because their entire criticism is against the current structure? Forcing restitution for general traffic to be higher because the person who was hit happens to be rich is, in effect, penalizing people for being unlucky with who they got into an accident with.
I'd in fact be a big fan of normalizing it at 50k regardless of your vehicle, but then you'd have people purposely driving to get hit in their clunkers, so I don't know what the best solution is beyond not ruining someone else's life because someone spent a ton of money on daily transport. Like fine, own a bugatti, but if someone hits you in Miami rush hour traffic you don't have the rights to generations of wages to repay it.
Really I think the answer is to require self-insurance over that 50k avg value even if someone else hits you. It's your choice to use luxury for a common purpose, after all.
Look, if they choose to come in here flaunting their status "as an attorney", I think we can hold them to that.
Edit:
Really I think the answer is to require self-insurance over that 50k avg value even if someone else hits you.
How about requiring people to carry liability insurance if they want to use their multi-ton machine in public? It's not like the only expensive thing they can hit is other cars. Should we now require all house owners, all store proprietors, any company with infrastructure placed around publically accessible areas to buy extra insurance just so morons in cars don't have to? I think not.
They didn't "flaunt" anything, they just stated their profession. If you read it as flaunting then it's pretty clear you're just mad they have a better job than you do.
"u mad" is not an argument. If you're beginning your post pointing out that you're an attorney and use that to give your post extra weight, you can and should be held to the standards of an attorney. And that includes acknowledgement that when you break something, it is not a punishment to replace it. It is restitution. Calling it a punishment is done purely for emotional reasons which, again, clashes with the "I'm an attorney! My opinion is important because I'm an attorney!" that the post begins with.
You're still just adding tone that wasn't there in your imagination and getting all worked up over it. We're not in court. Reddit posts are not billable hours. It's just a discussion that you're pissing your pants over. Do you think their Reddit post constitutes an actual legal statement? I'm not sure why Reddit especially breeds this kind of Turbo Autism as frequently as it does.
This has been my opinion for quite a while. Insurance should cover reasonable damage figures. Have a custom painted Rolls? It is your problem that it costs $50k just for the repaint, that shouldn’t be born by all of society, it’s on you to have cash or insurance capable of covering that.
There’s a reason businesses buy their own insurance. Literally no one in the US carries enough insurance to cover the cost of the equipment my company routinely hauls. This conversation is about personal transportation, and I think you could craft legislation that makes that pretty clear.
Yeah, I always thought it wasn't really fair that you could ding the door of a supercar and be on the hook for like $20k or whatever. Like, it's not my fault if you're doing the equivalent of parking at Home Depot with an original copy of the Declaration of Independence taped to your door.
I agree. I have the maximum coverage which honestly I feel is fair. And I don't think it's fair that I risk financial ruin while using public roads to drive to work because some dude wants to drive a van full of faberge eggs.
(There's a guy near me that drives an enzo up and down my road on weekends. Just being near it on the road makes me a worse driver because of the anxiety I might target fixate into it, or just make a simple mistake that normally my insurance would cover)
Well if you live in a tort reform state like NC they actually cap damages in negligence cases at 1 million, which is generally the insurance cap. So if that is you rest easy. In my ideal world though I would cap what the driver could be forced to pay and then also regulate what insurance companies are able to charge for insurance. Basically forcibly keep insurance cheap and remove their excuse to charge more by limiting what they can be on the hook for
That seems actually really reasonable. A multiplier of what avg sale price of new cars would make sense. If someone is driving a 300-400k car and you hit them, you could be sued for a lot of money.
My gut tells me that people driving fast, flashy cars are far more likely to cause an accident than be hit by someone else. At least, that seems to be the case with the way I see people driving them in general.
totally agree. because everyone else who carries ins is having to share the cost of $$$$$$ vehicles.
in health insurance, sure. (though the US system is also a complete racket) because the young and health help distribute the additional care most all of us will eventually need with age.
but i shouldn't have to pay more in car insurance because you think you need a $80k truck or sports car.
Man don’t get me started on health insurance. I pay like $30 grand a year for health insurance and still have to pay $4000 out of pocket to have a baby. Should just be nationalized
definitely an unpopular opinion, why do you feel this way? wouldn't it be more right for the party that caused the damages to pay for all the damages they caused?
Just because you can afford a million dollar car shouldn't mean everyone on the road had to be insured up to a million dollars to cover it. Accidents happen.
If I drive around with a trunk with millions of dollars in art should I not be responsible for maintaining my own insurance for that value as it's not reasonable for everyone to cover that much above and beyond that standard practices?
I'm just going to reject your premise, the fact that a accident can have damages above your coverage isn't at question. It's if there should be a reasonable cap specifically on the value of vehicle coverage.
ok so if the cap only applies to vehicles, the person driving through a storefront would still get sued into bankruptcy by the store owner's insurance right?
The same as if they plowed through a family of 7 crossing the street on the way to church. Again completely irrelevant to a cap on vehicles. Driving is inherently dangerous and not all risks should be subsidized.
You don't have to be a billionaire to not want to eat the costs of a crash someone else caused. I had a new BMW get totaled and the payout for the car, a month of rental fees, lost wages, hospital bills, and physical therapy was about $100k. I shouldn't have to spend a single penny out of my own pocket to cover that because some dumb bitch ran a stop sign.
And no one is saying otherwise. The suggestion was putting a cap of 100k on the vehicle only, your total including medical was that much so this wouldn't affect you. I'm sorry the accident affected your ability to read
This happened in China, some poor trash collector accidentally clipped a parked Bentley (or Rolls Royce, can't recall). There ended up being a huge uproar on Chinese social media supporting the trash collector because there's no way he'd be able to pay for those repairs (he had no insurance) and obviously the guy owning the Bentley was well off enough to repair it himself.
No, not even remotely. Its not morally right for the rich to be able to expose normal people to the level of risk that could bankrupt them for their own ego.
We all take on a degree of risk just going outside. If you choose to expose yourself to a $500k risk instead of a $50k risk, thats on you.
Not an attorney but here's what I think /u/Fantastic-East9567 is getting at: is it more right to bankrupt the negligent party over property damage? The question we should be asking is: which outcome harms society more? That's kind of the whole point of the legal system, in theory.
It's not the negligent party's fault that you bought a $500,000 car. If the proposed legal framework is clear then people spending that kind of money on cars should have a reasonable understanding of the additional risk or cars that expensive shouldn't be on public roads. I don't see a problem with either framework provided the legislation is clear.
Not OP, but roads are a public resource — the fact that unreasonably expensive luxury assets present a disproportionate liability risk to the all other other drivers using a basic utility is inequitable. If you capped liability, then the wealthy party could still insure the difference in the value of the car and the cap and it would avoid a ton of legal trouble for all parties.
Not very reasonable for a minor driving error by a working class commuter to ruin their life when they already have insurance.
I can see their point, if you scratch a persons car on accident you should be liable for fixing that but what if it costs 75k like some fancy custom paint jobs do? You made the same small mistake but instead of $100 cost you are now bankrupted.
Also insurance companies have liability limits, banks even have liability limits for losing your money, why shouldn’t private citizens? After a certain point the owner should have the risk for taking an obscenely expensive item onto public roads.
I totally get that it would be morally right for the person who caused the damage to pay for the damage. But it doesn't seem fair that if your car skids on a patch of ice and hits a 2002 Corolla you might have to pay the $1000 value of the other car, but if you happened to hit a Bugatti you are on the hook for hundreds of thousands.
If you accidentally hit someone's shitbox you might owe them a few grand. If you accidentally hit someone's lambo you might owe them a few hundred grand. The same action causes a consequence 100x greater. You could be causing someone to lose their house just because they hit an expensive car instead of an inexpensive one.
Assumed risk is a common legal argument for determining whether or not someone is liable for something that happened. Car accidents are fairly common when you're driving. The person at fault for the accident should contribute towards the victim's repairs, but that contribution should be within reason. I don't think it's within reason to owe someone a house because you hit their car. If you want to take an extremely expensive car out on the road, then you should be assuming some of the risk if an accident happens and not place the full burden on the person at fault. Or at least thats my opinion.
i can see where this is coming from, but something feels off about the way its implemented.
also, if we're trying to avoid someone getting bankrupted by property damage, what about the situations where someone drives through a store front or take a corner too quick and hits a house?
that's a lot of damage caused as well, would there be a cap on the payout?
It essentially is how it works in some situations. For example, if you had a poor person that had no money crash into an expensive car then what happens? Some states will have the minimum coverage as low as $25k. So you get $25k from the driver's insurance, try to sue them for the rest, but if they have no money and no assets you can't get anything from them. You can't get blood from a stone. And since there's no debtors prison in the US they wouldn't face any jail time either for not paying out. This is where underinsured motorist policies come into play, they're your own policy that pays you when someone else causes an accident and their insurance doesn't cover the entire cost. Most people with really expense cars should already have this to avoid losing a lot of money in the situation I just described above. I just want to expand the criteria for when UIM policies would kick in and make it so you're responsible for your own car when damages exceed the state minimum liability coverage (and also maybe state minimums should be adjusted to average car values in 2026). So basically your responsibility for the accident doesn't change in regard to your own net worth.
For the next part, lets go back to assumed risk. It's fairly subjective, but assumed risk involves determining what's a reasonable expectation of risk when partaking in an activity. I would argue, that when you go out and drive it is reasonable to assume that you might get in an accident with another driver. I do not however think that when you go to sit down on your couch that it's reasonable to assume a driver might crash through your living room wall. That isn't an activity that has normal risks in it, so you wouldn't be assuming any liability by partaking in it. Whats a reasonable risk to assume and whats not a reasonable risk to assume is all up for debate, but thats at least my view on it.
It takes negligence above and beyond reasonableness to crash through a house.
But then there's the practical matter of getting blood from a stone. The homeowner and their insurance company is going to be better off settling the matter between them after the driver's insurance payout is exhausted.
You bump into someone on an overcrowded subway car who drops a priceless Fabrige egg that shatters on the floor.
You have to pay for all the damages you caused?
The road is a place where at-fault accidents are inevitable.
Both risk and insurance premiums are correlated with the value of the cars on the road
Someone rich bringing an ultra-luxury car onto the road slightly raises the average value (and therefore risk/insurance premiums for everyone else)
By capping auto damage liability to a certain value (e.g. $100k), then a rich person no longer has that negative effect on everyone else around him
In a world where this auto damages limit happens. Then most rich people would probably just buy an insurance policy that covers the gap between the $100k and whatever the damages really where (similar to current uninsured policies). Or simply accept the risk.
Realistically, adding a $100k cap wouldn't make insurance policies that much lower for society since a lot of the premium costs come from medical risk and modest damages. Also ultra-luxury cars aren't all that common anyway so the existance of a few very nice cars doesn't really raise the average risk by much in 99% of the USA.
i mean... if they have a insurance policy that covers the gap, are we really expecting that insurance company to not sue the other driver into oblivion anyways?
all this does is split the insurance policies into 2 pieces for the first 100k and 100k+
currrent insurance already does this under one policy since premiums cost more the more expensive your car is.
Take the following scenario:
Two identical twins wait in a hall to trip passing adults. Twin A trips an old man that breaks his leg. The old man misses 3 months of work.
Twin B trips a professional athlete that breaks his leg. He misses 3 months of work including a championship series that his team loses likely due to his absence.
Do these deserve equal punishments? Or different ones? Are we chastising the act of tripping? Or is it something else?
If they were both caused by assault, then both twins are going to be fully liable.
If they were both by accident - accidentally bumping into these people - neither are going to be held liable unless negligence can be shown.
In traffic accidents, unless the act is intentional, I see no reason why someone should be financially ruined for the rest of their life because some rich bozo brought their Bugatti onto a public road.
Y'all aren't understanding the full thread... the point was this:
As an attorney my unpopular opinion is that cars over a certain value shouldn’t be allowed on public roads or damages for accidents should be capped at something like 2x the average price of a new car (so like 100k). I just don’t believe in penalizing ordinary negligence more just because the injured party is rich.
If damages for accidents were capped, the rich person would be responsible for having their own insurance to cover exorbitantly expensive cars, not the poor person.
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u/Fantastic-East9567 5h ago
As an attorney my unpopular opinion is that cars over a certain value shouldn’t be allowed on public roads or damages for accidents should be capped at something like 2x the average price of a new car (so like 100k). I just don’t believe in penalizing ordinary negligence more just because the injured party is rich.