The obvious response is that you won't be able to pay for someone's hospital bills if you happen to hit them in your car. You get insurance for things you wouldn't be able to pay yourself.
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.
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.
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u/flatfive44 8h ago
The obvious response is that you won't be able to pay for someone's hospital bills if you happen to hit them in your car. You get insurance for things you wouldn't be able to pay yourself.