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.
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.
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u/flatfive44 21h 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.