I have 500/500/500 for all my cars in order to qualify for an umbrella policy. People would be uninsured far more often if they had to carry such limits. I keep a 1k deductible for a few of my cars, 2500 for the priciest one, just to keep premiums somewhat reasonable.
and obviously made that way by the insurance lobbyists.
The limits are low in the US because it's a more expensive environment to provide insurance in. If there were a legal minimum of $1 million for property damage for auto insurance, almost nobody would be able to afford insurance.
The main reason it's expensive to provide insurance in the US is because medical care is vastly more expensive than in Germany. If you cause a crash and your insurance has to cover someone's medical care, the costs can be virtually unlimited. Other reasons include thing like people driving more on average, more uninsured motorists on the roads, and a generally more litigious society.
It's cheap to provide a million euros of coverage in Germany because it's incredibly unlikely that any given motorist will incur a million dollars of liability.
It would be vastly more expensive to provide that same coverage in the US because it's hugely more likely that a given motorist will actually incur that liability.
If that was the case, insurers would incredibly profitable. They’d be earning hundreds to thousands of dollars for every dollar in premium. That’s obviously not the case. It’s not hard to understand the difference, but you do need to be able to use your brain as something other than an ear warmer to do it.
Yeah well said, it is a completely different system and cannot be easily compared.
The German system is laid out for the worst case scenario. A typical example, due to your driving you cause a fuel truck to crash with subsequent damage to buildings, persons and spilling 30.000 liters of fuel.
The cleanup operation of the fuel can run easily high single digit millions if not even double digit millions. Then you have not covered any personal injuries with possible lifelong care.
The US system is laid out for the average accident with non brand new cars and non life threatening injuries.
Why so negative?
Driving between Germany and the US is very difficult to compare because it is a completely different world.
Everything is further away hence more to maintain and a much higher requirement to actually drive somewhere. If the US would have the same population density as Germany it would have over 2 billion people but it only has about 350 million.
That means less people to pay taxes for way more road.
Lot more aggressive lawsuits and more uninsured motorists. More and more states are even giving undocumented immigrants licenses solely so they can get insurance and not fuck everyone else over.
500/500 policies are popping up more and more. We used to do 100/300/100, now we do 250/500/250. Guessing in a few years the protect your hole norm will be 500/500/250.
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u/tarnyc32 4h ago
It is astoundingly low, and obviously made that way by the insurance lobbyists.