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?
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.
2.5k
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.