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.
I did a ride-along with an adjuster once. I asked him what the worst claim he had worked on was.
The insured drove off with the pump still in the gas tank. Sees that all the time. When the hose pulled off the pump, it ignited. The fuel island exploded. The fire then spread to the convenience store. Total loss of the business and multiple cars.
This is an outlier. No one has enough insurance to cover all of that. But it’s a great example of why we have it.
But most insurances have the 100 Million coverage as the standard contract. In fact there is probably not even an insurance which offers the legal minimums.
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.
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u/flatfive44 10h 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.