Car accidents (and unmanned vehicles). But mostly car accidents.

I’m not sure you read my full post there. Take away the hassle of driving, and more people will drive. Or, should I say more cars on the road as “driver” is no longer needed? It really is that simple. Autonomous driving may very well be a technological revolution, but I don’t think it is going to be the one you are expecting.

I’m certainly not saying self driving cars won’t happen. At some point I am pretty sure they will. Then what? Congestion that makes every day look like the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. And people will get used to it because now they are just sitting and watching things on their phone. Which is what they would be doing anyways, only now when they’re done they’re at some place the wanted or needed to be at.

My prediction is that in five years we’ll still be saying self-driving cars are five years out. Depending on LIDAR and special maps means your car isn’t smart enough for the real world. The best current self-driving cars (Waymo) require human intervention to make a left-turn in traffic when there is no light. This isn’t a tweak away; it requires a whole layer of intelligence that the self-driving companies have barely started on. Companies whose business model depends on self-driving (Uber) will try to solve this with a call-center model: when a car gets stuck, it will call for manual intervention, and some schmoe in a call center will try and resolve the driving conundrum via remote control. This will almost certainly result in a terrible passenger experience, and will be hugely stressful for the call-center employees, who will have a non-linear succession of only the most stressful elements of daily driving to contend with.

Even the commuter buses (15 mph max speed, fixed route, dedicated lane) are years short of going mainstream. Probably every child who is already born is going to need to learn to drive.

Well, if we’re really at the point of autonomous vehicles and simple robotics, I would think this would look more like:

Home - grocery store sends a little robot vehicle to you with groceries to offload.
Grandma - Taco Bell sends grandma a little robot vehicle with Taco Bell to offload.
Home - JC Penny’s sends a little robot vehicle with whatever the hell one buys at JC Penny’s. (Or, in other words, Amazon, but better.)

It’s getting freaky.

  • Early this morning Rebecca texted my wife who referred Rebecca to me. I asked her for her insurance info and her assessment of what happened in the accident. Basically she blames my kid. I told Rebecca I intended to hand it off to our insurance.

  • We spoke to our insurance agent this morning. She says we don’t have to file a claim at this point and to just break contact. We reviewed all the potential things that might happen, including small claims court or Rebecca filing an insurance claim against us.

  • Rebecca calls me and leaves angry voicemail or sends texts in ALL CAPS. Rebecca has a tone of voice she uses to talk to us and another tone that she uses to talk to her partner, Terry. We’re getting the kinder version of Rebecca. At one point, I’m sure she thought she’d hung up, she said something vulgar to Terry (in reference to us) to clarify his questions about whether she’d made a particular demand of us. She said, I told the motherfuckers! I feel a little bit bad, because she has this panicky tone to her voice. And Terry sounds like an angry jerk. I’m glad they don’t have our personal information.

  • She has threatened to escalate to the police. She’s texting and calling my wife. I asked my wife to block her.

  • We have the estimate from the body shop, which has their personal information. Someone may have gone down there and driven past slowly in a car that wasn’t involved in the accident. Someone else may have rolled his eyes so hard when he got the text establishing this, said eyes almost fell from his head. That’s like some shit that happens in a horror movie where you’re yelling at the screen, Don’t do that? WTF!

These people don’t sound… stable. I mean the cars are damaged, but no one was really hurt, or at least they’re not making a claim about that… yet. This is not eve close to a terrible accident so much as terrible incident.

Haha, I changed the title because the old title was making me feel like a dumbass each time the reply toast popped up. I don’t know what the heck most of you guys are even talking about.

Truth!

This accident has captured my weekend and stolen hours from my life I will never get back.

If you hadn’t had a chance to get one of those envelopes or fold-ups for your daughter that tell you what to do in the event of an accident, it might be a good time to go over that. Insurance companies often provide those with step by step instructions.

It seems like no duh, but when panic sets in it helps to have a guide, especially the line that says never discuss fault with the others involved.

Huh. Thanks! I didn’t even know they said that or that they had those, but it makes perfect sense to do both (have them and give that advice).

Bare minimum. They have better pocket guides you can keep in the glove department to go down the list of all the info you want, but my insurance company sends me this every year.

image

And the guides don’t just tell you to exchange information, they tell you what to exchange, DL #, insurance policy, car make and model, year, that sort of thing.

This sounds more like a dispute with a land lord over a security deposit than a liability claim. There maybe some legal principles and actual moneys owed, but the sheer skeeviness of the other party is overwhelming the other elements.

Anyways, you talked to your insurance agent. Wait for them to file a claim, or maybe Rebecca doesn’t have insurance and is worried about the legal implications and won’t file an actual claim, hence the crazy contacts.

If I were you, at this point I’d be welcoming police involvement.
Yeah, I’d totally be breaking contact with these people, and letting the authorities and insurance companies handle everything from this point forward. If questions need to be asked of you or your daughter, your insurance company should be the ones doing the asking, not the other party.

I cringe to think what would have happened if you had gone for their initial off-the-books “settlement” of $700 or $800 without involving a police report or your insurance company, and then a year later Rebecca or Terry decides they have a headache and blame it on a bad neck or back injury caused by that accident. Because you didn’t involve any officials, you’d be left wide open for some real Jerry Springer-like misery.

Cease all contact with them. Let your insurance company’s lawyers talk with them instead. That’s what you’re paying them for. And in my past experience, they’re good at what they do, and I barely needed to be involved at all other than answering a few questions put to me by my insurance company.

In other words, it’s impossible to say what Rebecca’s motivations truly are, but you need to make damn sure your ass is covered, because I’m just gonna guess that you have more to lose than they do.

This will be an interesting problem for sure. In large metropolitan areas at least traffic is elastic, it fills demand up to a certain point of tolerance. It’s why LA stopped expanding some roads, because traffic just filled it up no matter what they built. The limit was people’s frustration with traffic times.

Automated cars I think will allow for a vastly increased road capacity. People are stupid and bad drivers in aggregate and terrible at using the roads in an optimal fashion. What I am not sure about is how elastic demand will fill up the increased capacity with automation and how it will compete with human drivers. That’s kind of a wild card in terms of gains, if we removed humans I think the gains in capacity would incredible, but with humans still driving who knows.

Tell her you have no objection to that. Then give her your insurance info (again) and tell her not to call you anymore or you will contact the police.

A lot of good advice has been given here, already. I’ll add a bit of general info that a lot of people don’t know:

A police officer doesn’t determine whose fault an accident is. Getting a cop to agree with your version of events is meaningless when it comes to an insurance claim. The cop is there to do a few very specific things:

  1. determine if emergency services are needed; either an ambulance for someone involved or a tow to clear the road for other drivers
  2. cite someone if they broke a law or ordinance (in an accident, typically at least one party has - including the common “failure to control your vehicle”). If one party is cited and the other isn’t, this may be used by insurance companies to help determine fault. However, keep in mind that someone getting a ticket isn’t immediately guilty. They either have to pay the ticket or appear in court for that to be useful.
  3. take statements and then file a report. This report may then be used by insurance companies and/or lawyers. However, the police officer isn’t a super detective who’s going to match tread marks, retrieve your car’s “black box,” etc… That’s something for lawyers and insurance companies if they’re really wanting to investigate further (9/10 times they don’t).

If the above items are of value to you, call the cops. If they aren’t, don’t.

However, you ALWAYS want to call your insurance company. Worried about your rates going up? Yeah, that can happen. However, unless you’re exceptionally well-prepared and gather the appropriate authorizations, any settlement outside of insurance won’t stop them from filing a claim later on. For instance, imagine you hit someone:

You: “Oh, #$@&!!!”
Them: “Eh, I’m okay and it doesn’t look so bad. I’ll tell you what; I’ve got a buddy who can bang this out for $500, no insurance needed. Sound good?”
You: {relieved} “Yeah, sure!”

A week later, you get notice from your insurance company that he made a claim against your coverage. Not only are your rates going up, but you’re also out the $500. What’s worse, your company may deny the claim if you didn’t report it to them in a timely manner and then you’re potentially on the hook for everything (the victim would then have to prove you’re liable in court, but even if they fail to do so, that’s going to cost you additional time and money).

The only time I wouldn’t file a claim? If I had the only vehicle involved or, arguably, when a close friend/family member is involved (to be clear, things can go south REAL quick, so I’d still normally file one).

And yet we mostly consider the internet ubiquitous, including it’s many services. I think this “it won’t work in rural areas” argument is pretty soundly defeated by history. Who cares if the 20% in rural areas stick with traditional vehicles?

5 years sounds a bit aggressive to me from a tech point of view, but if you read the early reviews of the iPhone, Uber, Airbnb, etc they often say it’s nice but too gimmicky to be mainstream. I’ve learned to be very open about just how rapidly people might adopt these technologies that seem scary today for convenience.

I’d be surprised if it takes more than 10 years to be common (I.e. standard in all taxis and buses, some private vehicles) and 20 years to totally replace all private vehicles in urban areas. Once it is proven it seems likely that preferences and liability/insurance will accelerate adoption about as fast or faster than the historic fleet replacement rate.

The fact that we “mostly consider the Internet ubiquitous,” despite large swaths of the country not having reliable high-speed access, is not a good thing. It points to the inherent elitism of the technofuturists, and is one huge symptom of exactly the forces that brought about Trumpism. Endorsing technologies that are, by definition, likely to further isolate more than a fifth of the country and deepen their distrust of and loathing for the other four-fifths is not a recipe for progress however you define it.

Autonomous vehicles are certainly here to stay, and in urban areas and along some megacity corridors they make a hell of a lot of sense. For the huge numbers of people in the USA living where there is little to no reliable infrastructure, even visible friggin’ lane markers for goodness sakes, and where distances are great and living areas are separated from work places by such distances, largely because it’s too expensive to live closer, autonomous vehicles will not only not be terribly attractive, I fear they will actively hinder the opportunities of a lot of people. They won’t be able to get jobs in places that won’t allow personal vehicles, because, surprise, their only way to get there is via their personal vehicle. Given the glacial pace at which any sort of public transit worthy of the name has been rolled out to even major suburbs, the chances of rural folks getting any viable alternative to their personal autos is pretty low.

One time I got rear ended in the rain. It rains here like 50% of the time in the summer so people are usually pretty good about driving in it, but I hear the whoosh-squealing of hydroplaning tires and then impact. We drive off the road and quickly exchange insurance information. She’s in an older SUV (explorer I think) and she has pretty much no damage. My trunk is completely caved in since her bumper is higher than mine. She says she wants the cops to come. I say, it’s a rear end collision, insurance isn’t going to care about whatever happened and the cop on the phone is saying they’ll come when they can, which means forever from now. She insists. So I sit there for an hour talking to her a little but mostly just playing on my phone, taking the next day off work, and telling my wife what happened. Finally the cop arrives and we tell him what happened. And he tickets her. And she says to him with all of the sincerity that an older, honest southern woman can muster (you know how sweet and innocent they can be), that she was braking. “I was braking! I stopped like I normally would! But the car just kept sliding, it wasn’t my fault!”

I think that was her plan. The cop would go, “hey, you really tried, I guess it was the rain’s fault. Move along, little lady.”

You were very generous but I guess she had you over a barrel too. I can kind of relate to her just not getting how things work, grasping at straws. This is how it works? My God!

Thus she shows her ignorance. If it’s raining you don’t stop, or drive, like you normally would. Do take the slick road into account and react accordingly. She essentially admitted to being in the wrong.