Car insurance rates are surging as Americans struggle to pay for basic necessities and ongoing debt.

Car insurance rates are surging as Americans struggle to pay for basic necessities and ongoing debt.

The newest Consumer Price Index shows car insurance spiked 20 percent year over year. The surge in pricing occurred after years of gradual price inflation, with earlier reports finding the rates grew by 36 percent since 2020.

That’s at the same time debt is soaring for many Americans. While Americans hold around 1.75 trillion in student debt loans alone, they also have $1.05 trillion in credit card balances not paid off.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
    2613·
    1 year ago
    • People insist on driving larger cars, creating more severe accidents.
    • People insist on driving more expensive cars, driving up replacement and repair costs.
    • People insist on outlawing speed cameras and red light cameras, driving up accident rates and severity.
    • People insist on increasing speed limits, increasing accident rates and severity.
    • Roads and merge lanes are poorly designed as governments cut corners. Again, this increases accident rates and severity.
    • States don’t test drivers regularly for competence. This means impaired drivers and poorly skilled drivers remain on the road, causing accidents.
    • Urban police forces no longer enforce traffic laws in many cities, increasing accident rates.
    • Some states are getting rid of car inspections. Which means more cars with bad tires and no headlights and more accidents.

    Add inflation and greedflation, and It’s no wonder insurance rates are higher.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
      37·
      1 year ago

      People insist on outlawing speed cameras and red light cameras, driving up accident rates and severity.

      I can’t speak for your state, but red light cameras started being a great source of revenue from fines, so people started rigidly adhering to them. So this caused two problems.

      1. While there were less T-bone accidents meaning people running red lights and hitting perpendicular traffic, all other types of accidents increased by 18% because people were hard stopping so as not to get fined and getting rear ended. source. So if your point is lower costs because of fewer accidents, Red light cameras increased accidents.

      2. Because people were not running lights anymore, the fines from red light cameras went down. The money was so good that cities got greedy, they started randomly decreasing yellow light times to cause more people to run red lights to increase fines again video source

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
      15·
      1 year ago

      Some of these are valid. But speed cameras do fuck all for safety. They are a private company scam to take money from people

      • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        The better way to go about it is to redesign roadways to force people to slow down. Narrower lanes, trees on each side, no more 6-lane highways through semi-residential and mixed-use areas. And then invest in public transportation so that fewer people even need to drive their own cars.

        But I’m preaching to the choir on Lemmy and hoping for hell to freeze over.

    • psycho_driver@lemmy.world
      61·
      1 year ago

      People insist on driving more expensive cars, driving up replacement and repair costs.

      It’s not like the average US consumer has a say in this. The cheapest car you can drive off a lot is like 25k now. We could have less expensive cars but for half a century we’ve used tariffs to provide an unfair competitive advantage to our domestic motor companies who only took advantage of it to price gouge.

      • stoly@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        You’re missing the part where people spend $80k cars on a loan each five years because they are financially illiterate.

    • joel_feila@lemmy.world
      64·
      1 year ago

      Speed limits dont decrease acidents. They are the most famous example of a safety feature not working

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 year ago

      This list is true and depressing. People in this country should not be running it. It’s a daycare run by children.