[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by LuisBoston

To add another aspect, and definitely more direct:

There’s yet another reason for the auto-insurance surge: terrible, reckless, angry driving and its multifaceted consequences.

Since the peak of the pandemic, the car-centric lifestyle has gotten far more dangerous. The gun-safety nonprofit Everytown found that by 2022, incidents of road-rage shootings had nearly doubled from 2018. The federal government also measured record spikes in driving fatalities from 2021 to 2022. Even though that increase began to trail off in subsequent years, the sheer number of traffic deaths remains much higher than it was pre-2020. As a New York Times Magazine report noted earlier this year, a rise in aggressive and careless driving habits—speeding, running traffic lights, rushing intersections, driving drunk, refusing to wear a seatbelt—has persisted even as roadways have clogged up again. And drivers are pulling off these horrific trends while seated in bigger and bigger cars, ones which obstruct their vision and tower over smaller vehicles (as well as people).

That, of course, translates into money spent cleaning up the messes. Auto companies have been receiving not just more repair claims on average, but more severe claims overall, as Yahoo Finance has pinpointed. With bodily injuries (both in and outside of the vehicle) occurring alongside car damage, medical and property claims have escalated. Plus, there simply aren’t enough trained mechanics and technicians to carry the load when it comes to the more luxurious, multifaceted vehicles involved in all these crashes and injuries and killings.

Bigger, more dangerous cars that guzzle fuel and are powered by drivers who, carrying rage and bad habits from the COVID era, run rampant over our streets—that’s what’s helping to keep inflation higher these days. There’s only so much the Fed can do about that. So, if consumers are once again feeling pessimistic about the economy, maybe they could start looking at what goes on behind their steering wheels.

https://slate.com/business/2024/04/c...s-driving.html

Pure drivel.