cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1247209/all-cars-sold-in-the-eu-now-require-a-camera-aimed-at-your-face-its-still-not-clear-wher
Starting July 7, 2026, every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera aimed at your face. Glance at your phone, your kids in the back seat, or the radio for too long, and the car will flash a warning light and sound an alert.
Automakers have known this was coming for years. What they, and EU regulators, have never spelled out is what happens to that footage after the alert goes off.
While the intention behind the new system is difficult to dispute, its implementation has raised several concerns. Early real-world testing suggests the distraction warnings can be overly sensitive and potentially distracting.
I just want to rant about how dystopian car “insurance” is.
Set aside all the justifications / propaganda you’ve heard about car insurance, and think about how it actually works. You’re legally obligated to pay a corporation for the right to use your vehicle on public roads. What do you get out of it? For the vast majority of people nothing. Even if you get in an accident they’ll do their absolute damnedest not to pay you or to pay you a pittance that you could’ve covered with a fraction of the cumulative fee. That’s basically the text-book definition of a scam. Even if you do have “good” insurance (doubt) they’ll have higher prices due to all the scammy insurance companies. It’s a legally obligate scam – insurance has effectively turned every public road into a toll road.
Frankly, I feel this way about all forms of insurance, so I doubt anyone will take me seriously (It’s not hard to save and invest money, with that the entire notion of insurance kinda falls apart). Still legally obligatory insurance is a particularly disgusting form of oligarchical capture.
Should read up on the history of medical insurance, e.g. blue cross blue shield. The idea was that expensive payouts can happen early on during someone’s coverage, before they have a chance to build up savings. No one wants that to happen to them, so if everybody is in the pool of people who will pay for coverage, that risk is mitigated by being spread over a large group who only need to pay in a little at any time.
Rich people or institutions who can afford to self-insure don’t need insurance.
This original insurance was non-profit. The capitalist insurances are the ones realizing they can choose to only cover people who aren’t likely to need payouts, and profit off of the difference between pay ins and pay outs. I also agree this is a morally dubious system.
This particular example makes me uncomfortable because it implies there’s some circumstance where someone who couldn’t pay the monthly insurance bill would be turned away when they need serious medical attention. Like, I understand the logic of insurance being better than dying here, but it doesn’t really change the underlying logic of the situation being ‘oh they can’t pay we’ll just let them die’.
The government should just cover that with standard taxes. It shouldn’t even be government insurance where everyone is paying in an equal amount to make it ‘fair’. If we have to take more money from rich people than poor people to prevent deaths, just do it. The working class betters everyone. We should be treated well.
The scam in this case where you can’t wait / go without / buy cheaper is more rich people trying to find an excuse to not acknowledge how much the rest of society does for them.
I used to think like you do. “How does this benefit me?”
But as a pedestrian who was hit by an uninsured driver, I can firmly tell you that you have no idea what you are talking about. Driving is not a constitutional right. It’s a privilege that the state gives to you. It’s extremely dangerous for those around you, so limiting the ability to drive very dangerous vehicles to people who are financially responsible isn’t the worst idea. You might even say, “but you can just sue the person who hit you if they don’t have insurance.” The response is to think about the kind of person who can’t afford $100/mo and how much you might be able to squeeze out of them in a lawsuit over $20,000 in repair bills.
Sorry that happened to you, that’s genuinely terrible.
That said, I think you should be angry at the cost of medicine and medical care rather than being angry at all poor people because one acted terribly. We should do everything we can to prevent people from being hit by cars, but I don’t think exploiting poor people for needing to get from one location to another is going to help lower incidence of pedestrian collisions. In my personal experience it’s usually the wealthier cars who drive more recklessly, but there’s certainly no mechanistic relation between being poor and being a bad driver. The poors aren’t inherently less capable of driving. (Unless, you know of a way to get insurance for free…)
Just buy a new car. If your car repairs costs more than a year of my rent you need a cheaper car - or a better mechanic. I’m very sympathetic to people hit by cars - I think that’s terrible. I’m not at all sympathetic to rich (or “middle class”) people complaining about damage to their $100k+ vehicles. You can buy an used electric fleet van for ~$40k, and that’s just about as fancy as you could practically need. Anything beyond that is a show of status (many things below that are still a show of status), and I’d rather not pay a second tax to an oligarch so people with more money than sense can show off how much money they can waste.
Maybe 16 wheelers should have insurance, but it’s exploitation of the poor elsewhere.
It’s not a $20k repair bill I’m worried about, it’s the potential of $100k+ in medical liability that I’m really buying insurance for.
In my area there’s plenty of expensive cars driving around too, I somehow doubt the minimum $25k insurance would cover even half the cost of a totaled car + everything involved.
I didn’t mention the medical liability, since a modern civilized society shouldn’t need to have me worried about medical liability. I was lucky to have good insurance when I was a pedestrian hit by an uninsured driver. I wasn’t on the hook for my $60,000 in medical bills, because I had insurance. In a good society, I shouldn’t need private medical insurance to protect me if I get hit by an uninsured driver.
Now, if my new car gets totaled by a shitbox '88 Cutlass Cierra driven by a person who can barely even afford THAT car, then that’s where requiring insurance comes into play.