OneAndOneIs2

I'm in California at the moment, but I'm mostly riding a bicycle so I can't say that car insurance has been at the forefront of my mind. But I see from Ars that the state department here wants to make it mandatory that the cost of your insurance is based on how many miles you drive.

There's protests from the EFF about the privacy implications of monitoring people's mileage, and all the concerns about how they'll manage to actually do the monitoring.

So here's a simple suggestion on how to link insurance to mileage with no privacy invasion, no real ability to falsify, and zero paperwork overhead. And as a plus, it also means every vehicle on the road always has valid insurance and gives you a big incentive to drive economical cars.

All that you do is, you increase the tax on petrol, and the money gained from this increase is used to fund the insurance.

So you don't have any insurance policy. Nobody buys insurance for their cars. Everybody is insured because every time you fill your car, you're paying for your insurance. And the greater the distance you drive, the more often you need to fill up, so the more insurance you pay. And if you drive a big gas-guzzler, you pay more.

It's not exactly a new idea. You don't have to have an insurance policy before a fire engine will come to your burning house to put out the flames: You pay your taxes and the service is free if you need it. Just apply the same thing to car insurance. I think just about everyone at least knows somebody who's been hit by a driver with no insurance - this would eliminate that in one go.

Of course, it would suck for the insurance companies who would no longer be able to sell car insurance. So they'll undoubtedly sabotage any proposal like this to the best of their ability. But seriously, is there any downside to having every car on the road insured by default in this manner?