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QuestionerAs a Berkshire and Tesla shareholder, I would like to hear your thoughts on the potential financial effects to Geico, assuming Elon Musk's delivers on his fully autonomous driving goal. On Tesla's most recent earnings call, Elon said, if you've got at scale a statistically significant amount of data that shows conclusively that the autonomous car has, let's say, half the accident rate of a human-driven car, I think that's difficult to ignore. Assuming Elon succeeds in reducing accidents by 50% versus human drivers, wouldn't auto insurance rates fall to reflect the reduced underwriting risk thereby adversely impacting Geico's revenues and float and perhaps margins too?
WarrenIf accidents get reduced 50%, it's going to be good for society and it's going to be bad for insurance companies volume, but, you know, good for society is what we're looking for it.
Ajit JainThe point I want to make in terms of... and the fact that they feel that because of their technology, the number of accidents do come down. And that is certainly provable. But I think what needs to be factored in as well is the pay cost of each one of these accidents has skyrocketed. So if you multiply the number of accidents times the cost of each accident, I'm not sure that total number has come down as much as Tesla would like us to believe. us to believe. Tesla has been towing with the idea of writing insurance directly or indirectly, and so far it hasn't really sort of been much of a success. Time will tell, but I think, you know, automation just shifts a lot of the expense from the operator to the equipment provider.