Your Car's Safety Sensors Make Crashes More Expensive. That's the Point.

Vehicle repair prices have climbed more than 40% since 2020, outpacing inflation by a comfortable margin. The finger-pointing has settled on a convenient villain: automatic emergency braking sensors, blind spot monitors, and lane-keeping cameras. Everyone from your body shop to your brother-in-law agrees.

They're right about one number and catastrophically wrong about the one that matters.

An IIHS-HLDI analysis of 2017 through 2022 model year vehicles, published August 11, found that collision claim severity runs about 10% higher for vehicles with crash avoidance systems versus otherwise identical models without them.^[1] A windshield swap that used to cost $250 now hits $1,000 when a forward-facing camera needs recalibration.^[2] So far, the conventional wisdom holds.

But then the data does something strange: property damage liability claim severity, which covers damage to the other vehicle, is 15% higher for ADAS-equipped cars. Your sensors cannot possibly make the other driver's Honda Civic more expensive to fix, so where is that 15% coming from?

Welcome to Simpson's Paradox, automotive edition, because crash avoidance systems are exceptionally good at preventing cheap crashes: the 5-mph parking lot tap, the distracted-at-a-red-light rear-ender, the lane-drift sideswipe. AEB alone cuts police-reported rear-end crashes by 50%.^[2] Remove those from the pool and the remaining crashes are disproportionately violent. Average cost per claim goes up because the cheap ones vanished, not because anything got more expensive.

Insurance math confirms it: PDL claim frequency for ADAS-equipped vehicles is nearly 40% lower, and collision frequency drops about 10%. Multiply slightly higher per-claim costs by dramatically lower claim counts, and overall collision losses fall about 5% while PDL losses plunge nearly 30%.^[1] Your crash costs more to fix because the system already prevented the five cheap ones and left you with the one expensive one it couldn't stop.

Sensors aren't the only cost driver, either: two-thirds of new vehicles now have AWD, more than half run turbocharged or electrified powertrains, and SUVs have swallowed the sedan market, generating more crash energy per impact.^[1] Calibration bills are real, but they're one line item in a much longer invoice that includes the consequences of making every car bigger and more complicated than the one it replaced.

The counterargument deserves its full weight: this math is aggregate, and individual crash victims don't experience averages. If you're the person in the crash ADAS didn't prevent, your bill is genuinely 10 to 15% higher, and "but you crashed less often than the statistical you" is cold comfort with a $6,000 deductible. There's also a distributional question the insurance industry isn't eager to answer: if lower-income drivers are more likely to drive older, unequipped vehicles and get hit by newer ones, the savings accrue to one population while the costs land on another.

But blaming the cameras is still wrong, because those cameras are doing exactly what they were designed to do. They just leave behind a data trail that looks, to anyone who skips the multiplication, like they're making everything worse.