Martin Luther King Jr. Day  January 19th 2026

Costs, exposure, and the geography of loss: auto market outlook in enhanced competitor analysis

Insurance Business has released a newly enhanced edition of its Competitor Analysis: Private Passenger Auto Insurance, delivering the most granular market outlook yet on America’s most volatile personal lines segment.

The upgraded report expands macro-cost and exposure analysis, showing how inflation, litigation, and shifting driver behavior pressure underwriting results. New figures track long-term premium, loss, and combined-ratio trends from 2014 to 2024, alongside inflation data revealing a 65% rise in vehicle repair costs, far outpacing broader service inflation. Updated exposure charts show changes in written auto liability over more than a decade.

The Auto Competitor Analysis introduces new state-level performance intelligence. New maps and tables identify the top five states by private passenger auto market share (California, Florida, Texas, New York, and Georgia), and rank states’ combined ratios over a ten-year period. Nationwide maps reveal how profitability diverges sharply by jurisdiction, driven by repair inflation, drivers' market and legal exposure.

A major enhancement is the inclusion of defense-to-loss ratio analysis, with new state-by-state maps exposing where private passenger auto litigation costs function as a hidden tax on underwriting firms. These visuals clarify why combined ratios alone no longer tell the full story.

LA Fire survivors rude surprise could hit more Americans | Digital Insurance

Since the 1990s, American homes have been systematically underinsured in the event that they are completely destroyed.

(Bloomberg) --A year after the Los Angeles wildfires, many survivors face the same problem: Their insurance policies aren't paying out enough to cover the cost of rebuilding.

It's a tragic predicament. And it will happen again when the next disaster hits.

Since the 1990s, American homes have been systematically underinsured in the event that they are completely destroyed. Study after study shows that, counter to the public's understanding, many home insurance policies are not required to cover total replacement of homes.

The trend, though decades old, has been somewhat hidden. But climate-driven events that cause massive destruction, especially wildfires, are revealing just how pervasive and severe the problem has become.

"Climate change did not cause underinsurance, but it does expose it and amplify it," said Kenneth Klein, a professor at the California Western School of Law specializing in the topic.

Global warming is creating a hotter and drier world. Combined with more construction in areas with lots of flammable vegetation — the wildland-urban interface — it's led to a rise in damaging fires in the US. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2023 found that wildfires in Western states destroyed 243% more buildings in the decade between 2010 and 2020 than in the previous decade. The fires in LA claimed in excess of 15,000 structures.