As in outsider of the auto industry this sounds like a classic blame-the-customer attitude that exists in many industries. The auto industry attributes the increase of severity and frequency of auto accidents to an external party so they share zero liability.
That doesn't seem like it follows though. Most people are driving the same car they were driving in 2019. It's not like the auto industry went and changed everyone's cars and repaved the roads or something. If this was some long term trend, then sure, easier to see how you could explain it with changes in headlights or ride height or some other factor of how cars are designed.
A dramatic increase in amount and severity of accidents after a major world-impacting event like the pandemic seems like exactly the sort of thing that would make sense to be some change in the way people drive. This isn't "Oh, the users just hate the new Slack design. What idiots." For 90+ percent of the US, nothing has changed about the cars or roads in the last 4 years any more than the 4 years before that, and yet the outcomes of driving have changed.
How do you imagine the auto insurance industry is driving this change in customer behavior and outcomes? I cannot imagine any way in which it's the fault of the insurers, but I know that this is merely a failure of my imagination.
Bear in mind that the auto insurance industry is quite distinct from the auto manufacturing industry.
Due to electrification, I imagine the average weight of a new car is increasing, which causes more damage. Previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.
Due to increasingly pedestrian-unfriendly designs, like "grr I'm a bad boy" grills on trucks, crashes becomes more damaging to what they crash into. More, previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.
The purported timeline is: Pandemic hits, people stop driving, incidents falls drastically. Pandemic stops, people starts driving again, but incidents and severity increase drastically compared to pre pandemic.
The companies are saying internally "people forgot how to drive properly", which granted, sounds weird. But it also sounds weird that people upgraded their cars, while not driving them, or that there was a huge spike in car sales as people upgraded post pandemic.
Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet [1]
>I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.
Well, first of all it doesn't need to be what any person is convinced is "large", it just needs to be nonzero. Second of all, it's not about customers, it's about manufacturers. As your own data indicates[0], a nonzero number of people replaced their car during that time period, just like in every other time period. If more people choose electric than did decades ago, there will be more electric cars than decades ago. And there are[1]! Electrification is increasing, therefore weight is increasing, therefore crash severity is increasing.
So the timeline is, each year, more and more people are buying electric cars, and it looks like severity increased, too. Do we have data on people's ability to drive over time? Maybe, but I haven't seen it, so that's what seems unconvincing so far. We definitely have data on vehicle weight over time, though.
[0]: "Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet" – by my viewing of the data, it shows that a lot of consumers, in fact, went out and bought a car during that period. Millions did, tens of millions even, and it only takes a single car difference to affect the population average.
