Here in Virginia, you can pay a $500 fee when registering the car and be legally exempt from the requirement to carry insurance. It's complete madness.
When I was born, there was no requirement for insurance in California. And I think we were better off.
But then, with the aftereffects of WWII, communism and the baby boomer generation and traitorous profiteering as well as all sorts of other anti-citizen movements, we got Illegal Aliens (at that time from Mexico but really any detritus of people from anywhere would cause this problem). With them they brought a host of problems, including never getting insurance and causing a lot of very bad accidents. California sought to fix this, but the solution came from Iowa and the Communists from Sacramento, in the form of required insurance.
I find that insurance on cars is a racket: to pay for insurance, you have to spend so much extra time at work, that you get so extra tired, that you have more accidents, which causes the insurance claims, which then allows insurers to raise insurance rates, then they profit immensely. My first auto accident happened precisely because I was paying insurance, and working a night job to pay for that insurance, and was too sleepy to drive safely. One of the essential ingredients to the insurance racket is law enforcement, which gives you a bunch of nonsense traffic violation tickets that cost immensely and make insurance go up immensely.
I finally learned that for my physical well-being and the safety of all people in general, that it was absolutely paramount that I never get insurance, except when (a) absolutely necessary and (b) when I can afford it. As a result, my life has gone a lot, lot better. Driving has been safer, and I have been healthier, by far, with this policy.
But, these things happen to all people. All people figured out the same thing as me. And before long, California was inundated with people circumventing the insurance racket. The racketeers needed a solution.
So they came up with instant suspended registration and the SR-22 program. Now, cars will automatically become ticketable if they don't have current insurance, and can be towed to heaven (or hell) upon sight by any designated racketeering towing company. You loose your car completely, confiscated by the government, and you still owe for anything you paid for it. (There is a multi-thousand dollar buyout you can offer to get the car back, but that's rarely an available option.) The SR-22 program is the same thing with driver's licenses.
Where the government taketh, the government taketh more; goto Where. (It's a loop of ever-building proportions.)
That $500 racketeering payoff option in Virginia sounds like a wonderful pro-citizen mob tip of the hat. I'd take it in a heartbeat. I'd grumble, of course. Then, I'd go get insurance. But, whenever the insurance got too silly, I'd turn it off. Insurance needs competition, but if the government regulates it, then the competition gets stifled, and the effects of competition go away, and it turns into collusion. When the customer is the government instead of the people, then the people don't get the benefit of the product, but the government does. That's why in Virginia I bet insurance rates are (a) REALLY LOW and (b) good quality options for customers, and (c) the customers are the citizens, not the government.
Let me guess:
Insurance is a much better product in Virginia than everywhere else. It basically has to be, for the reasons I described above. That's the effect of not being required to carry it.
