The Oracle of Omaha sees a lot of hurricane-inflicted pain for auto insurers — including his own.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we had 50,000 [vehicle] losses, and most of them will be total losses,” Warren Buffett said in a TV interview Wednesday, referring to auto insurer Geico, which is owned by his investment firm Berkshire Hathaway.

“The insured loss will be large. There will be a lot of uninsured losses, too,” Buffett told CNBC, asked about the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey during a wide-ranging interview on his 87th birthday.

Geico underwrites roughly 10 percent of the auto insurance in Texas, representing roughly half a million vehicles, Buffett said. The company currently insures 24 million vehicles, according to its website.

Other insurance companies such as Chubb, Travelers, Allstate and Assurant have seen their stocks drop as damage from Harvey, which began tearing across Louisiana on Wednesday, is assessed.

“The vehicle damage in total in Houston is likely to be just as severe, if not worse,” than Hurricane Sandy, Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for Cox Automotive, said in a report Tuesday.

Smoke estimated that half a million cars could be affected by Harvey. That is twice as many cars as were destroyed by Sandy, which swept through New York and New Jersey in October 2012. The higher figure is due in part to Texas being more vehicle-dependent than the New York City metro area.

For insurers, how they respond to Harvey will be telling.

“It’s how you perform at a time like this that really determines whether your insurance company is doing the right job,” Buffett said. “The effects of this are going to go on for a very long time.”