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Self-Driving Cars To Transform Insurance and Other Industries
MarkWhittington writes: The advent of commercially available self-driving cars is about five years away, but already some are thinking about how they will disrupt the economy and how society operates in general. One industry likely to suffer is that of auto insurance. Since the vast majority of auto accidents are caused by human error, having more autonomous vehicles on the road will almost assuredly result in fewer overall accidents. Further, once we've transitioned to a society that mostly gets around using self-driving vehicles, most accidents will be the result of hardware and software malfunctions. Insurance for self-driving cars would more resemble product liability coverage than the sort of auto insurance we have today. Indeed, the technology will also likely impact diverse industries such as auto mechanics, taxi services, and health care, as well as policing.
Really? As long as liability insurance is mandatory, and comprehensive required for as long as you have load on the car, and as long as it takes action on the part of a state legislature followed by years of court battles to force insurance companies to lower rates, no, insurance companies will not suffer from lower accident rates.
In fact, in most states, they will probably use the changing market as an excuse to raise rates, knowing they will continue to sell the same number of policies while paying fewer claims.
Anybody who believes that the legal requirements for insurance will change for self driving cars is smoking dope.
Police in small towns would lose a ton of money - much fewer speeding and traffic tickets.
Similarly, the elderly would participate more in life - go out, party, and socialize a lot more.
Movies ( and a bit of books) will increase - think of all the stuff kids do while you drive them around.
But all of this will take 10-20 years, after the first sale, not immediately
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In this case, the legal industry will welcome the plethora of deep-pocketed targets available to be sued when an accident occurs with a self-driving vehicle.
My bet... insurance companies will make it nearly impossible to own a human driving car. Since humans create accidents and they do not wish to pay out, liability coverage for a human driven car will increase greatly while robotic cars will drop. Eventually it will be nearly impossible to own a human driven car because of the costs.
The alternate vision of the future is that, as usual, futurists are all hot and horny about how their technology will revolutionize the world, but it will continue to be far too expensive for society to change over and it will never happen on the claimed scale.
So, like when I see things about how we'll have smart cities in which the roads are interconnected and technology will be everywhere .. I'm forced to conclude we're not going to tear down the world and start over to build this shiny stuff the futurists keep telling us is inevitable.
At the end of the day, these are products someone wants to sell us. And if the world doesn't feel like it has billions or trillions of dollars to rebuild everything for your shiny new technology, then either it will never happen, or it will be rolled out in a few limited places for the wealthy.
Take the average age of a car in North America .. hell, take the average age of a car in the world.
Now, ask yourself who is going to replace all of the cars on the planet with your super awesome technology?
From there you can pretty much realize that this stuff will never 100% replace what we have, will only ever benefit a very small amount of people, and likely won't be able to coexist with what we have now. In which case it sounds good on paper, but will never come to fruition.
Technology is cool, and it does move forward. But the economics of technology often means it will never be as practical or achievable as claimed by its proponents.
The world isn't going to rush out and buy self-driving cars just because the people who want to sell self-driving cars tell us how awesome they'll be. It just doesn't work that way.
As usual, I'll believe it when I see it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Is that the same kind of years that are used by a lot of other technological advances? Because if it is, we won't have commercially available self-driving cars before 2040.
And by then, I hope they're freakin' flying cars, too.
I like how the article is written, "Unsupported and extremely unlikely assumption is true. Based on that unsupported assumption, everybody will start behaving according to another unsupported assumption. Once this happens, the only accidents will be due to a third unsupported assumption. Given all this, how does this affect the insurance industry?"
Well, I say who cares? The first assumption is not likely to occur. The second one presumes that everybody will accept this and completely change their lifestyle to not own a car. The third one assumes that only hardware and software errors could possibly cause a crash. Once you pile conjecture upon conjecture upon conjecture, it is not even worth talking about it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
These cars might work out fairly well in sunny southern California -- but the NorthEast during significant parts of our driving season? I drive an AWD drive sedan with studded snow tires from November to April, and when one gets into not too atypical conditions (snow/ice covered highways, no lane markings visible, snowing/reduced visibility, etc.) -- driving becomes almost a black art. You can forget about cruise control in these conditions -- unless to have a strong desire to end up in a ditch. Nuance is the rule, and the expectation that your vehicle will go where you steer/drive/stop to -- well, you are more hopeful then I am in these conditions. Turn down the radio, turn off cruise control, light touch on the wheel, paranoia re: other cars on the road -- assume the worst, etc... My suspicion is that self driving cars will resolve this issue by significant slowing, which then presents is own set of danger issues (i.e. everyone else on the road expects traffic moving 50+ even in fairly bad conditions, and cars going 10 or 15 in limited visibility on divided highways -- well, I wouldn't want to be around for the resultant carnage...
It all comes down to having the right sensors and the right algorithm to handle the situations. The fact is that the computer can process far more road condition data than a human being. I too drive/drove in rough conditions (used to live far north in Canada). Based on my experience I'd bet the a well designed self driving car would do much better than most drivers.
Visibility (possibly limited), steering, 2 pedals, g-force are the only elements most drivers use to drive their vehicle. For most of us this feedback is often responded to late resulting in slight over compensation.
The computer has unlimited visibility and 4 wheel traction control not limited by slip diffs and other slow response technologies. Instead all 4 wheels are controlled independent (I'm assuming these cars will all be electric by then). The computer is much quicker at responding to change in road conditions and is able to adapt much quicker.