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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.
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.
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If I can pile into one drunk and it will drive me home, sign me up. My hunch is that the our current nanny-state way of thinking will never allow this. We will be required to be sober and attentive even if not driving. You'd probably get a ticket for merely reading a book or sending a text message.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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
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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.
It doesn't matter, I just saved 15% on my car insurance . ..
...what is going to imagine: some insurance company is the first to come up with cheaper insurance for self-driving cars. The others follow. Murderous competition follows, until prices settle at a new, much lower level. Plus: we lose a couple of insurance companies as road-kill. Minus: the survivors may form a cartel.
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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.
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The main gain with automated cars, even with a gradual adoption rate of say 10 years, are cities with traffic. Productive time will shoot up when people can work while being driven to work, traffic will be lessened, optimal driving habits can lower fuel usage. The areas where we will spend less money would be fuel, possibly insurance, and car maintenance.
This saved money doesn't just disappear, it will go into other areas of the economy that might have a better impact. After all, if you spend $2000/yr on fuel for one car, cutting that in half due to ride sharing or 3/4 due to more efficient driving will allow you to spend it on a vacation, clothes, entertainment, industries that are seeing falling revenue due to less expendable money.
At some point if their costs go down there will be competition. If nothing else, some new auto insurance company will come along and offer lower rates for various levels of self-driving car.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Right now I have about $50K invested in human-controlled automobiles. These automobiles, with proper maintenance, will last me another 10-20 years.
The real question is, if you want to make auto-cars mandatory, how are you going to get the millions of Americans who are currently paying for non-auto-cars out of their loans? If non-auto-cars become unusable on public streets, how the hell am I supposed to get enough value out of the ones I already own, to be able to afford to replace them with 2 auto-cars?
FYI, if your answer involves a government subsidy, then you're already admitting to failure.
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Once some accidents happen, their financial penalties will be off the charts.
Unless they have good insurance ;)
The link to the previous slashdot article states that traffic fines collect 300k per officer.
Strangely no one in the previous article mentioned that based on the numbers given that
would make there only be 20k officers in the USA. In reality, according to google,
there are 900k sworn officers which would make traffic fines only account for 7k per
officer. Still a significant amount but nowhere near the 300k mentioned in the previous
article.
Nobody who is driving today will see ubiquitous self-driving passenger cars.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A lot of organ transplants come from those killed in car / motorcycle accidents. As deaths sharply decline with self-driving vehicles this will be a grim predicament.