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Will Self-Driving Cars Destroy the Auto Insurance Industry? (siliconvalley.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article from the Bay Area News Group:
Imagine your fully autonomous self-driving car totals a minivan. Who pays for the damages? "There wouldn't be any liability on you, because you're just like a passenger in a taxi," says Santa Clara University law professor Robert Peterson. Instead, the manufacturer of your car or its software would probably be on the hook... Virtually everything around car insurance is expected to change, from who owns the vehicles to who must carry insurance to who -- or what -- is held responsible for causing damage, injuries and death in an accident."
Ironically, if you're only driving a semi-autonomous car, "you could end up in court fighting to prove the car did wrong, not you," according to the article. Will human drivers be considered a liability -- by insurers, and even by car owners? The article notes that Google is already testing a car with no user-controlled brake pedal or steering wheel. Of course, one consumer analyst warns the newspaper that "hackers will remain a risk, necessitating insurance coverage for hostile takeover of automated systems..."
If I have an automated car and I had to have (driving, expensive) insurance for the times I switched it to manual then I wouldn't want a car that could be switched to manual. If companies can confidently stand behind their products, then it isn't a problem for them to accept responsibility because they won't be causing problems. Therefore, I would expect AI insurance to be around the same price as for a $20-30K piece of property that may get ruined due to reasons beyond the owner's control. Judging by the my property insurance cost, that should be around $30 a year.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The nature of insurance just changes, from covering individual drivers to insuring manufacturers and fleet operators for product liability. The biggest impact will be on the legal profession: a whole army of bottom feeders will disappear, to be replaced with smaller additions to corporate lawyer ranks. A whole genre of late-night TV advertising will be replaced by ads for body mods, escort services and medical tourism services.
I'd bet self-driving car makers will be willing to spend tens/hundreds of millions trying to prove the liability isn't theirs.
I foresee a lot of lobbying from Google etc to change the law regarding compensation or at least making it the car owner's liability.
Victim sues the car owner then car owner is forced into arbitration because of the car software's EULA.
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This will be the greatest push for genuine no fault insurance system. A few states have them, California tried but the industry got so deeply involved they gutted the bills and created a Frankensystem so convoluted and confusing that it actually costs more and makes the lawyers more money.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
They can sell anything.
What will happen is that many municipalities will see a dramatic loss of income from traffic and parking* violations. That could indeed be devastating. People are gonna have to fire up the old still and go back to bootlegging to make a couple of bucks.
*since the car can go off to find a space by itself, or simply drive around the block a few times.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wow, that's good to know. That means I don't need home insurance either, because I'm not operating the house; I'm just living in it like a resident in a hotel. Clearly the person who built the house will be liable. Oh, wait ....
Could we please put aside these laughable "self-driving cars will be sued out of existence" arguments once and for all? Liability insurance can be purchased to cover situations in which you do not directly control events. For example:
I own a house, and I pay insurance to (among other things) protect myself if I'm sued by people who may injure themselves on my property, even if I'm not at home. My insurance company is perfectly happy to sell me liability insurance, even for property I don't live in.
It will be the same with self-driving cars. If you own one, you'll be able to buy liability insurance for it, just as you would for any other vehicle. The insurance industry will adapt perfectly well.
Yes, there will be expensive driving aids on cars, but no one here will see ubiquitous cars that drive themselves.
I've seen one. I know people who've been in them. I know a company working on one which has done more km on the street autonomously than the average person will drive in a lifetime. So much for vaporware.
You are right though. Self-driving cars are vapourware, but only because the definition doesn't take into account the likelihood of a technology reaching market.
If 5% (or less) are self-driving cars, then there will (probably) never be 5% of cars self-driving. Rather than a complicated ramping-up, lets get an average. Say it's 10% of sold cars are self-driving.
Then Y1 cars will be 10% self driving, while Y2+ will be 0% self driving. The average age of the fleet is 10 years (and growing, but slowly). So in 5 years, the ratio of cars will be about 2.5% self-drivers (more if the replacement rate of non-self-drivers is higher than self-drivers, which would be true if self-drivers crash less).
So with a steady 10% self-drivers, we'd see 5% of cars replaced with self-drivers in about 10 years. Obviously, shorter if the percent of new cars being self-driving is higher.
Learn to love Alaska
From: https://www.google.com/selfdri...
We've self-driven more than 1.5 million miles and are currently out on the streets of Mountain View, CA, Austin, TX, Kirkland, WA and Metro Phoenix, AZ.
It sounds like they have actual cars, driving actual miles, in actual cities. I've also had a coworker who was driving in the Bay Area see one of their cars go by him on the highway - with no one driving.
Now, they might not replace all cars, but even eliminating regular cars in major cities will dramatically change things. Imagine the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago and DC with less than half the cars they have now (due to people sharing, etc.). Suddenly, rush hour isn't a nightmare, and parking spots don't need to sell for $10k/year since it would be cheaper to send your car home instead of parking it - and then it is available for your spouse/child/family member to use, instead of it being parking in a parking ramp downtown. Plus, you could send your car to drive your child to before- and after-school activities instead of doing it yourself.
"Christine, go pick up Carrie from school and drive her to swim practice and then park and wait for her to finish. Then drive her home without stopping at Dairy Queen. (Yes, I named the car Christine.)
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Christine, go pick up Carrie from school and drive her to swim practice and then park and wait for her to finish.
Are you trying to warn us of the consequences of self driving cars?
Christine (1983)
Carrie (1979)
Insufficient maintenance being one.
So I reckon that either accidents will involve a great deal of argument between the little guy (who bought the SDC) and the big guy (manufacturer) with the big guy making all sorts of accusations and demanding proof that every last servicing requirement had been carried out by an approved service agent. Or the car will remain the property of the manufacturer (or fleet owner) and it will be leased to the notional user. Thus removing the car's passenger from liability. But leaving them with a large monthly bill for ensuring the vehicle is kept mechanically perfect.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Either all of that, or he's wrong and a legal standard will be set where it is the owner of the equipment who is liable, whether it is operating in autonomous mode or not. If that's the case, nothing much will change.
I'm still half of the mind that autonomous cars are already in a Segway type situation, where you have all these wonks predicting that they're poised to transform all of society etc. but the logic just doesn't hold up:
A.) Americans like driving.
B.) Car manufacturers market various car models with features that cater to the fact that Americans like driving, because it's profitable.
...and the biggie...
C.) Does anyone really believe autonomous cars will be sold to consumers without the ability for a human driver to take over in emergency situations? But if the autonomous mode can be disabled, then 1.) You will still need a drivers license to own an autonomous car, so no increase in convenience and no benefit to the disabled; 2.) The implication is that as the "driver," you must be alert to the possibility of emergency situations at all times, even in autonomous mode. This means you will have to pay attention as if you were actually operating the vehicle, which negates a lot of the value of a self-driving car. What's more, various cognitive processes will probably cause people to think they're in an emergency when they're not, causing people to turn off autonomous mode way more often than necessary, making the road much more unpredictable and (ironically) unsafe.
So will autonomous cars be a thing? Almost certainly. In fact, it seems they already exist. Will private ownership of autonomous cars by US consumers ever be a thing? Don't bet on it.
"Fine," you say. "Autonomous cars will be like fleets of robot taxis that you hire." But if most of the drivers on the road are still driving their own cars, then that negates a lot of the safety and environmental claims. Autonomous cars won't be able to optimize coordinated driving for fuel efficiency, for example, and all the marketing and all the newspaper headlines will be around how well they cope with unpredictable human driver behavior.
And if it goes the other way and you start seeing autonomous cars bumper-to-bumper like taxis in NYC, how long will it be before someone asks whether these robot taxi companies are paying their share of the taxes used to pave the roads, install traffic lights, etc.? And then there's still the issue of who's liable if a blind guy gets in an accident in a robot taxi. Or if blind guys aren't allowed to hire robot taxis, who goes to court over the Americans With Disabilities Act?
Don't worry, though. Once Google evolves into a full-blown defense contractor, it will still be able to sell autonomous vehicles to the Pentagon.
Breakfast served all day!
Backing up semi trucks using computers already exists (and they're pretty good at it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Why would self-driving cars destroy the insurance industry?
Even if we ignore the ability of incumbents to fight bitter rearguard actions for years or decades when their economic interests are threatened; it's not as though self-driving actually changes the basic risks associated with cars. In an ideal world, automated cars may be more reliable than human drivers, certainly less likely to be drunk or exhausted; but unless they somehow achieve infallibility, there will still be periodic accidents. And the whole point of car insurance(and the fact that it is generally mandatory) is that a car accident can easily cause more damage than most operators can afford to pay for, especially if injuries or deaths stack up in addition to mechanical damage.
Nothing about the self-driving-ness changes any of this. It might change the determination of who is at fault; or increase the number of 'no culpability can be assigned' situations; but it will still be a situation of occasional ruinously expensive incidents with long periods of quiet, which is more or less exactly what insurance is constructed to cover.
There will, presumably, be lots of fun arguing over who exactly carries the insurance, and what sorts of failure modes become the vendor's problem vs. the 'known risks' that the operator takes in using an automated vehicle on the road; but the same basic factors are in play.
What will probably change is the flavor of actuarial data-mining that is popular: currently, it's all about scrutinizing the driver for direct and indirect signs of riskiness. If the driver isn't driving, they'll presumably shift to exhaustive scrutiny of system maintenance and where/when the vehicle is operated(since some roads and times of day will just be more risky than others). Insurers mapping out 'high-risk' zones and charging people who travel in them more definitely won't go badly or upset anyone. Not at all.
My house doesn't drive at all, but I still need insurance, because things can still happen to it.
Anything that is expensive, that you can't afford to replace should something happen to it, will need to be insured. This notion that self-driving cars will destroy the insurance industry is just plain silly.
A lot of people are looking at scenarios in which ordinary people won't own a car. Instead, they expect that people will subscribe to a car service. In that case, the car service will mostly self-insure.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Gas driven cars are vapourware said the buggy manufacturer to the buggy whip manufacturer...
The problem has always been when the person loses the lawsuit and doesn't have money to pay. That's why we insurance mainly exists.
(seriously: every so often I see women using a baby carriage as a means to clear a path, pushing it into traffic to make everyone stop so she can cross. What's up with that?)
When you have a baby you turn into a sleep deprived zombie.
Yeah, my heart bleeds for insurance companies.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Let's start by saying that currently 12 states and Puerto Rico have no-fault auto insurance laws, and the car insurance business thrives there. Why? Because fault is really not the core important part of insurance. Insurance is there to cover the risk you cannot afford to pay for all at once if you have a problem. Regardless of who is at fault, if you're driving around in a 40,000 dollar car that the bank holds a 30,000 dollar note on, the bank is going to insist you carry insurance on the car.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I think this is right. When self-driving cars merge with Lyft or Uber or Avis, then a lot of people won't need to own cars at all. Open your smartphone app and request a small car to drive you to the supermarket - and 90 minutes later, request a large car to take you and your groceries home. Or schedule a van to take the family across town to Grandma's house or across the country to go to Disneyland. And it would STILL probably be cheaper than buying a car and making payments + insurance + gas + maintenance (plus, in big cities, leasing garage space...).
Perhaps each car service will merge with a different car maker....
If you can afford it you can already do all that with existing taxi/van hire services. And if you can't afford it now, Lyft or Uber aren't exactly going to provide subsidised services for the poor in the future, are they?
It's always going to be more convenient to have your own vehicle.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"Given a sidewalk where people can unexpectedly enter the road"
People _don't_ unexpectedly enter the road, short of erupting from a shielded location and even then there's usually some sort of warning (like a ball bouncing onto the road - a classic warning that it's time to slow down and prepare for a kid on the road) They telegraph their intentions pretty clearly even if not aware they're doing so.
The problem is car _drivers_ expect to have right of way and _expect_ that pedestrians won't step onto the road. The truth of the matter is that the curb creates a "safety demarcation line" which only exists in the mind of the driver.
A self driving car will not only stop more quickly, it will probably already be slowing down before the pedestrian has even stepped onto the road. Additionally, without an impatient monkey at the controls, more suitable speed limits (20mph in residential areas) will become the norm. The tradeoff of smoother traffic flow will more than likely eliminate any potential time loss on most journeys and pedestrian overpasses will probably become a thing of the past (they're a stupid idea. People don't use them and the main reason for them existing is because drivers tend to have tunnel vision above 30mph)
Machines have 360 degree vision AND they don't spend time looking at the cute ass on that female walking down the sidewalk instead of what's happening on the road in front of them, or looking at the pedestrian looking like he _might_ step onto the road on the right whilst missing the 18 wheeler pulling out on the left (or the wobbly cyclist who demands your entire attention to the point of missing the pedestrian stepping out from the other side of the road)
WRT the "google car hit a bus" non-story from a few months back, the car assumed (rightly) that it had right of way. The software didn't take into account that the bus driver would bully his way through regardless (If you look, you'll see the car stopped well before the collision). If both were automated it wouldn't have happened and newer algorithms take more account of human drivers refusing to yield to right of way.
FWIW the average traffic speed in London is 10-12mph and it's a lot slower in peak hours. Parking is nearly impossible (or extremely expensive). When you factor these in (and that driving in such conditions is stressful) there's a strong argument that people will flock to automated vehicles and car services. Now factor in that large european cities account for 30% of car sales in europe, that's a large chunk of lost sales for manufacturers - balanced by vastly increased sales in developing countries.