How vehicle insurance and autonomy intertwined

In early 2023 Oxbotica claimed at an event, which was held at Lloyd’s of London about the Future of Autonomy that insurance and autonomy are intertwined.

At the event, Sam Tiltman, sharing economy and mobility leader for the UK & Ireland at Marsh, claimed that the combined impact of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), electric vehicles and automation is huge. Their interconnectedness could disrupt the insurance industry if autonomous vehicles were to prove their worth by delivering on their premise by preventing accidents, injuries and by reducing insurance risk. To avoid or to prepare for any disruption, Tiltman advises insurers to start investing now.

Adding to this is the prospect of changing from having one vehicle operator or driver to have zero vehicle occupancy. Autonomy means that the traditional paradigm of how a vehicle is controlled is going to change, making it possible to have ‘n’ operators per vehicle. Insurers will need to calculate how many operators amount to ‘n’ as they would need to decide what it means.

Insurance is an enabler

Rebecca Marsden vice-president of risk and insurance at Oxbotica says that insurance is an enabler for self-driving technology at scale. She believes it is mission critical to “unlocking the benefits of autonomy to every person and organization on the planet”. She also thinks that insurance is about underpinning consumer trust as it is a route to market for autonomous vehicles – adding that there is a powerful relationship between autonomy and insurance. In her view this isn’t just about risk management.

She explains: “The depth of usable data and extent of analytics available through autonomous vehicle technology is transformative.” Artificial intelligence (AI) can be deployed to validate and verify autonomous vehicle software for virtual world simulation, automated discovery of challenging scenarios, and real-time data expansion. The aim, she says, is to answer questions such as:

• What makes the AV safe?
• What external factors and challenging circumstances must it navigate?
• How can we plan for conditions that have never been encountered or envisioned?
• How can we build a validation and verification system that allows for rapid updates to ensure our product utilizes the latest technology and software?

Analog and digital worlds

To this, Julian Broadbent, CEO of Applied EV responds: “The insurance world is data rich, however; it spends most of its time extracting data from an analogue world. Connected vehicles are at the very edge of digitalization, they are all about providing data. This may be communicating legacy data or storing data. With connected and autonomous vehicles, the data is on a platter as they are so well equipped. As every step of the vehicle is digitized, they are able to produce amounts of data insurance companies can only dream of.”

However, you would be forgiven for thinking that all is rosy. Chris Moore, head of Apollo ibott 1971 reports that there is still some resistance to autonomy. It still suffers from having an unfavorable public perception. He believes that society accepts elevated levels of autonomation in many industries. Yet, autonomy incites fear whenever it comes to the prospect of increasing it on our roads.

Echoing Marsden, he adds: “Insurance plays a vital role here to improve this perception and create trust. Companies looking to deploy and operate autonomous vehicles are investing time with key insures in the space to develop fit for purpose insurance products that can enable this future of transportation to grow and flourish. That insurance will likely take the form of a usage based and embedded product. This will completely disrupt the distribution of motor insurance as we see it today.”

Significant impact

Despite this, he concurs that the impact of MaaS, electric vehicles and automation will be significant, citing the environmental impact of reducing pollution from the vehicles, although some critics dispute the claim that electric vehicles are as clean as they are said to be. Nevertheless, the transition away from internal combustion engines will, in his view, inevitably have an impact on society too.

To read the complete article, visit TU-Automotive.