Skip to main content

Motor insurance for autonomous vehicles ‘will shift from drivers to OEMs’

Autonomous vehicles are likely to increase insurance claims related to product parameters rather than driver liability New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Impact of Automated Vehicles on Motor Insurance Market, finds that motor insurers will move away from the driver-centric strategy to follow one or a combination of three models as automated vehicles become common: product-centric evaluation; brand-centric evaluation; system-centric evaluation.
October 19, 2015 Read time: 2 mins
Autonomous vehicles are likely to increase insurance claims related to product parameters rather than driver liability

New analysis from 2097 Frost & Sullivan, Impact of Automated Vehicles on Motor Insurance Market, finds that motor insurers will move away from the driver-centric strategy to follow one or a combination of three models as automated vehicles become common: product-centric evaluation; brand-centric evaluation; system-centric evaluation.

The current system of calculating motor insurance premiums places importance on driver-related factors such as age, gender and driving record. However, the introduction of autonomous vehicles will turn the spotlight on vehicle-related parameters. As the motor insurance business goes through this transformation, the future holds vast potential for novel risk evaluation models.

“Along with higher product liability, the responsibility of insuring the vehicle will shift from vehicle owners to manufacturers,” said Frost & Sullivan Automotive and Transportation senior research analyst Kamalesh Mohanarangam. “Further, all excesses currently covered by the insured will be shared among several stakeholders, such as road-operators and local transport authorities.”

As the risk of accidents will fall drastically with the advent of autonomous vehicles, the insurance premium to cover that risk too will drop significantly. Nevertheless, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers will increase insurance spend to cover their share of product liability risk, thereby offsetting the shrinkage in consumer-driven insurance revenues.

With OEMs and tier 1 suppliers looking to ensure fool proof product safety, methods to access risk and certify the product will assume greater importance. The traditional method of underwriting that uses historic data will take a back-seat, paving the way for a new breed of underwriters capable of evaluating driving algorithms and assigning a relevant risk priority number.

“Moreover, insurers will develop new products for risks arising out of innovations,” noted Mohanarangam. “For instance, with the digitalisation of automobiles, insurers will provide cyber cover for protection against cyber-attacks and hacks.”

In the wake of plummeting premiums, motor insurance will become part of other insurance policies and value-added packages as stakeholders look to new avenues of profit generation in a changing environment.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Guidelines on cyber security for connected and automated vehicles ‘doesn’t go far enough’
    August 8, 2017
    David Barzilai, chairman and co-founder of automotive cyber-security firm, Karamba Security, has applauded the UK government for taking pre-emptive action and zeroing in on preventing cyber-attacks as critical for the adoption of self-driving cars on a mass scale. However, he says the guidelines don’t go far enough toward effectively preventing car hacking, saying cars are not servers or mobile phones that can sustain the risk of hidden security bugs. The time it takes to remediate such bugs in production,
  • Infrastructure and the autonomous vehicle
    December 12, 2014
    Harold Worrall ponders the effect of autonomous vehicles on transportation infrastructure. For the last century the transportation industry has been focused on the supply of infrastructure to support the ever growing fleet of vehicles and the greater number of miles covered by each vehicle. Our focus has been planning, funding, designing, building and maintaining roadways. Politicians, engineers, planners, financial managers … all of us have had this focus. We have experienced demand growth since the first
  • Counting the environmental costs of ITS deployment
    October 29, 2015
    David Crawford looks at the latest thinking about calculating the benefits associated with the environmental side of ITS schemes. The penny is dropping that some environmental costs “are being shifted outside the traditional bounds of evaluation methods” for ITS-based road transport projects, according to researchers at the UK University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies.
  • SafeRide: it’s time to act on cyberattacks
    May 10, 2019
    Cyber threats are increasing rapidly and conventional security measures are unable to keep up. Ben Spencer talks to SafeRide’s Gil Reiter about what OEMs can do now As more vehicles become connected, so the potential threats to their security increase. Gil Reiter, vice president of product management for security firm SafeRide, says the biggest ‘attack surface’ for connected cars is their internet connectivity - and the in-vehicle applications that use the internet connection. “The most vulnerable co