It now seems inevitable that driverless cars are in our future. It may not be tomorrow, but soon enough there will be more driverless cars on the road and eventually they will make up the majority. So, with that eventual future in mind, many people wonder how that will change the car insurance industry. Certainly, there will still be a need for some kind of insurance, but how different will it be from what we have today?
According to industry experts, the significant impact of driverless cars is still 25 to 30 years off, but there are big changes ahead. Some liken it to the changes that came about during the advent of the horseless carriage in the 1890s.
But while the era of the horseless carriage created a need for more personal coverage, the coming era of the driverless car will shift the need over to that of more commercial insurance because it is assumed that car manufacturers will take on much of the risk for this new tech.
But these are merely educated guesses and it is impossible to know where exactly insurers strategy should go. With seemingly more of the liability going over to the manufacturers, the terms liability and responsibility begin to break down when there are multiple parties involved. Now it’s not just the owner and manufacturer who may be held liable but the software developer too. Insurers see one of their biggest roles being the management of responsibility ratios.
As mentioned before, these are all just best guess scenarios and the reality is no one really knows what the next turn will be. With cars doing their own driving, maybe more people will be opting not to own a car at all. It may be that insurers and corporations will only deal with each other and the average person left out of the loop entirely. It will be interesting to see how this will all turn out.
