The Coming Robot Apocalypse of Car Insurers

Generali

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/03/04/1787962/insurers-will-destroy-themselves-to-nudge-us-into-robot-utopia/

The simple version is that insurers will give cheaper insurance to cars that have automated features to stop them crashing. In doing so they will make 'crash proof' cars much more attractive.

Crash proof cars don't need expensive insurance and the likelihood is that we will not own cars but instead borrow them from robot manufacturers like Roomba and Google. These companies will need insurance, not drivers. As a result Britain will go from having perhaps 40,000,000 insurance policies to having perhaps 20.

Not great if you work for a retail insurance company.

ging84

lose the bit about car insurance an i'm interested

ging84

modern crash avoidance technology and eventually driver-less cars may well significantly reduce accidents and drive down insurance premiums
people don't own their cars now, as much as 75% of new car sales are on some sort of finance agreement.
In 20 years time very little will have changed

Generali

ging84 wrote: »

lose the bit about car insurance an i'm interested

Funnily enough I was just thinking that the headline could be punchier.:rotfl:

ruggedtoast

I'm curious as to how this technology can cope with unpredictable other human drivers.

I'm wondering particularly about situations in crowded city traffic where you can't pull out unless you get a nod or a flash from another driver.

michaels

I clearly watch too much sci-fi. Once our ships, planes, cars and infrastructure are all controlled by computer does that not make us rather vulnerable to human hackers or even a skynet type computer intelligence?

ruggedtoast

I personally think the automation stuff is a bit of a crock. The most advanced robot AI now can just about climb up a staircase without falling over and then pick up a coffee cup that someone has placed for it in a place it can find it.

Google's self driving algorithms work well in the US where the roads are long, straight and largely arranged on a grid pattern. I would like to see how it copes with having to change lanes in rush hour in downtown LA, as my experience of American drivers in New York, St Louis and Atlanta is that you can leave your indicators on til the cows come home, but they will not create a gap for you unless you start making one yourself.

I can't begin to imagine how a Google car would cope on Hangar Lane at rush hour. Its GPS lane guidance would be useless and it wouldnt be able to move over without being able to understand light flashes and body language of the drivers behind it anyway.

This all looks great for googles R&D I'm sure but unless they ban human drivers from the road in one go I think we are decades away from any kind of real self driving car.

ruggedtoast

michaels wrote: »

I clearly watch too much sci-fi. Once our ships, planes, cars and infrastructure are all controlled by computer does that not make us rather vulnerable to human hackers or even a skynet type computer intelligence?

Google's vision of the future would be immensely vulnerable to this yes.

Bill Gates has historically never been very keen on the idea of cloud computing, and I once saw an interview with him in the early zeros getting quite angry with a journalist who was predicting all PCs would be replaced by dumb terminals networked to a cloud servers, thereb y freeing consumers from the burden of endlessly updating home and office computers.

Obviously Microsoft has a vested interest in this not happening but one of his main problems with the idea was security and privacy, and the vulnerability of even a well run cloud network to attack or failure.

Ten years on I think I agree with him. I trust google about as far as I can throw Africa, and the more important I find it that there is a walled garden on my PC than can keep them and the likes of Facebook out, no matter how useful their social networking and free email facilities are.

System

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ljcDe6n-io

Baby steps.

tomterm8

I don't see it, myself. These are multinational big corporations. If car insurance became unnecessary they'd just diversify into another sector.

purch

I never read threads with the word Apocalypse in the title :eek: