The idea behind self-driving cars is so that we can take out the human error in driving which could potentially lead to less accidents, less injuries, and hopefully less fatalities while on the road. However this also means that there would be less reason to claim insurance since we wouldn’t crash, which means that we might not even need insurance at all.This is a good thing, or is it? From a consumer standpoint we suppose it is, but it seems that some insurance companies don’t think so. Three insurance companies – Cincinnati Financial, Mercury General and the Travelers Companies – have recently expressed their worry that self-driving cars could affect their business in a negative manner.
Cincinnati felt that this could lead to “disruption of the insurance market caused by technology innovations such as driverless cars that could decrease consumer demand for insurance products.” However they are not alone as car part manufacturers believe that self-driving cars could also affect their business, namely the need for less spare parts since there would essentially be less accidents.
We reckon that’s a very cynical point of view but it seems that these companies need not worry, at least for now. According to Russ Rader, a spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “It takes a long time for new safety features to penetrate the fleet that’s on the road because people hang on to their vehicles for a long time. Even when a feature is mandated by federal regulations, it takes 3o years for it to penetrate 95% of the vehicles on the road.”
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