Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military - Velodyne Lidar

End Users
Is Your
Guy Fraker
Driverless Car
in Good Hands
Insurance Remains a Hurdle for Driverless Car Technology
Driverless cars pose a host of technological and even
social acceptance challenges, but there’s another issue
that must be resolved before they truly take to
the roads — insurance.
“There is a new era of mobility. ... You’re seeing new drive
trains, new metals, new glass, autonomous functions,
shared transportation, at a hockey-stick growth rate, and
one of the only places where all of those trends come
together in a way that affects the consumer pocketbook
immediately is insurance,” says Guy Fraker, a technology
consultant and former Innovation Director from within
the insurance industry. Fraker has studied the issue of
insurance and driverless technology since 2007.
One problem for the industry in general is that it is
regulated by 51 separate state commissioner offices, so
setting insurance rates means getting approval 51 times,
with some of those processes taking years.
“If they [insurance companies] file a rate wrong, it can
take years to get a corrective filing approved, even if it’s
a discount, and may require tens of millions of dollars in
programming hours,” Fraker tells Mission Critical.
“You have 51 independent, uncoordinated state insurance
commissioners. They are typically not a regulatory
body sought out in advance of broad-scale vehicle deployment
as their role is to react to rate filings from insurers
who have taken those factors into account. If an
auto manufacturer is going to come out with something
dramatic, they will go to the DMV, but not necessarily
the department of insurance. However, now that a
‘driver’ may be an artificial intelligent operating system,
the time will come for this to change.”
Another big question facing both auto manufacturers
and insurers centers on the cost of repair. For instance,
a new design might feature radar sensors installed low
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