Why would driverless cars lead to a reduction of people owning cars? I don’t care who drives my car, it is still MY car. It still needs to be in my garage when I want to go someplace.
Also, as I’ve said for years, most insurance claims are not for accidents. They are for vandalism, car break ins, hail damage, tree limbs falling on your windshield, scrapes in a parking lot, etc. Who (or what) ever is driving the car has nothing to do with those
Nothing in the article says that there will be a reduction in people owning cars. That’s not the deal.
As to the other point, yes, it may well be that car owners will still need (smaller) policies for all that non-accident stuff. These are policies that agents will still be selling. But as the severity on those claims is much smaller, most of the premium will shift over to the manufacturers and tech firms – and they will be dealing with the insurance companies. So the shift is away from the agents, and away from personal lines to national-level commercial lines.
I do hope independent agents aren’t looking at this headline and thinking that everything will be fine. Agents need to plan for a future very different than the present, in terms of core products and customer acquisition strategies.
There’s some wishful thinking in this article. It’s probably true that there won’t be a sudden car insurance Armageddon considering that autonomous vehicles owned by fleets will take several decades to proliferate, but eventually–20-25(?) years–with tens of trillions of miles of very safe operations in fleet ownership, the fleet owners will have all of the pricing leverage when it comes to negotiating a single, corporate-level insurance policy–that will devastate the car insurance business as we know it. But it won’t happen over night–that I agree with.
Could be a shift from a human underwriter to an automated one as well, if your prediction is true. Telematics take the place of loss control. So, at least there will be some significant reduction in expense, which may help with profitability measures.
Why would driverless cars lead to a reduction of people owning cars? I don’t care who drives my car, it is still MY car. It still needs to be in my garage when I want to go someplace.
Also, as I’ve said for years, most insurance claims are not for accidents. They are for vandalism, car break ins, hail damage, tree limbs falling on your windshield, scrapes in a parking lot, etc. Who (or what) ever is driving the car has nothing to do with those
Nothing in the article says that there will be a reduction in people owning cars. That’s not the deal.
As to the other point, yes, it may well be that car owners will still need (smaller) policies for all that non-accident stuff. These are policies that agents will still be selling. But as the severity on those claims is much smaller, most of the premium will shift over to the manufacturers and tech firms – and they will be dealing with the insurance companies. So the shift is away from the agents, and away from personal lines to national-level commercial lines.
I do hope independent agents aren’t looking at this headline and thinking that everything will be fine. Agents need to plan for a future very different than the present, in terms of core products and customer acquisition strategies.
There’s some wishful thinking in this article. It’s probably true that there won’t be a sudden car insurance Armageddon considering that autonomous vehicles owned by fleets will take several decades to proliferate, but eventually–20-25(?) years–with tens of trillions of miles of very safe operations in fleet ownership, the fleet owners will have all of the pricing leverage when it comes to negotiating a single, corporate-level insurance policy–that will devastate the car insurance business as we know it. But it won’t happen over night–that I agree with.
Could be a shift from a human underwriter to an automated one as well, if your prediction is true. Telematics take the place of loss control. So, at least there will be some significant reduction in expense, which may help with profitability measures.