New Zealand's insurance industry is grappling with how to deal with the advent of driverless cars. Research in the United States by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has predicted that driverless cars and autonomous driving technology could cut US$20 billion from insurance premiums worldwide by 2020. At the moment, vehicle insurance makes up 42 per cent of all non-life gross premiums. Peter Shaw, chief executive at vehicle safety research firm Thatcham Research, said manufacturers were predicting highly autonomous vehicles, capable of allowing the driver to drop "out of the loop" for certain sections of their journey, would be available from around 2021.
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"Without doubt, crash frequency will also dramatically reduce. We've already seen this with the adoption of Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) on many new cars.
"Research predicts that by 2035, as a result of autonomous and connected cars, crashes will be reduced by 80 per cent. Additionally, if a crash unfortunately can't be avoided, then the impact speed will also drop as a result of the system's performance - reducing the severity of the crash," he said.
Tim Grafton, chief executive of the Insurance Council of New Zealand, said it was something that New Zealand insurance companies were thinking about.
"This isn't going to happen overnight, but if you look ahead 15 or 20 years, it will be a significant change for the insurance industry."
If New Zealand got to the point where all cars were driverless, the accident rate would drop significantly and the cars would be insured based on manufacturer liability. That would be a different environment for insurers, he said.
But they would still need to offer cover for theft, vandalism and break-in of vehicles. "That's not going to go away with driverless cars."
Even with autonomous cars, he said there would probably be situations where drivers would still have the ability to take over, and then the responsibility for a crash would still rest with them as opposed to the manufacturer of the car.
Coby Duggan, Volvo NZ national manager, said the insurance industry would have no choice but to react.
"The medium to long-term impact on the insurance industry is likely to be significant. Autonomous driving technology is the single most important advance in automotive safety to be seen in recent years. It will mean fewer accidents, fewer injuries, fewer fatalities and fewer costs for vehicle owners," he said.
Volvo will start the UK's most extensive autonomous trial, called Drive Me UK, in 2017, with up to 100 driverless cars being driven on real roads, part of its global push to develop AD cars with similar programmes to be run in Sweden and China.
"It's something that insurers are thinking about a lot," Grafton said. "If by 2040 all cars are autonomous that's a very different scene with significant implications. A lot of disruptive technology impacts a lot of industries and that affects the insurers working with them. It's not being ignored. It's being focused on within proportion to what its impact is currently."
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