4 Ways Driverless Cars Are Poised to Shake up Insurance
3. Early Adopters Already Need Coverage
Basil Enan, the CEO of online broker CoverHound, says that he sees Google self-driving cars "a couple times a week" around his home in the Bay Area. Many of his customers, he adds, are cut from the same cloth of tech-savvy drivers.
"A lot of our customers are likely to be the ones who are more early adopters of those products," he says. "We already see some insurers provide discounts for semi-driverless technologies. The insurance companies tend to take a very slow approach to these things but it's very compelling for our customers."
But there's an offset to that, he notes: "Many of the cars we see with those functions are very expensive, so you have premiums offsetting the discounts. Cars are also getting more expensive to fix because they're designed with things that total the car to save the passenger."
Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio
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