Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.
People have to drive the same distance regardless. Whether it's human or computer error leading to the accident is irrelevant to your premium. To a car insurance company it's all about rates and risks.
Assuming driverless cars are shown to be safer than humans - and they'll have to be in order to get approval - your car insurance company would be stupid not to cover them. From their perspective it's simple economics. The accident rate is lower, thus the potential liability is lower.
If your insurer isn't willing to insure your driverless car, you'll switch to someone who does. If no established provider insures driverless, that's a no-brainer company to start. Similar payments in a high-margin industry with lower average payouts? Yes, please.
Liability is the easy part.
Buy from an insurance agency = safe but more expensive.
Self-insure = cheaper but riskier.
Insuring a vehicle is just figuring out what the likely payout ratio across a cohort of those vehicles is going to be, then working backwards from there to come up with a premium that will cover the claim amounts, administrative costs and provide a pool of funds to invest.
Lots of things are insured today with no interest in who is operating them. Automated cars are no different to that.
Essentially you're imaging a current situation (where a driver is insured) and transferring that to a situation with no driver. That's wrong.
Insurance companies don't care - they just want to be able to predict what the likely payout rate is. And that's how much it will cost. If that includes cover for buggy code, it just means a higher premium. Essentially younger drivers have buggier driving code, and that's why they cost more to insure.
I will never understand why people think insurance companies will be a barrier to adoption. Insurance companies are going to love this. I think the tipping point will be when insurance rates on driving your own car skyrocket.
Yes. The logic goes like this. 'Currently I'm an insured driver'. I will have a car with no driver. It therefore cannot be insured.
Where I live cars are already insured for third-party personal damages, regardless of who is driving them. It's a fixed-cost premium attached and paid at vehicle registration time. Thus, if you are injured in a motor vehicle accident, regardless of who is at fault, you (or your heirs) will be paid compensation in a regulated environment. This is a functioning market which doesn't adjust for driver age or experience, but instead collectively insures all vehicles on the road, and pays out when a claim is made. Periodically, when more than one insurer is involved, they will negotiate an 'at fault' percentage in order to work out which ratio at which the claims are attributed to each insurer. This may involve discussion of the drivers actions (to determine fault), but the payout is always made - because the vehicle itself is the thing that is insured.
In this system, the only way the driver can become liable for the claim is if they specifically and deliberately engaged in a criminal act, such as driving an unregistered vehicle, or driving under influence. Mere speeding or red-light running doesn't void the insurance (as these are traffic infringements rather than criminal acts). And in these cases, the insurance company still pays out the compensation, but may proceed to recover the compensation from the driver that broke the law.
This type of system would easily be translated to driverless vehicles. The owner of the vehicle would pay a registration fee, and a portion of that fee would be passed onto the owners choice of insurer (or a valid certificate of insurance would need to be presented for registration, which is the same thing). As long as the insurance was paid, then third-party personal and property damage would be paid out to any accident claimants. If the insurance company then decided someone was directly liable for causing the claim (such as tampering with vehicle systems or negligent coding) then they could recover the claim money.
Such a system would be a vast improvement on the current situation, whereby it's the driver that is insured, and because of the various risk factors, insurance premiums are all over the place. As a result, the riskiest drivers also tend to be the ones lacking insurance, which is the worst case for someone who needs to make a claim.
But then insurance is one of the most misunderstood products around, so I guess it's not surprising that ignorance of how it works abounds.
Is there any reason to believe that insurance companies won't just happily write policies priced for automated cars, and everything will proceed pretty much like it does now? You drive around, accidents happen, insurance companies pay out to the injured parties, and adjust the rates on automatic cars to match the real cost to operate?
If I were Google, I would just make some kind of deal with an insurance company to handle all scenarios where a crash occurs when a vehicle is in autonomous mode and bundle said insurance in with the cost of the vehicle.
Insurance (assuming the owner has it in force) may pay, but the liability still rests with the owner.
Signing an agreement will not make people alert and ready.
We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.
Well "shift" implies that it must be one place or the other; in reality, liability is not zero-sum, so one party having reduced liability doesn't imply another party has more, and vice versa.
This is particularly the caseWe are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.
In the case of automotive systems, there's no reason the driver, owner, and manufacturer all can't be liable, and no reason that any changes in the degree of liability for one have to be reflected at all in the liabilities of the others.