Why Technology-Enhanced Cars Aren’t Necessarily Driving Down Claims … Yet

While Level 5 autonomous vehicles aren’t commonplace yet, the car of today already looks vastly different than the vehicles that were on the roads a decade ago — an evolution that has implications for insureds’ exposures and insurance needs. “Already, new cars today typically have dozens of sensors built into them,” said Drew Aldrich (pictured), principal at American Family Ventures, and a panelist at the upcoming Emerging Risks & Innovation Summit in New York. “As the sensors in the cars become increasingly important to making decisions or actions in the car — nudging the car from swerving into lanes or accident avoidance — the actual compute has to be done in the car itself. It can’t be sent to the cloud for the compute to be held there and then sent back — the feed just doesn’t require it — so that’s causing lots of really interesting things in the world of edge computing, where the actual computer doing all of the compute work is happening in the vehicle itself.”