Swiss Re looks to assess autonomous vehicle risk for insurance industry

A new research collaboration between  Swiss Re and Waymo aims to study autonomous vehicles (AVs) to understand their behaviours and develop new risk assessment methodologies for the insurance industry.

The safe deployment of AV technology could “revolutionise” the mobility space, by advancing road safety and fostering new business models, but the insurance industry might not be equipped with the right knowledge and data to assess this novel risk, Swiss Re suggested in its new report.

Swiss Re believes that AVs will likely result in a significant shift in risk rating factors characteristics, from driver-centric to vehicle-centric, with traditional insurance parameters are expected to become “negligible”.

Furthermore, the lack of claims data will make the conception of alternative risk assessment methodologies “a must-have”, it noted.

Swiss Re highlighted that it has the potential to promote a safe deployment and adoption of AVs worldwide, producing a tangible positive impact on road safety and, in turn, on the insurance industry capabilities to tailor their pricing and coverages to meet the needs of this technology.

Swiss Re and Waymo will share their respective cutting-edge risk and technology knowledge to set the way of the industry towards a standard for the assessment of AVs risk.

Pranav Pasricha, global head of P&C solutions, Swiss Re, said: "Our vision is to make the world more resilient and help close the protection gap. By entering into a collaboration with Waymo, we continue our work on enabling insurance of autonomous vehicles and thereby contributing to creating safer roads. This is of great importance to the industry, which very soon needs to tackle a big paradigm shift in its largest risk pool of motor insurance."

Tilia Gode, head of risk & insurance at Waymo, added: “As autonomous driving technology companies like Waymo progress in their mission to make roadways safer, we expect there to be fewer claims' data to feed existing insurance underwriting and actuarial models. This calls for an evolution of the traditional methods and the use of new data sources in innovative ways. Both Waymo and Swiss Re are leaders in their fields and well positioned to help solve these problems for our respective industries.”

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