MOTOR MOUTH INSURANCE COULD BE A SELF-DRIVING ROADBLOCK
With no one at the wheel, automakers and tech types will be on the hook for crashes
There’s beginning to be an air of immediacy to this whole autonomous driving thing, a rising momentum that makes protestations of civil liberties lost — as in some day we may not be allowed to drive our own cars — and Rise of the Machine doomsdays (i.e., that the artificial intelligence we are building into our machines will eventually come back to haunt us) seem futile.
Indeed, a spate of recent announcements says there’s a good chance we’ll be sipping Champagne in the back of our computer-controlled cars long before Lord Elon manages to rid us all of the internal combustion engine.
First comes the news that Apple will be developing autonomous driving technology, but not actual cars. According to the official pronouncement — chief executive Tim Cook calling it “the mother of all AI projects” — the geniuses behind the iMac and iPhone will stick to what they do know rather than sticking their noses into something they know nothing about.
Google also realized there’s little point trading the extremely high profit margins (16.7 per cent in 2016) of the tech industry for the paltry three to six per cent pocket change common to automakers. With Waymo — Google’s new name for its division developing little self-driving runabouts — and Apple seemingly out of the car business, there’s a tad less pressure to rush to EVs, but an even larger focus at OEMs to get a giddy-up on their self-driving technology.
And, according to tech news site theinformation.com, it is these Silicon Valley interlopers that are leading the charge to driverless cars, the site’s auto-tech savvy senior writer, Amir Efrati, placing Waymo at the head of the self-driving pack, thanks to its ability to develop all its own hardware — notably a LIDAR system superior to its competitors’ — and a long-term focus only on self-driving.
It’s also not much of a surprise that Uber is right behind in second, the ride-hailing company’s main advantage being not so much technology but incentive, as any aspirations of future profitability rest on getting rid of all those pesky humans driving their definitely-not-taxis.
Quietly assuming the third spot is Daimler, the company’s longtime focus on high-tech electronic safety gadgets auguring well for the transformation to full-fledged autonomy. Because it sells its low-volume products to customers with relatively deep pockets, the traditional sellone-car-to-one-customer business model is not as threatened as lower-echelon automakers that will have to contend with volume drops as computerized cars promote the sharing of one car among multiple drivers and even multiple families.
Other contenders include Delphi (General Motors’ parts-producing spinoff ) and Tesla (the most aggressively autonomous of current automakers), and nuTonomy (an MIT spinoff dedicated to nothing but self-driving) and Baidu (China’s Google) offer some interesting technology. It’s perhaps a bit surprising to some to see GM and its partnership with Cruise ahead of seemingly more audacious competitors.
Indeed, Ford, despite its bold pronouncements of self-driving cars by 2021, is not rated nearly as highly in large part because its much-ballyhooed hookup with Waymo fell through.
But, that’s just the who. Much more important is the how. I don’t mean the technological innovations needed — the basic design of our driverless future has been written. Rather, I’m referring to the steps needed before we’re going to let a robot drive our cars anywhere. Jacques Aschenbroich, chief executive of auto parts giant Valeo, told the audience at the Viva Technology event last week in Paris that automakers — and the high-tech firms supplying them — should be liable if a self-driving car has an accident. He also told CNBC that, while “the carmaker will have to be at the centre … afterwards, if we are responsible of some failure in our algorithm, then it will come back to us.”
This is a huge societal transformation from the current model that places all of the responsibility — that should be read liability — on the driver. Automakers have long sought to reject responsibility for their products’ failures — Ford for its exploding Pintos, General Motors for its rolling Corvairs and, more recently, Audi and Toyota for their unintended acceleration.
So, for automakers — Volvo first broached this subject in 2015 when chief executive Hakan Samuelsson said the company “will accept full liability” whenever one of its cars is in autonomous mode — and part suppliers to accept liability for the accidents their self-driving cars create is perhaps a bigger paradigm shift than even the electric vehicle revolution we have been promised.
If this new-found responsibility becomes reality, not only will autonomous technology have a devastating effect on industries like trucking (three million-plus truckers in North America suddenly becoming obsolete), it also means the complete demise of the current automobile insurance industry, insurers and brokers alike. Instead of a supply chain — there are about 40,000 insurance brokers in Canada and some quarter million in the United States — that thrive on the policies of almost 300 million individual automobiles, a few large companies will simply need to insure the automakers and their autonomous technology supply chains.
In other words, Waymo may be leading the self-driving universe in technology but, inevitably, it will be this question of responsibility that will determine when — perhaps even if — our cars enjoy the complete autonomy we keep being promised.