Senate, the upper house of the Australian parliament received a new proposal, which stated the need of new insurance requirements for the drivers who are working for the app based ride-hailing companies like Uber, Lyft, etc. officials of the auto insurance are having discussions in this regard. And it is also believed that, these ideas of the new auto-insurance requirements will help the victims of car accidents.
This bill would likewise shield the casualties from the blame of the monetary crumple. The arrangement behind the protection of the ride-hailing administrations will be accessible in a straight-forward manner. Presently the issue is with the self-driving cars. It is expected that there will be 3.5 million self-driving cars by 2020 and 4.5 million cars by 2030. The institute has quoted that, these vehicles will not remain as fully autonomous vehicles, Till a certain time they will become fully-autonomous vehicles.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ydhDQaLAqM]
The lawyer and the adjunct professor of insurance law at Georgetown University, Marc Mayerson said that, by some way the insurance companies have to provide the mechanism, which allows the compensation for car accidents. But, it is aimed that, self-driving cars will not create any sorts of negligence liability for the passenger ,since it is manufactured to avoid collision. Therfore it is expected that the personal insurance premiums of the self-driving car owners will be much lower.
Reference:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- agenda-driverless- insurance-20160620- snap-story.html
youtube link:
youtube.com/watch?v=bjQJwEKjz6g
Australia is not a single country which is leading the discussions on this issue. British insurance company Adrian Flux ‘launched what is thought to be the world’s first publicly-available driverless car insurance policy’ as pointed out by online resource Insurance Business (http://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/uk/news/breaking-news/adrian-flux-worlds-first-driverless-car-insurer-on-selfdriving-cars-and-insurance-40040.aspx). Besides, the Association of British Insurers (ABI) is insistent on the necessity of establishing an international standard set of core data that must be collected by autonomous vehicles and provided to insurance companies after a car accident. Sharing such set of data between insurers and carmakers supposed helps to establish liability in incidents involving driverless cars (http://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/uk/news/breaking-news/insurers-seek-standard-set-of-data-from-driverless-cars-40903.aspx).
Honestly speaking this topic evokes in me ambivalent attitude and mostly not in regards to what extent this will change the insurance industry or with what challenges will face the lawyers. But how ready people to trust their lives to the vehicles. Now there is too little statistic’s data and information about accidents involving self-driving cars to claim that they are completely safe. It is not difficult to find in the Internet information about some incidents with Tesla and Google cars. For the time being, I would prefer to drive or to be a passenger in a regular car/taxi, to which I am accustomed.
We have to see the number of future accidents by self-driving cars. As stated in this link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allan-smith/how-selfdriving-cars-will_b_10890256.html, approximately 10 million cars will be equipped with self-driving features by 2020. If the number of accidents will be lower than today, insurance companies will lower the premiums. Thus, the question of liability for insurance policies will be solved.