READING THE ROAD

220+ MILLION AUTONOMOUS

MILES DRIVEN

Are we ready for automated vehicles?

“Data is the new fuel”

Alex Glassbrook, Barrister, Temple Garden Chambers

Automated vehicles: The data revolution behind the driving revolution

For years, we have referred to vehicles equipped with increasingly sophisticated advanced driver assistance systems as computers on wheels. But the advent of automated vehicles requires us to go a step further: to think of these vehicles as robots on wheels. 

The distinction is more than a turn of phrase. A computer processes information; a robot uses information to sense, decide and act in the physical world. That is the transition taking place with automated vehicles. Sophisticated algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) will use huge quantities of data to make decisions that directly control a physical vehicle - steering, accelerating, braking and responding to the world around it.

Once digital decisions determine how a vehicle behaves on the road, questions about that data - where it comes from, how it is used, who can access it and whether it can be trusted - become much more significant. An automated vehicle is not simply a conventional car with the driver removed. It is a connected digital system operating in the physical world.

That matters profoundly for insurers.

How will an insurer establish what happened after a collision? Who controls the information generated during a journey? How will fraud evolve when evidence is digital as well as physical? What happens when a vehicle is hacked? Where will its data be stored, and who gets access when something goes wrong?

The common thread is data.

From physical to digital evidence

Traditional motor claims have largely been built around human behaviour: who was driving, what did they see and what did the witnesses say? 

Automation changes that evidential landscape. Following an incident, a key question may be whether the human or automated driving system was in control - followed by what the system detected, what decisions it made and whether it was operating within the conditions for which it was designed.

The vehicle itself, therefore, becomes an increasingly important witness.

That does not mean insurers need every piece of information it generates. AV developers have legitimate commercial reasons for protecting the huge datasets and proprietary systems underpinning their technology.

The challenge is to identify a limited, proportionate and standardised dataset that enables insurers and compensators to establish what happened and deal with claims efficiently.

“The amount of data that's gone in just to get them operating is absolutely ludicrous. It is amounts of data that we can't even begin to fathom.” 

Tom Leggett, Vehicle Technology and Research Manager, Thatcham Research