asIs UBI telematics the connected car shortcut?
User-based insurance is blazing a trail others would like to follow and is also discovering the challenges.
The ITS sector needs to keep a very careful eye on the automotive industry: “There’s a war going on in the connected car space creating richer datasets than we ever imagined possible” says Paul Stacy, research and development director of Wunelli, part of the LexisNexis group. The car makers have gone way beyond infotainment, unlocking huge amounts of data in the process … facts and figures which the insurance and ITS industries can use for a multitude of different purposes.
For instance, Stacy told the recent Insurance Telematics Europe 2015 conference in London, the Co-operative car insurance group “now has 84% of its policy holders logging on once a month to check their status.” People are getting more and more comfortable with using the data they generate when they drive, provided they can see the benefits to them as a consumer.
For ITS professionals, mobility will remain a key issue. Iain Macbeth, behaviour change programme manager with Transport for London (TfL), told the conference he hopes this new wave of data will help the UK capital cope with becoming the first megacity in Western Europe. It is a place that needs to keep moving. London experiences 26 million journeys a day with 3 million taking place on the underground and 6 million on the buses. The city’s 8.4 million population will mushroom to more than 10 million by 2030 and the TfL knows that it will have to continue developing its road infrastructure, underground and overground rail networks, tram systems, cable car lines, river buses, taxi fleets and cycleways. If it doesn’t, gridlock and economic catastrophe looms.
London’s projected population growth “is the equivalent of putting the whole of Birmingham and Leeds inside the M25 (London’s orbital motorway) in the next 15 years,” says Macbeth. Two new cities are about to crash into in an already overcrowded urban sprawl. Make no mistake, “the big issue for us is mobility” he said. Despite the fact that London is building a new east-west Crossrail train line (currently the biggest infrastructure project in Europe) and extending its north-south Northern Line metro route, roads are - and will remain - the key battleground. London is spending more than £4billion ($6.2billion) over six years on these initiatives, and it knows there will be more to come.
Where is insurance telematics now, asked Josep Celaya of Mapfre.
HERE's Beaumont said his company's data can be the basis of differentiating UBI policies.
TfL is currently running a series of autonomous vehicle tests in Greenwich, south-east London. “There are going to be lots of baby steps along the way to the autonomous car,” says Macbeth. Things are not going to happen fast, but the benefits are there to be seen. “30% of London’s congestion is due to very minor collisions.” Maybe autonomous cars could stop these collisions taking place? And maybe autonomous vans and light goods vehicles could help businesses in the city cope with a chronic shortage of young commercial vehicle drivers? Perhaps this new dynamic will also encourage more and more people to think twice about making a short car journey of only 1km to 2km? Maybe not.
The interactive digital map will be “the core of everything” in the future. According to Peter Beaumont, director of enterprise customer and market development at Nokia subsidiary HERE, the next generation of digital maps will help the ITS sector use location technology to improve the efficiency of business and traffic management.
2 billion search and geocode requests and 390 million routing instructions.
• Platform extensions (custom location, platform data, route matching, toll costing, mobile SDK).
• driving alerts and coaching aids such as speeding and upcoming hazards and eco-driving feedback.