A British research project featuring Jaguar Land Rover, Bosch and Direct Line could drive down insurance premiums with the development of more efficient data collection software for cars equipped with autonomous driving capability. Insurance experts predict that the higher costs related to driverless cars, their more complicated hardware and the public's unfamiliarity with them will initially increase insurance premiums when such vehicles arrive on our roads in earnest. But Move UK, a London-based project supported by £3.4 million of government funding, is investigating ways to efficiently use data to combat insurance hikes. JLR has supplied a fleet of five Land Rover Discovery Sports equipped with Bosch forward-facing cameras and radars to Greenwich Borough Council, another Move UK partner, for its employees to use as daily transport. The technology onboard each vehicle has been designed to only record ‘events’, such as hard braking manoeuvres and unexpected changes to road furniture, rather than all moments of a journey, by intelligently recognising these important incidents. Without this system of recording, Move UK predicts that the amount of data recorded and collected by a fully autonomous car could exceed 8GB per second. That huge amount of data would prove costly and time-consuming for an insurer like Direct Line to filter through in order to determine the risks presented by autonomous cars on urban roads. By using the more streamlined data-collection system being researched by Move UK, potential risks can be evaluated in less time, enabling insurers to quickly build a picture of how self-driving cars operate. Direct Line's director of motor development, Dan Freedman, told Autocar that the long-term effect of this could be lower premiums, "even though the cost of cars equipped with driverless technology may initially push them up".
Jaguar Land Rover ( JLR ) , Bosch and Direct Line have teamed up for a research project aiming to streamline the data collection from autonomous vehicles . The companies are hoping an organised data collection method will help to drive down insurance premiums when the usage of autonomous cars increases . As part of the project , JLR is using Bosch cameras and other devices in all of its vehicles , aiming to record meaningful events , such as hard braking and sudden changes to road characteristics . Focusing on these occurrences should allow data to be processed more easily , helping to determine insurance premium pricing .