Axa's Williams warns motor insurers against becoming obsolete

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Motor insurance is going to be "massively impacted” by the advent of autonomous vehicles, a senior Axa executive has warned.

David Williams, technical director at Axa, told the Insuring Autonomous Vehicles 2018 conference in London that motor insurers risked falling into obsolescence like Kodak or Blockbuster.

“We must not allow it to happen to the insurance industry,” he said.

Williams noted 75% of vehicles on the road are expected to be autonomous by 2025. As the margin for human error decreases, accident frequency could drop by 90%, he added.

As some car makers are now offering motor insurance, Williams said he was “concerned with them getting into that distribution role”.

He admitted: “They do have a better relationship with their customer.”

For insurers to make the most of connected cars, they need to process the data produced by the vehicles, Williams point out, raising two issues.

“An average autonomous vehicle produces an average 4TB of data a day,” he said, joking the IT systems of many insurance companies could struggle with that.

The second problem is access to vehicle data. “We’ve had a few squabbles with our motor manufacturing colleagues, German ones especially, who were keen on keeping it to themselves,” he said, adding a solution was on the horizon, with data going to a third party.

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