The key roles autonomous vehicles can play

The arrival of autonomous vehicles will disrupt long-standing sectors, including insurance and healthcare but offer new and necessary solutions, according to an industry observer

Steve Greenfield, CEO of Automotive Ventures, told attendees at the MEMA Aftermarket Suppliers Aftermarket Technology Conference in Springfield, Missouri, that the automotive sector has moved slowly to adapt, making it hard to predict when such change will take place.

“There’s this tension around trying to forecast when these changes will actually happen,” he said, adding that many industry forecasts have proven incorrect.

But, he predicted that the shift to widespread vehicle autonomy is now inevitable.

“Consultants are almost always wrong,” Greenfield told attendees before describing significant changes ahead as automated vehicles take up a larger share of the car parc.

Success will likely be found in dense metro areas. As autonomous vehicles become widespread and a more trusted resource, people will rethink their mobility preferences. They may realize they don’t need all those cars parked in their driveway.

“Maybe I need one car, and then I’m going to supplement that where I could do ride-hailing,” Greenfield said. “If that cost per mile gets dramatically less, which the promise is, without a human driving, the cost for ride hailing …  should be dramatically less.”

Greenfield noted the broad impact on insurance, pointing out that “there are startups right now building insurance products for autonomous vehicles.”

It won’t matter if you have traffic tickets or if you’re a good driver. But there is still a need to figure out how to insure these vehicles and determine what happens in a collision, he pointed out.

Healthcare could see effects as well.

“If we can start to reduce the 42,000 deaths in America each year that happen as a result of automobile accidents,” Greenfield pointed out, adding that the strain on the healthcare system would go down. Consumers could see insurance costs decrease if the person being covered is riding in an autonomous vehicle.

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