There are many dystopian doom scenarios to choose from at present — death by AI, climate apocalypse, Pauline Hanson as PM — but here’s another one that should upset you only slightly less. In the very near future, autonomous technology is going to make driving your own car as expensive, and socially unacceptable, as smoking cigarettes.
And, as usual, the person I think we should blame, for now, is Elon Musk.
The thin end of this wedge seared into my brain lasdt week when Zurich Insurance announced that it was offering cheaper premiums to anyone who drives a Tesla fitted with the curiously named Full Self Driving (Supervised) system (one analogy would be Fully Automated Robot (via Remote Control).
After reviewing early stage data, Zurich’s underwriters have declared there is a lower accident frequency for Tesla drivers who are using the technology and that automated trips using FSD (Supervised) were safer than human-driven journeys.
I’ll just pause while you cogitate on that for a moment – relatively speaking, your insurance just got more expensive because you are more dangerous on the road than even a semi-autonomous system, let alone the properly self-driving cars that are around the corner.
Tesla says about half of its Australian owners have bought the system (oh yes, it costs extra) and that the data it has collected from 132 million kilometres of driving on our roads shows that FSD (Supervised) equipped vehicles had one seventh (or 14 per cent) as many crashes as those without it.
The insurer says assisted driving reduces risk enough to change the price, although each driver’s age, driving record and location will still determine the size of the saving.
Keep in mind that Tesla’s system is far from flawless — indeed I wouldn’t personally trust it — and that it uses only cameras, rather than the combination of cameras, LIDAR and radar systems favoured by Waymo, the Google-owned self-driving taxi company that’s currently racking up more than 500,000 paid rides a week across California, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, with New York, London, Tokyo and, most likely Sydney by next year.
(Tesla’s effort at actually FULL self driving, the Cybercab, is also sticking with a camera-only approach, with mixed safety results for its Texas trials thus far.)
The safety figures for Waymos are also impressive. Between 2021 and 2024 they were involved in 68 per cent fewer crashes serious enough to be reported to police and 81 per cent fewer crashes causing injury. (Those numbers are conservative because human drivers don’t always report accidents, robot drivers do.)
As Noah Goodall from the Virginia Transportation Research Council points out: “Reductions this big are basically unheard of when it comes to traffic safety. Not even seatbelts or airbags achieved the kinds of numbers we’re seeing here.”
While Bryant Walker Smith, an associate law professor who advises governments on regulations for self-driving cars declares: “What I always tell policymakers is that we absolutely should be concerned about automated driving, but we should be terrified of human driving.”
And that’s the point. As these automated systems are rolled out — and earlier this month, China’s Industry Ministry announced it would encourage large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles by 2030 — we human drivers will increasingly be seen as a problem and, from an insurance point of view, as an unnecessary risk.
Which means those of us who like driving will be like smokers – people who are made to pay for our seemingly suicidal fascination with, or addiction to, risky behaviours.
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