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TUK-Automotive September 2015--Insurance

Insurance Telematics USA 2015

The Insurance Telematics USA Conference & Exhibition is the largest and most informative forum for executives from across the connected car and motor insurance industries.

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Where the UBI Industry Has come to do Business Since 2010

Join 800+ senior decision makers at The Insurance Telematics USA 2015 Conference & Exhibition (2-3 September at the Radisson Aqua Blu, Chicago) to take your place at the cutting edge of the motor insurance evolution.

  • 70+ Speakers: Executives from Progressive, Ford, The Hartford, MAPFRE, Zurich, Volkswagen, American Family and Liberty Mutual will lay out the tech. & business solutions they need to streamline claims and create product diversification
  • 5 Brand New Tracks On: The Consumer at the Heart of UBI Data, The Connected Car Disrupter, Insurance Telematics & Claims, Business Model & Tech. Innovations and Data Decisions & UBI – Customize your own conference agenda and find the gaps in the market ready for innovative products and services
  • 800+ Senior Attendees From Across North America: This is only event to gather a truly nationwide audience. Make partnerships across the country to prepare your UBI business for mass deployment – 55% of attendees are from insurance carriers

 

D20 Stock Index vs Dow Jones

Google Props Up Drifting Driverless Stock Index

Driverless Transportation

Propped up by Google (GOOG), the Driverless Transportation (D20) Stock Index gained 0.3 percent last week to finish up 0.47 points at 153.73. Buoyed by the Alphabet announcement, Google added $21.82 and its stock closed at $657.12 on Friday. Without Google’s rise, the D20 Index would have lost 1.71 points, or 1.1 percent. Google’s 3.4 percent gain was tops in the D20 which saw 12 losers and eight gainers last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, with a 0.6 percent gain, and the S&P 500, with a 0.7 percent gain, outperformed the D20.

The recent devaluation in the Chinese currency, the Yuan, has hurt the lucrative Chinese market for the luxury German automakers. Daimler (DDAIF), owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand, lost 6.3 percent of its value and finished the week down $5.79 to $86.21. Volkswagen (VLKPY), owner of the prestigious Audi brand, lost $1.60, or 3.9 percent, to end the week at $39.94. The French parts maker Valeo SA (VLEEY) also seemed to be affected by the devaluation. Its ADR shares lost 6.7 percent of their value to close the week at $65.30. Further devaluations of the Yuan could rattle the larger markets and negatively affect the D20 Index.

Visit the Driverless Transportation D20 Stock Index page to learn more about it and its component stocks.

ESV Show

Enhanced Safety of Vehicles

After more than 25 years, once again the International Technical Conference on Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) is being hosted by Sweden. The ESV conference is internationally focused on vehicle safety and is supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and many other participating Governments across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.
The ESV conference is unique and invaluable to the global community. It provides opportunities to share innovative advances in motor vehicle safety and encourage international cooperation. ESV attendees include members of governments, automobile manufacturers and their suppliers, safety researchers and other motor vehicle safety professionals, medical, insurance, legal and policy professionals, consumers, academia, students and international media.
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UMTRI1

Autonomous Vehicles — Much More Efficient, Just as Many Sold

Burney Simpson

Automakers can breathe a sigh of relief.

According to a new study, a U.S. filled with fully-autonomous driverless vehicles could see a huge drop in the number of vehicles per household but there will be no corresponding decline in the total number of vehicles sold.

“While each household would potentially own fewer vehicles, they would put significantly more miles on the vehicle(s) that they do own. So households might trade owning fewer vehicles for needing to replace them much more often,” Brandon Schoettle, co-author with Michael Sivak of “Potential Impact of Self-Driving Vehicles on Household Vehicle Demand and Usage,” writes to Driverless Transportation in an email.

These driverless vehicles are defined as Full Self-Driving Automation (Level 4) by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The agency says a Level 4 vehicle “perform(s) all safety-critical driving functions and monitor(s) roadway conditions for an entire trip.” The agency categorizes vehicles as Level 0 to Level 4 depending on their autonomous capabilities, with 4 as the highest.

Once Level 4 vehicles are widely available the average number of vehicles-per-household would drop 43 percent, from today’s 2.1 to 1.2, according to Schoettle and Sivak, researchers with the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan.

That’s because many households would purchase a single Level 4 vehicle to replace multiple cars without driverless capability, treating their high-tech cars as ‘return-to-home’ vehicles.

Theoretically, these households only use a vehicle when necessary and it then drives itself home, instead of sitting parked for most of the day. For example, the driverless car drops off the commuter in a household at a public transit station around 8 a.m., and the vehicle returns home. Other household members use it twice during the day. Around 5 p.m., the vehicle drives itself back to the station to pick up the commuter for the return trip home.

The researcher’s analysis of the 2009 National Household Travel Survey from the U.S. Department of Transportation found that nearly 84 percent of household trips today do not overlap with other household trips. This suggests that only 16 percent of American households actually need to use two or more cars at the same time.

In this future-world where Level 4 cars are commonplace, households will run the vehicle for more hours-per-day and for more miles-per-year. This “would result in a 75 percent increase in individual vehicle usage” from 11,661 to 20,406 annual miles per vehicle, the report finds.

That would shorten vehicle lifespan from today’s average of more than 11 years to 6.5 years. That means households will need to replace their vehicle more often.

In addition, “(t)here is also the potential for non-drivers to become self-driving vehicle users, which would lead to more vehicles being purchased and/or more annual miles per vehicle,” notes Schoettle. “It could be the case that these forces combine to have only a minor impact on annual vehicle sales.”

The report suggests that further study is necessary, and acknowledges that many human factors are not taken into account in its conclusions. For instance, many consumers don’t want to share vehicles, and their commuter example assumes there is a place where people never miss trains that always run on time.

For the auto OEMs this report seems to offer pros and cons. On the one hand, consumers will demand tougher vehicles with more capabilities. On the other, that sounds like a good reason to raise prices.

UMTRI

University of Michigan Sustainable Worldwide Transportation

The study, Potential Impact of Self-Driving Vehicles on Household Vehicle Demand and Usage has been released by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, sponsored by the University of Michigan Sustainable Worldwide Transportation. The study is by Brandon Schoettle and Michael Sivak.

As noted in the abstract, the report presents an analysis of the potential for reduced vehicle ownership within households based on sharing of completely self-driving vehicles that employ a “return-to-home” mode, acting as a form of shared family or household vehicle. An examination of the latest U.S. National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data shows a general lack of trip overlap between drivers within a majority of households, opening up the possibility for a significant reduction in average vehicle ownership per household based on vehicle sharing.

Click here to read an abstract of the study. Please contact Michael Sivak at sivak@umich.edu for a copy of the full report.

 

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