Yearly, almost 1.4 million lives are lost, and 50 million people are injured on roads globally. ADAS, a technology designed to assist drivers, has shown huge potential in reducing the number of road crashes and mitigating the number of fatalities and severe injuries.
In the last 10 years, car and other vehicle manufacturers have been accelerating the rollout of ADAS. Insurers, however, have been slow in catching up as they still mostly rely on static demographic factors for premium calculation rather than taking the full implications of ADAS into account. In 2019 Swiss Re launched the ADAS Risk Score with the aim of creating a vehicle-specific insurance rating that primary carriers can use to calculate insurance premiums, taking driver assistance systems into account.
Swiss Re and Veoneer share a mutual interest in gaining the best possible insights into the safety effects of ADAS in order to further improve and tailor the performance of such systems to drivers' habits, and accurately evaluate them.
Through this partnership, Veoneer will enhance its ADAS technology using Swiss Re's empirical knowledge of performance of ADAS systems based on insurance-relevant insights and comprehensive approach to risk modelling. A better understanding of how a vehicle is driven in specific contexts, such as differing road or weather conditions, will reveal the opportunities and limitations of current systems in more detail.
At the same time, Swiss Re will benefit from Veoneer's expertise on ADAS hardware and software technologies. This information will feed into the Swiss Re ADAS Risk Score to the benefit of car manufacturers. Consequently, insurers will gain from being able to assess the latest car safety technologies for insurance purposes.
Swiss Re's global head p&c solutions Pranav Pasricha said: "We're delighted to further our work on advanced driving assistance systems through the partnership with Veoneer. We thereby respond to our clients' needs of being able to accurately assess the latest ADAS technologies and their potential impact on future claims. "
Steven Jenkins, chief technology officer at Veoneer, said: "With extended knowledge about the real-world performance of various ADAS technologies in different parts of the world, we can develop systems used by vehicle manufacturers globally that support drivers in an even better way. It forms the next step in collaborative driving, putting both driver and technology in focus."