Autonomous vehicles will fundamentally change how we think about personal mobility. Many services we use today — from gas stations to mechanic’s shops — will have to adapt to a world without drivers.

In the transition to autonomous vehicles, the auto insurance industry will be one of the most interesting to watch. What will it mean to insure fleets of autonomous vehicles?

Early on at Voyage, we realized there would be a dramatic shift in the risk profile associated with operating a large fleet of AVs. As we ramped up preparations for scaling our fleet in 2019, we knew we needed an insurance partner who was equally excited about developing new solutions to ensure the safety of all stakeholders in the world of autonomous transportation.

That need led us to Intact Financial, the largest provider of property and casualty insurance in Canada, and a leading provider of specialty insurance in North America. Intact has a track record of innovation in automotive insurance, structuring partnerships with Uber and Turo to develop custom ride-sharing and car-sharing insurance solutions for their Canadian operations.

From our first meeting with Intact, our teams were in total lockstep. We were excited about their depth of expertise in data modeling and Machine Learning, and our groups immediately began to brainstorm an interesting concept: real-time insurance premiums.

Output from the Velodyne VLS-128 LIDAR

Car insurance today is heavily based on statistical analysis of data — everything from driving history, to driver demographics, vehicle type, and geographic location. Knowing that, Intact presented a really interesting question: what could we do with the enormous amount of data generated every second in Voyage’s autonomous vehicles?

What if insurance premiums could be adjusted in real-time as we drove, taking into account environmental factors? Insurance premiums could be adjusted dynamically — automatically lowering when driving in an empty parking lot, and readjusting on a busy street with pedestrians. Our vehicles already construct and record a 360-degree view of the world, so sharing that data directly with Intact felt like a natural way of developing activity and risk profiles of our operating environments.