



OMAHA — Google wants its self-driving cars to be on the road in five years. Warren Buffett may be starting to fret about that.

Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns the massive auto insurer Geico. If self-driving cars take off, Geico and its competitors could easily take a hit, Buffett says.

“That is a real threat to the auto insurance industry,” Buffett said at his company’s annual meeting here Saturday. “If [self-driving cars] prove successful and reduce accidents dramatically, it will be very good for society and very bad for auto insurers.”

Self-driving cars use video cameras, radar sensors, lasers and 3D mapping technology to navigate the road ahead. Google has positioned them as a way to reduce by half the 1.2 million lives lost every year in traffic accidents. Yet insurers fear a reduced rate of collisions could lead to lower premiums, ultimately hurting their bottom lines.

Still, Buffett said autonomous cars would not cause him to think "for one second" of selling Geico, which he repeatedly praised at the meeting. He and his longtime investing partner, Charlie Munger, also questioned how long it would take for driverless cars to gain mass appeal.

"Some of these things happen a lot more slowly than you might be think," Munger said. "I have a feeling that self-driving cars that have a huge impact on the market might take a while."

Some of the technology required to create a fully automated car is already in use. Newer car models can park themselves, detect dangerous objects in a blind spot, adjust the speed of cruise control and assist with parking.

At a panel of automotive experts at this week's Milken Institute Global Conference (which I covered here), nearly all agreed that a self-driving car would happen; timing was the only question. Even U.S. safety regulators vowed not to stand in the way of such technology.

But Buffett, 83, predicted his insurer would still be doing well five, 10 or 30 years in the future. After that? "I'll go peacefully without knowing," he joked.

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Photo: Stanford Center for Internet and Society/Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.