More and more companies are piloting heavy-duty autonomous vehicles (AVs), and as they hit the road, the trucking industry inches closer to disruption – and so does the insurance industry.
Insurance cost ranked seventh on the American Transportation Research Institute's (ATRI) 18th annual Top Industry Issues report for motor carriers, and Stephen Ritzler, team lead of trucking and logistics at CoverWallet, said the emergence of autonomous trucks could spark rising rates with every sized carrier, even if it is primarily the larger fleets utilizing the technology.
[Related: Who's liable when a self-driving truck causes a crash?]
“This is going to be an evolving rate scenario that's going to play out over the course of the next five to 10 years,” he said.
Luckily, both the insurance and trucking industries have time to adjust.
Kevin Abramson at Cover Whale said the industry is years – if not decades – away from seeing the true impact on insurance pricing. He said carriers will likely see a spike in insurance rates to start while the insurance industry determines the effects of having AVs on the road. But if AVs prove to be as safe as anticipated because they remove human error, from a sleepy driver to a distracted driver, he said they should drive the cost of insurance down across the trucking industry over time.
