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On the subject of cars with driver assistance:
Is anyone aware of Progressive/Geico/LiMu Emu offering discounts on cars that are so equipped? If they offered a monthly discount for certain collision avoidance options, it could make buying that option a net discount.
My understanding is that cars with advanced driver assistance features tend to have higher insurance premiums. That could be because those tend to be higher-end Mercedes and Volvos, but I think certain ADAS has trickled down to Toyota and Ford now…
The way it is supposed to work here is cars with driver assistance tech gets a higher NCAP rating, and insurers say NCAP is one of the things taken into account when determining risk. Lower risk, lower premiums in theory.
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I’d charge much higher premiums for driving assist features, based on my experience of BMW, VW, Skoda, Nissan, Kia, Toyota and Nissan. All of them fail completely on the roads around here.
On a stretch of dual carriageway on the bypass to our town, they have repaired the road and all of those systems try and follow the tar strips of the repair, instead of the road or the white lines, and crash the car into the central concrete barrier!
At an exit going in the other direction, there are again tar strips, where the road has been repaired and the cars try and go off the road and down the grass embankment, back onto the bypass!
It is very unnerving and I generally turn the feature off these days. My personal car, an older Nissan, just beeps when I cross the white lines, it beeps as well, when I drive over the tar strips, but at least it doesn’t actively try and crash the car!
Being from a place that gets enough snow that we have special equipment for clearing things like sidewalks, I’ve always wondered why they don’t automate the snow clearing by burying a wire under the surface as they build it, so that an onboard magnetometer, in combination with GPS, could be used for path following. The same would work in road lanes or road markings. Of course it would increase the cost of building the roads initially, but it would probably pay dividends in the long run for automation. I suppose there is the risk that a vandal would mess with it… but it being buried would make that harder than messing with, say, road signs.
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You would also need tens of millions of miles of wire, which would be very wasteful.