re: will car insurance be around in the next 10 years?

That's not self driving, you dullard.

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I would think it's totally possible for cars to drive themselves in the next ten years

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Possible, but HIGHLY unlikely. You'd need over 80% of the population on the autopilot transportation.They'd have to account for roads, weathering conditions on roads at any particular time, emergency vehicles coming through busy traffic intersections.

Its going to be a LONG time before car insurance goes away. Besides, they have to make these autonomous vehicles affordable for everyone else, and they aren't even appealing to the upper-middle class (whats left of it) very easily as is when it comes to vehicles that are capable of autonomous driving.

You also have to factor in the police, and how much control they might have over stopping someone (with or without cause) in a world of autonomous vehicles.

Your entire point is valid if autonomous vehicles become the large majority, but there are too many other factors to work through before we're close to even introducing the idea as a reality.

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You can post any article / study you want, but the simple fact is that google's driverless cars have not been at fault in a single one of their 14 accidents. That is with millions of miles logged.

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LINK

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Of the 341 times humans had to take over the cars in testing that took place in California in the 14 months leading up to November 2015, 272 of those times it was due to a failure in the autonomous technology installed in the pod-like vehicles, the report shows.

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These failures mostly consisted of software or perception errors. In all circumstances where such a failure occurs, the test driver receives a warning from the car and takes manual control. Each incident is recorded and later replayed in a simulator to work out what went wrong. In only 13 of the recorded incidents would Google's bubble cars have crashed without human intervention, the simulator showed.

Self-driving cars are a priority for Google, which eventually hopes to create a business providing software to traditional car manufacturers. One of the main incentives for developing autonomous vehicles is to make roads safer by eliminating the possibility for crashes caused by human error. With companies including Toyota, Nissan and Google hoping to get self-driving cars on the roads within the next five years, the safety records of test vehicles are under intense scrutiny. If the aim is to create cars that can be driven with minimal human intervention, Google's track record may offer some encouragement.

Two of Google's near misses involved dodging traffic cones, and three saw test drivers take over to save the car from being hit by another car. When Google engineers later ran these scenarios through their simulator they found that had the human drivers not intervened, the self-driving cars would have been hit by the other vehicle.


"These events are rare and our engineers carefully study these simulated contacts and refine the software to ensure the self-driving car performs safely," wrote Google in the report. A software "fix" is tested against many miles of simulated driving then tested again on the road, the company explained. When the fix has been reviewed successfully, it is then rolled out to the entire fleet.

As the total number of miles the fleet drives add up, the number of failures it has to replicate in its simulator decrease, Google said. It added though that the failures occurred so rarely it was tricky to spot trends. The company's cars have driven 424,331 miles on California roads in total and haven't experienced one near miss since April 2015.

Google seems to be having more success than automaker Nissan, which too has been using California roads to test its self-driving cars. Its own report shows drivers had to take control of vehicles on 106 occasions, despite only driving 1,485 miles.

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Of the 341 times humans had to take over the cars in testing that took place in California in the 14 months leading up to November 2015, 272 of those times it was due to a failure in the autonomous technology installed in the pod-like vehicles, the report shows.

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if losses go down, of course rates would follow.

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This is correct.

I have a Cadillac rental this week that makes me so glad that I bought a nice vehicle before all of these sensors became standard. It'll cost me to upkeep it, but I'm keeping my no-fricking-avoidance/lane-departure sensor car forever.

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That confessed partiality is showing.

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We are in collectively one of the softest property insurance markets in many years. Ask any decent sized business owner if his property insurance has gone up or down in the last few years. Majority would have gone down unless they are in a wierd niche or suffered a loss. No hurricanes in last few years, price has gone down.

Good point. Passenger airplanes can fly themselves with auto pilot, and airlines don't carry liability insurance anymore.