" Oxbotica, the autonomous-vehicle company spun out from the University of Oxford, to investigate how driverless vehicles can gather and share data. The idea is to explore not just how cars could pass data between each other in order to drive more effectively, but also how that data could be used by third parties like municipal authorities and, crucially, insurers."
by Jamie Condliffe, MIT Review April 30, 2018
This could be the beginnings of new ecosystems based around Smart Cities, Smart Highways, Autonomous Vehicles, Ride Share and Fleet Owners/Leasing Companies and Insurers.
“Insurers can adjust the envelope [in which a car can operate] to control the risk on the policy,” explains Newman. “The autonomy system has insurance built into it that allows it to control risk over a fleet.” Oxbotica reckons that this kind of close relationship with insurers could help encourage lawmakers to allow more autonomous cars on the roads for testing, buoyed by the knowledge that expert risk assessors are involved in controlling them. Newman also suggests that this could make it easier to get the go-ahead to test autonomous vehicles in other high-stakes environments, like airports.