@ Tech New Knowledge Original
Author 丨 古廿Editorial 丨i page
If you ask when self-driving is coming, Musk's answer will always be next year.
Recently, this sentence has been summarized by netizens as the "Musk time law" of when to fully realize automatic driving. Because some netizens on social media platforms edited a video of Musk's public interview at different times, when asked when autopilot was realized, his answer was always the same: about 1 year.
When talking about autonomous driving as early as 2014, Musk said it would come in the next 1 year. Then, in 2017, Musk publicly said that L5 level autonomous driving will come in the next few months; in 2018, Musk reiterated this commitment again. After that, the same time law continued until 2022.
However, Schrödinger's autopilot has not stopped Tesla from becoming the king of electric vehicle sales. After all, even if it has repeatedly defaulted on automatic driving, as the leader of new energy vehicles, Tesla still has not encountered an opponent who can fight.
Tesla, which is far ahead in selling cars and has no pressure, has opened up a number of side businesses, from the hats, whistles and other cultural peripherals that were once on the shelves of the online mall, to musk's car insurance business that musk believes can account for 40% of revenue in the future.
Regarding the time planning of the crossover car insurance business, Musk also said: "With the progress of automatic driving, the car insurance business will also be carried out simultaneously. ”
Probably very confident in the realization of full self-driving in 2022, at the Tesla shareholders' meeting in October 2021, Musk announced that he will take the lead in launching Tesla insurance in Texas, USA, and hopes to start full promotion in 2022.
Two months after the insurance product went live, Musk confidently said at the earnings conference in early 2022 that Tesla will achieve full self-driving in 2022.
However, for Tesla Insurance, the technology circle is optimistic that the future has come, while the insurance industry believes that it is necessary to let the bullet fly for a while, behind the two completely different attitudes, there is a generation gap between the two circles of AI for car insurance.
UBI car insurance for a chicken feather
Probably because in the field of automatic driving, "wolves are coming" shouted more, for Tesla to enter the insurance industry, most insurance practitioners believe that although the first product launched a ripple in the industry, but in essence it is still not a new thing.
On the one hand, in the eyes of insurance industry insiders, Tesla Insurance is still the concept of UBI insurance. The so-called UBI is "Usage Based Insurance", that is, "insurance based on actual use".
"Actual use" here has three meanings:
One is based on the time and mileage of the vehicle used;
The second is based on the external driving environment factors such as the external environment, driving place, and road conditions when the vehicle is driving;
Third, based on driving habits, real-time monitoring of driving behavior data such as acceleration, deceleration, turning, and braking.
According to this, three UBI product forms can be generated. Paid-for-Mileage (PAYD), Pay-Per-Driving Behavior (PHYD) and Managed Driving Habits (MHYD).
The first two forms, simple deployment and data collection, are the main products of UBI auto insurance at present. The latter is not mature because of the difficulty of data collection effectiveness.
The product threshold is low or the product is immature, so that the UBI car insurance companies in the market have not achieved much of a big climate.
Internationally, UBI is the earliest and most widespread U.S. market, dating back to Progressive, which was founded in San Francisco in 1937. As the originator of UBI car insurance, it first launched its pay-for-mileage (PAYD) product in 1999. The international rookie was Root, who went public in October 2020, raising $724 million, making it the largest IPO in Ohio's history.
However, as a UBI unicorn licensed in 36 states and with 900 employees, Root went from an unlimited IPO to today's decline in just one year.
UBI companies in the international market are sluggish, and UBI companies in the domestic market are completely destroyed. Started in 2013, with the help of policy dividends and technology empowerment, UBI ushered in an explosive period in China from 2014 to 2016.
Large insurance companies have piloted UBI, Chinese Insurance has joined hands with third-party companies to try UBI projects for the first time, and subsequently, Ping An, Taibao, Sunshine, and AXA Tianping have successively begun to explore UBI.
Small and medium-sized insurance companies and start-up companies have also closely followed the UBI car insurance outlet, mileage insurance, driving evaluation technology, zebra driving, car earnings, jimmy and other more than 30 technology companies, have competed for the UBI car insurance track. In 2016, there were even more than 300 technology companies involved in the UBI concept in the market.
Under the hot speculation of the concept, problems such as opaque information, lack of industry standards, difficulty in data collection, and insufficient accuracy and flexibility in scoring have erupted in a concentrated manner, making the pricing and claim settlement methods of UBI products rough, the user effect is not ideal, and the results of UBI car insurance are minimal.
Finally, at the end of 2017, in the environment where the capital market began to enter a downward cycle, the entrepreneurial projects of the auto insurance category became increasingly insufficient, UBI auto insurance suffered a cold winter, and a large number of start-up companies were transformed or closed.
The end of UBI car insurance in the traditional insurance industry is the reason why insurance practitioners who face Tesla car insurance and hold license plate resources today are watching "let the bullets fly".
Teslas betting on UBI
Unlike traditional forces, for UBI auto insurance, new energy vehicle manufacturers are enthusiastic.
In August 2020, Tesla established an insurance brokerage company in Shanghai with a registered capital of 50 million yuan, known as Tesla's starting point in China's insurance industry.
Earlier, in September 2018, Xiaopeng Automobile, which has been following Tesla's example, also established Guangzhou Xiaopeng Automobile Insurance Agency Co., Ltd. and began to get involved in the field of automobile insurance. So far, the new domestic car-making forces have only been involved in the insurance business in the three enterprises of "Wei Xiaoli", xiaopeng and Weilai.
Although the ideal car has not been followed up, in 2017, Li Xiang, who had not yet built a car at that time, said in an interview with the "Jianyue Car Review" that in the future, automobile companies will sell their own car insurance, provide automatic driving technology, approve their own rates, and repair themselves.
In addition to the new forces, traditional car companies such as Geely, SAIC, and GAC, as well as power battery supplier Ningde Times, have all participated in the insurance industry.
However, although Tesla has successfully registered insurance companies, they still need to get the brokerage business qualification of the regulatory authorities before they can truly enter the threshold from the real development of insurance products and the sale of self-operated insurance.
This threshold is also considered by Buffett, the god of stocks, to be the main obstacle for car companies to enter the insurance field. In 2019, Buffett said at Berkshire's annual summary conference that it is no less difficult for car companies to carry out insurance business than insurance companies to cross-border cars.
The reason for this conclusion is that, in his view, the gross profit margin of new car insurance in the international market is 6%, and there is not much room for profitability. The entry of tesla and other companies will be a rival to the traditional insurance industry, but it will not destroy the entire auto insurance industry, nor will it be optimistic about the disruptive impact it will bring.
And Buffett believes that insurance regulation is a very slow thing to reform, they prefer to support the stability of inherent interest institutions, as the economic source seems to be less stable car companies, it is difficult to obtain insurance licenses to sell insurance.
However, despite this, the introduction of UBI car insurance under the trend of "software-defined cars" is considered by automakers to be a matter of course.
Traditional UBI products, according to the way of data collection and bearing, are mainly divided into front-loading Telematics + UBI mode and post-installation OBD + UBI mode. The front-loading model is mainly dominated by manufacturers, and the after-installation model is mainly dominated by UBI auto insurance companies.
Although the dominant parties are different, but subject to the collection method, the data collection of the two is mainly the status of the vehicle or a small amount of data related to people. The information of the car and the information of the person are statically separated, and there is no dynamic data correlation.
ADAS (Advanced Assisted Driving) is the use of a variety of sensors installed on the car, in the car driving process anytime and anywhere to sense the surrounding environment, collect data, static, dynamic object identification, detection and tracking, and combined with the navigator map data, systematic calculation and analysis, to achieve the dual dynamic data collection of human factor and vehicle factor.
In Tesla's view, the UBI model based on the new energy vehicle ADAS can provide a more complete driving behavior data, and insurance companies can use this to construct a more accurate premium pricing model and issue more competitive UBI products.
For example, Tesla insurance recently launched in Texas is mainly composed of 5 "safety elements", tesla on the official website pointed out that the factors related to the premium only include: model, insurance type, area, mileage, driving score (Safety Score).
Tesla made it clear that pricing does not take into account the credit score, age, gender, marital status, historical insurance, traffic violations and other important risk factors used by traditional car insurance products. This means that premiums are only related to the real-time driving behavior of current drivers, abandoning the historical projections of traditional insurance products to derive future large numbers.
Although it is still the concept of UBI car insurance, products based on ADAS data collection and real-time premium updates are no longer a level in product form. However, even so, in the process of the development of new energy vehicle insurance, UBI is likely to be only a transitional product form.
Autonomous driving is the end of car insurance?
Another reason why automakers are crazy about the cross-border insurance industry at present is that how to do autonomous auto insurance products still needs to be explored by many parties.
Although Tesla's self-driving technology promised for many years presents the Schrödinger phenomenon, according to a consensus in the mainstream of the industry, it is necessary to achieve landable L4 level autonomous driving in 2025.
In the SAE Driving Automation Classification, the L0-L2 level is defined as a "driver assistance system" and the L3-L5 level is called an "automatic driving system". This means that there is an insurmountable liability gap between L2 and L3.
The difference between L2 and L3 level autonomous driving is mainly in the division of responsibilities after a traffic accident. At present, the insured of automobile insurance is mainly individual car owners, and automobile insurance is basically to provide protection for accidents caused by human error.
Whether it is direct sales, agency or brokerage channels, the sales model and profit model of property and casualty insurance companies are based on the operation of individual car owners as policyholders. The New York Times pointed out that with the application of autonomous driving technology, the role of the insured will gradually change.
First, the accident responsibility of individual car owners will be transferred to car manufacturers and technology companies that provide autonomous driving technology, and the insured will be transformed into automobile manufacturers and technology companies; second, with the rise of the car rental industry, a large number of car rental companies will provide self-driving cars, and the insured will be transformed into car rental companies.
The role of the policyholder shifts from individual car owners to car manufacturers, and it is clear that car manufacturers need a product to transition and get involved in the insurance industry, understanding the three main processes of insurance from data actuarial claims.
In 2017, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said he thought it would be another 15 years before driverless cars could have a significant impact on the insurance industry as a whole. Therefore, with the realization of autonomous driving, there is also a deeply rooted view: the popularity of automatic driving will hit the auto insurance industry hard, and the deep moat will disappear.
For example, if self-driving cars are owned by OEMs or service providers, the average number of cars owned by individuals will decrease, and private insured persons will decrease; self-driving cars are safer than manual driving, the accident rate is greatly reduced, and the insurance loss is less, so the premium will also fall.
According to the KPMG model, if autonomous driving is successfully realized, in 2025-2040, self-driving cars will gradually replace existing cars, and the accident rate will be reduced by 80%, and the average accident rate per vehicle will reach 0.009 in 2040.
But that doesn't mean car insurance premiums will keep falling, and in an Accenture-designed model, the drops are hedged against by new insurance products brought in by self-driving cars.
Finally, before 2050, the cumulative value of new revenue brought by automatic driving is greater than the cumulative value of premium reduction brought about by automatic driving.
How to launch new insurance products before the inflection point in 2025 and gain a net increase in the market has become a ticket to master the future. Then obviously, before the advent of automatic driving, automakers do not want to use UBI car insurance to be more fully prepared.
Who cares what people in the traditional insurance industry think?