Four losses a personal auto policy can't answer.
These are not edge cases. They are the ordinary shape of a claim once software is doing the driving — and in each one, the question of who pays turns on machine evidence rather than on what anyone remembers.
ADAS · Level 2–3
Signal: contested control
The handoff collision
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01
ScenarioA driver-assist system requests takeover approaching a work zone. The driver responds late, or responds to the wrong thing. The vehicle leaves its lane and strikes another car.
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02
Machine evidenceControl state second by second, the takeover request and its timing, driver-monitoring output, torque on the wheel, and whether the system was inside its declared operating domain when it asked.
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03
Where liability landsSplit, and contested. Personal auto responds for the driver's share; product liability responds if the handoff itself was unreasonable — too little warning, or a request the system should not have needed to make.
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04
What we rate onTakeover lead time, driver-monitoring quality, ODD boundary discipline, and observed intervention rates across the fleet.
Why it matters: this is the zone where a human is nominally responsible and functionally not — and the one carriers price most crudely.
Driverless fleet
Signal: no driver to name
At-fault, with nobody in the seat
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01
ScenarioA rider-only vehicle yields incorrectly at an unprotected left and is struck. There is no operator on board, and the other party names your company rather than a driver.
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02
Machine evidencePerception output, the planner's decision trace, the software version and map release in force, sensor health at the moment, and any remote-assistance session open at the time.
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03
Where liability landsOn the deployer, immediately — then redistributed across the stack. The autonomy vendor, the mapping provider, and the sensor manufacturer each sit behind a contractual indemnity that has to actually respond.
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04
What we rate onMiles by domain, incident and near-miss rates, remote-assistance load, and how cleanly the indemnity chain is drafted behind you.
Why it matters: a commercial claim against a technology company, priced as if it were a fender-bender, is a mispriced claim.
OTA release
Signal: fleet-wide, overnight
Behaviour regression after an update
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01
ScenarioA release ships on a Tuesday. By Friday, braking behaviour in low sun has changed just enough to produce a cluster of rear-end claims across several cities at once.
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02
Machine evidenceThe version manifest per vehicle, rollout timing by cohort, pre- and post-release behaviour on matched routes, regression test coverage, and time to detect and roll back.
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03
Where liability landsSquarely on the software provider — and on one event, not many. Every affected vehicle traces to a single defective release, which is the definition of a correlated loss.
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04
What we rate onStaged rollout discipline, canary cohort size, regression coverage, rollback time, and how much of the fleet ever runs one version at once.
Why it matters: this is the aggregation event traditional books are least ready for. An annual underwriting cycle never sees it coming.
System to system
Signal: no human in either seat
Two autonomous stacks, one intersection
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01
ScenarioTwo driverless vehicles from different operators meet at an ambiguous merge. Both behave reasonably by their own driving policy. They collide anyway.
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02
Machine evidenceTwo independent logs that must be reconciled: what each stack perceived, what each predicted the other would do, and where the two driving policies disagreed about right of way.
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03
Where liability landsBetween two software companies, with no human negligence anywhere in the record. Fault becomes a comparison of design choices — which is a product question, settled from logs neither party controls alone.
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04
What we rate onDriving-policy conservatism, prediction accuracy against real interactions, log retention and shareability, and interoperability behaviour in mixed autonomous traffic.
Why it matters: it is the end state of the shift. There is no driver anywhere in this claim, and no personal auto policy has a role in resolving it.