Swiss Re collaborates with Luminar on vehicle safety capabilities

Swiss Re announced an exclusive agreement with Luminar, an automotive technology company, that will reduce overall vehicle ownership costs, enhance assisted driving technology and improve driver safety. Swiss Re will leverage data, provided by commercial and consumer vehicles equipped with Luminar’s lidar and safety solutions, to assess proactive accident prevention capabilities that could potentially prevent or reduce auto insurance claims.

“The goal of Luminar is to make roads safer. And at Swiss Re, the ultimate mission is to make the world more resilient… Making the roads safer is a strong way to fulfill that mission…” says Luigi Di Lillo, lead of the products and partnerships team at Swiss Re in the reinsurance solutions unit. He explains that the partnership aligns with Swiss Re’s mission “to bring new perspectives, new methodologies to our clients and ensure that clients buying insurance are incentivized by a system which is safer, in terms of preventing or mitigating an accident and, as such, reduces the deaths on the road.”

Swiss Re aims to assess the validity of the accident prevention and safety solutions to ultimately reduce claims volume and the total cost of insurance for consumers driving vehicles with Luminar digital technology.

“We try to translate the real performance of these devices on the road into insurance metrics, and insurance metrics are a direct link to cost of ownership because you pay less for your insurance and, as such, you lower the amount of money that you have to pay to keep your car, while you’re being safer,” Di Lillo says.

The data that is gathered and evaluated by Swiss Re will be translated into insurance metrics and made available to Luminar as a cornerstone of its insurance program, furthering its mission to accelerate driver safety and lower insurance costs.

“Traditional risk models rely on sets of data or knowledge which are not synced with the advanced technology which is available in cars today. Namely, the data stemming from this technology, which are representative of the performance of vehicles on the road, are not used to their full extent,” Di Lillo explains. “The idea is to provide additional levels of granularity to our clients, and in turn improve their segmentation power, risk selection and pricing accuracy. If a car equipped with Luminar devices is safer than another car fitted with other kinds of systems, then the driver should get possibly a discount on its insurance premium.”

Luminar will be launching an insurance initiative, expected to be available in the U.S. next year. Swiss Re will be supporting the insurance program by scoring Luminar devices and creating data that can be used for future models or rate-making.