The Politics of Road transport InsuraNCE (PRINCE)

This project studies the role of insurance in the transition of road transport: a systemic transformation of our mobility following changes and innovations in technology, user practices, policy, knowledge and business models.

From an insurance perspective four developments stand out. (1) The growing availability of mobility data from increasingly real-time sensor data from vehicles, infrastructure, cameras, etc. (2) The automation and increasing connectivity of vehicles that shift liability from drivers and operators to automated and connected driving systems. (3) The electrification of vehicles, which adds new (fire) risks and cost calculations. And (4) the new (shared) forms of mobility that emerge around e-scooters, (private) car-sharing and ride-hailing services.

There is a need to govern these trends as they come with new opportunities and risks to transport climate emission targets, road-safety, urban planning and accessibility. There is also a need to understand how insurers respond to these innovations that affect their whole business: from their risk analyses, product development and liability all the way to a potential shrinking of the overall market.

These two needs are closely interrelated. The disciplines that study the insurance aspects of these developments, like law, transport and underwriting, typically do so with the goal to improve and optimize insurance assessments, products and premiums. Missing from this work is the insight from critical security studies (CSS) that insurance acts as a form of governance.

For example, people who cannot afford or are rejected for insurance are legally excluded from driving a car in most developed countries. Similarly, insurers actively use premiums to guide 'risky' people, often young drivers, to drive more carefully. Insurance thus helps direct mobility, which implies that there is a direct link between how insurance is organized internally and how these aforementioned trends are governed socially.

CSS offers this insight based on its study of the role that security plays in society. A core argument in CSS is that how people do security or insurance, not just whether people are secure or insured, is important because such acts and decisions inherently have discriminatory effects: they differentiate between those with and without protection and distribute resources accordingly.

CSS thus asks why certain technologies, activities or behaviours are considered risky at certain times and places. This is an important question, because the four developments offer an opportunity to understand how insurers observe, learn and adapt their old routines to these new developments. Developments on which they have no or little data, statistical models, terms and conditions or claims handling processes.

The aim of PRINCE is therefore to understand to what extent and how road transport insurance practices are affected by and affecting the above four developments in road transport. The first objective is to collect, classify, analyse and share recent information on the way road transport insurance practices are affected by and affecting the above listed trends.

Over the course of 18 months, the project will conduct an academic literature review, a systematic empirical and legal document analysis and up to 75 stakeholder interviews across three carefully selected cases (the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands), organize workshops and distribute the findings. This will be accomplished with the help of a research associate, as the second aim and objective are for the investigator to gain the skills and experience to lead his own future research teams.

In short, this project generates a deeper understanding of the role that insurance plays as a form of governance of a more sustainable road transport system while offering an updated empirical overview of how insurance deals with fast-changing transport innovations.