BOE Says Driverless Cars May Transform Insurance as Risk Shifts

Driverless cars developed by companies such as Google Inc. could transform the insurance industry if their accident-avoidance technology sparks a shift in risk transfer, according to one of the Bank of England’s first blog posts.

“As human drivers become replaced by lasers and sensors, the placement of liability may start to shift towards manufacturers,” BOE officials Neha Jain, James O’Reilly and Nicholas Silk wrote wrote on Friday. “Such developments would pose challenging questions” for the bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority, which regulates U.K. insurers.