How one insurer is prepping for just a arena of driverless cars

“There’s a photo of an street in the us from about 1898 and everybody is due to horse-drawn carriages,” says Penny Searles, the chief executive of Smartdriverclub. “The same photograph was taken just A decade’s later in 1908, and everyone had the latest Ford Model T car instead. The insurers who had identified the right way to insure cars ahead of that change led the marketplace for the next 60 or 70 years.”

It was this lesson Searles been in mind when she started the Portsmouth-based business 3 years ago. Her aim should be to build a company acquainted with insuring vehicles with sophisticated reporting functions and inbuilt tracking, which might use it in the strong position when driverless cars become easily available.

Currently it provides telematics insurance, a type of insurance where a policy will depend on a driver’s behaviour. Such driver behaviour