QuestionerAutonomous vehicles are already driving across roads in American cities with no driver involvement. How do Warren and Ajit think about any disruption risk from these autonomous vehicles to Geico's auto insurance business, which is built around understanding and underwriting human drivers? Wouldn't what we call auto insurance today just become product liability for autonomous vehicles and autonomous software companies?
Ajit JainYeah, there's no question that insurance for automobile wheels is going to change dramatically once self-driving cars become a reality. The big change that we will see is what you identified. Most of the insurance that is sold and bought revolves around operator errors and how often they happen, how severe they are, and therefore what premium we order to charge. To the extent these new self-driving cars are more safe and are involved in fewer accidents, that insurance will be less required. Instead, it will be substituted by, as you mentioned, product liability. So we at Geico and elsewhere are certainly trying to get ready for that switch where we move from providing insurance for operator errors and be more reasonable. ready to provide protection for product errors and errors and omissions in the construction of these automobiles.
WarrenYeah, we expect change in all our businesses. And good thing we did, Charlie pushed me into it, but if I'd settled for being in New England and textiles, you know, and even though it worked well for 70 years or so prior there, too, you know, the world changed. And if the game didn't change it all, really, would be very interesting. You know, if every time you, every time you, you know, every time you, you know, swung in a baseball, you had a hole and run the game wouldn't be interesting. If every time you hit a golf, a golf ball, you had a hole in one, it wouldn't be interesting. So, and the fact that there will be things you have to think about all the time as you go along and you'll make mistakes and all that. And that's really part of the fun. I mean, your brain would turn to mush if you didn't have a few problems.