How driverless cars could kill a Meerkat

I was chatting to a taxi driver yesterday who, after hearing me on the phone to a journalist talking about #drones and #driverlesscars, asked me the usual question..."So how long do you think it will take for driverless cars to be on our roads?"  

Of course, my response was in line with Government targets for trials of #driverlesscars on our roads by 2021. Then, much to his horror, I added that I thought that it would take around 5 years for things like driverless taxi services to start to appear (which was a little cruel) and around 10 years for widespread adoption.

He went on to ask,..."So how long until everything is driverless?", which is a good question.  I answered that full adoption of #driverlesscars, whilst inevitable eventually, would take decades. You simply can't take the 100's Millions of cars off the road quickly and not everyone will want to use a driverless car so a cultural change will need to take place which will take a long time to achieve.

However, having now reflected on that answer, I do believe that it will be necessary, once the vastly superior safety performance of #driverlesscars become obvious, that we human drivers will need to pay more for our insurance because we are simply not safe behind the wheel and this will eventually, through economic pressure, push a lot of us to adopt the use of driverless cars more quickly. This will inevitably lead to even less accidents as more of us give up killing each other on the road and a more rapid drive towards total adoption.

This then caused me to ask myself the question...

What then happens to the car insurance companies? If car accidents eventually drop to almost zero, will this be the death of that annoying Meerkat?

Let's hope so!