Last week, CMT attended TU-Automotive Detroit where our VP of Insurance, Ryan McMahon, participated in a panel discussion titled “Insurance for a Mobility Revolution.” If you missed it, here are some of the main points he discussed.

Cars are here to stay
Recent studies debunk the prevalent theory that an important part of the population will stop owning cars. For example, MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research published a paper in April that said millennials own as many cars as baby boomers. In fact, a study the paper is based on found that millennials are putting more miles on their cars than baby boomers. The nature of mobility might be changing but cars are still part of our world.

How mobility is changing
One example of changing mobility is ridesharing. Access to services like Uber and Lyft has improved how we get around and are easier ways to get from point A to point B. The change and its impact is amazing: you can use the same app to get rides in multiple countries. However, rideshares, as well as the emergence of kick scooters and e-bikes as transportation modes, are generating new risks.

Adapting to changing risks
The insurance world is evolving to match these changing risks and needs. Insurance is the ability to measure risk and build appropriate models to help customers in the time of need, and ultimately, it’s the insurer’s role to understand, measure, and mitigate risk in the new world of mobility.

Insurers are preparing themselves to succeed in covering these new risks. For example, insurers are building mobile-based telematics platforms to measure the way people drive so they can predict crash risk more accurately. CMT partners with insurers to understand how behaviors behind the wheel mitigate or create risk and consider how insurers can change their interactions with consumers to avoid accidents.

The future of mobility
Mobile telematics is leading innovation in insurance. The mobile phone is platform agnostic – it can measure the user’s behaviors across multiple transportation modes. This creates a future for personal mobility policies. Instead of a different policy for each transportation mode, a personal mobility policy covers users across cars, rideshares, scooters, and beyond.