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Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have long promised to transform transportation, reduce accidents, and reshape the insurance landscape. Yet, as two landmark publications from the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) make clear^1,2, the road to a driverless future is paved with complex risk, actuarial uncertainty, and the urgent need for cross-industry collaboration. From the CAS Actuarial Review's 2026 analysis of where AVs have stumbled, to the foundational 2018 CAS Automated Vehicles Task Force (AVTF) report that mapped out the insurance industry's critical role in AV development, these sources together reveal a consistent truth: the successful integration of autonomous vehicles into society is as much an insurance and risk management challenge as it is a technological one.

The CAS Actuarial Review's February 2026 piece, 'Autonomous Vehicles Hit Bumps in the Road,' captures a pivotal moment of reckoning for the AV industry. After years of bold predictions and massive capital investment, the deployment of autonomous vehicles has proved far messier in practice than in theory. Incidents involving robotaxi fleets from unexpected stops on railroad crossings to collisions in complex urban environments have highlighted the gap between controlled test conditions and the chaotic unpredictability of real-world roads.

AVs grounded San Francisco to a halt in December 2025 when citywide blackouts darkened traffic lights. Waymo’s software was overloaded by novel information such as more pedestrians crossing and other taxis in close proximity (also unsure what to do), creating gridlock. Other recent reports of odd behavior include Waymo taxis stopping in front of oncoming trains and swerving into traffic. Tesla’s position as an early innovator has contributed to FSD in particular becoming a bellwether for National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) inquiries regarding cooperation with traffic laws and performance in sun glare or fog conditions. Waymo recently recalled several vehicles in Austin for their failure to stop for school buses, triggering a different NHTSA evaluation. Still other issues of potential concern to regulators include remote teleoperators and deployment of service packs (e.g. software updates, bug fixes, security patches, etc.)³.

These setbacks have direct implications for liability, insurance coverage, and public trust. Each incident raises the question that insurers and actuaries must eventually answer: when an autonomous system causes harm, who is responsible, and how should that responsibility be priced? These are precisely the questions that the world has been working to address for nearly a decade.

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The CAS Automated Vehicles Task Force published its foundational report in 2018 and it reads today less like a historical document and more like an unheeded warning. At a time when AVs existed mostly in test conditions and controlled environments, the task force identified three specific structural problems the industry needed to solve before mass deployment: pricing models that could not recognize AV safety improvements fast enough, a liability system built for human negligence that would break down when algorithms caused harm, and the absence of any credible benchmark for comparing autonomous and human driver performance. Eight years later, all three problems remain unsolved and all three are now playing out in real incidents on real roads in real cities. The report's central recommendation was that manufacturers, insurers, regulators, policymakers, and actuaries needed to collaborate from the earliest stages of development to define data standards, design liability frameworks, and establish benchmarks before deployment at scale. The industry did the opposite. It deployed first and is now scrambling to build the governance frameworks the CAS said were prerequisites.

The 2018 CAS AVTF report, titled 'Automated Vehicles and the Insurance Industry. A Pathway to Safety: The Case for Collaboration,' laid out the foundational argument that casualty actuaries are uniquely positioned to facilitate the safe, efficient, and equitable introduction of AV technology. The report's central thesis is that accurate risk pricing is a commercial imperative as well as a public safety imperative.

The AVTF argued that overpricing AV insurance risk would make safer vehicles prohibitively expensive for many consumers, slowing adoption of technology that could save thousands of lives annually. Conversely, underpricing AV risk would force drivers of conventional, less-safe vehicles to effectively subsidize AV-owners' premiums an inequitable cross-subsidy with significant social implications. Only through rigorous, data-informed actuarial analysis can the industry avoid either outcome.

It’s important to note that where AVs have been implemented, they are still safer than human drivers despite the teething issues. Waymo and Swiss Re partnered in 2024 to analyze liability claims across 25.3 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymo across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin. The study compared Waymo's liability claims against Swiss Re's human driver baseline built from over 500,000 claims and over 200 billion miles of exposure. The Waymo Driver demonstrated an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human drivers overall. Against newer human-driven vehicles equipped with ADAS technology including automated emergency braking, lane-keeping assistance, and forward collision warning, the reduction was 86% for property damage and 90% for bodily injury⁴.

More recent Waymo research in 2025 across 56.7 million miles added further granularity, finding 92% fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians, 82% fewer involving cyclists, and 96% fewer injury-involving intersection crashes compared to human benchmarks⁵. That is why it is important to push for their adoption and contain any potential public back-lashes because this important technology can still potentially save millions of lives lost to accidents across the world every year.

There is a significant lag between the introduction of loss-reducing AV technology and its recognition in insurance premiums. Using a real insurer's proprietary pricing model, the CAS task force in 2018 found that a vehicle reducing insurance losses by 50% would receive only an 8% premium discount after 4 years under existing models assuming the vehicle is categorized as a new model type with no prior year comparison data. Even a perfectly crashless vehicle would earn only a 15% discount over the same period.

This lag arises because traditional insurance pricing models were built for a world where the individual driver is the primary determinant of accident frequency and severity. In an AV environment, where the vehicle's technology not the driver's behavior governs risk, these models are structurally ill-suited. The report demonstrates that better outcomes are possible: under certain conditions, a vehicle with zero crashes could earn up to a 78% premium discount after 4 years but only if insurers can accurately identify and track AV technology in their datasets, something that remains difficult today.

The solution, the AVTF concluded, is direct, open collaboration between insurers and manufacturers to specify, collect, and share technology performance data. Without this, accurate pricing will remain elusive and the technology's full market potential will be suppressed.

The challenges surrounding autonomous vehicles and insurance cannot be solved by any single industry or discipline working in isolation. The prevailing tendency is to address AV issues in silos manufacturers focused on technology, lawyers focused on liability, policymakers focused on regulation as fundamentally inadequate for a challenge of this complexity and consequence.

Multidisciplinary coalition comprising manufacturers, technologists, policymakers, attorneys, risk managers, insurers, and actuaries all need to be working collaboratively from the earliest stages of AV development to define consistent data standards, design appropriate liability frameworks, and establish safety benchmarks. This kind of proactive, cooperative model stands in contrast to the reactive, post-incident approach that has characterized much of the industry's response to AV incidents so far.

The actuarial profession's contribution to this coalition is specific and irreplaceable: quantifying risk and uncertainty, pricing coverage accurately, modeling the cost implications of alternative liability systems, and building the performance benchmarks that allow safer technology to be recognized and rewarded in the marketplace.

The headline that autonomous vehicles have 'hit bumps in the road' should not be read as a verdict of failure. It should be read as a description of the work that remains. Every incident, every edge case, every liability dispute is data and data, properly collected, analyzed, and shared, is exactly what the actuarial profession needs to bring clarity to one of the most consequential technological transitions in the history of transportation.

Actuaries are not bystanders in the AV revolution they are essential participants. By pricing risk accurately, illuminating the true costs of competing liability systems, and establishing the benchmarks by which autonomous safety can be honestly measured, casualty actuaries can help ensure that autonomous vehicles reach the market as quickly, equitably, and safely as possible. The road ahead remains uncertain. But with the right data, the right collaboration, and the right risk frameworks, the insurance industry can help navigate it.