How New Radar Safety Features Could Affect your Car Insurance Premium

New technology is coming that will make driving safer and your car insurance premium cheaper.

New radar based safety systems will decrease the chance of bumper car driving on the roads.

What is the future going to hold in store for us as drivers? 

With the advances in technology being applied to our vehicles, how much longer will it be before all we have to do is type in our destination and the vehicle will drive us there? While driverless cars are not a reality quite yet, thanks to steps in technology our cars are starting to prevent us from being able to have an accident.  If you couldn’t have an accident think about what that would do to your car insurance premium.

What New Safety Features Could Affect Your Car Insurance Premium?

Side curtain airbags, anti-lock brakes and tracking systems are all safety features that you can find in most new cars today and have a direct affect on our car insurance premium. But, none of them compare to what is waiting just around the corner for us as far as new safety features for our vehicles.

Using radar technology, engineers have started to create safety systems in cars that alert us when danger of an accident is present. They can also take control and actually decelerate our vehicle to avoid rear ending someone. 

The radar can tell us when we need to brake harder to avoid hitting someone and it can tell us if there is someone in our blind spot to save us from changing lanes or turning into another car that we didn’t see.  It will be like having our very own NASCAR spotter to help us with those things that we don’t see.

Thanks to smaller car radar systems that can be installed in cars for cheaper than they used to, we are most likely going to be seeing more cars with these types of safety systems on the market here in the United States soon(insurance headlines).

Decrease in Insurance Claims

Per the National Safety Council there are over 2.5 million collisions each year from people rear ending another car. These statistics make rear end accidents the most common type of accidents in the nation and results in increased car insurance premium for the drivers that cause them.

If this new radar safety device in your vehicle prevents you from being able to rear end a person, the insurance claims reported each year are going to come down drastically. There will also be a decrease in sideswiping accidents with having the vehicle able to alert you to someone in your blind spot.

For you, this means a cheaper car insurance premium if your vehicle can prevent you from having an accident because of a decreased chance of accident surcharges being added to your policy.  It can also mean a cheaper car insurance premium for everyone due to decreased rear end accidents from hit-and-run drivers.  The cost of a hit-and-run driver increases the car insurance premium for everyone in a company, if the driver is never caught, so that the insurance company can still make a profit.  The car insurance premium of coverages like uninsured/underinsured motorist coverages are directly affected by the number of hit-and-run drivers in an area and could go down if this radar system actually did decrease those numbers.

Potential Car Insurance Premium Discounts

A technology such as this that would make driving safer by preventing accidents is sure to have some sort of car insurance premium discount associated with it.  However, exactly how they are going to discount the car insurance premium on these cars is what we are going to have to wait and see.  Are companies going to make it as a listed discount along with ABS where in some cases you have to remind your agent that you have them because they don’t put the car insurance premium discount on your policy?

Or are the base rates for the car insurance premium on these vehicles just going to be cheaper? I guess we will just have to wait and find out until they are allowed to be sold in the United States.