Insurance News - Friday, February 12, 2016

Here are the leading auto insurance headlines from ONTARIO AUTO INSURANCE TOPICS ON TWITTER for Friday, February 12, 2016:

• Trial lawyers and victims group call for inquiry into the use of medical evidence by auto insurers in insurance claims.  Personally, I believe this is symptomatic of a much bigger problem.
• A startup at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hopes to replace insurance agents with artificial intelligence and make buying auto insurance as easy as texting a photo of your license plate.
• Uber lost its bid to freeze a lawsuit bound for trial over California drivers’ demands to be treated as employees while the company appeals rulings that dramatically increased the stakes in the case.
• A recent Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) study forecasts that 380 million semi, highly or fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be on the road by 2030. In the decade preceding 2030, the penetration of active safety and autonomous vehicles will reduce the number of accidents by more than 30%, leading to a significant reduction in insurance premiums.
• Uber is piloting a new way to check the quality of its drivers — by monitoring their driving, speed and distractedness via their smartphones, using the devices’ geolocation information, accelerometers and gyrometers (which reveal whether a person is, for example, moving their phone around while driving) - essentially a telematics application.