Luminar partners with Swiss Re
Automotive technology company Luminar and Swiss Re announced an exclusive partnership. The first step of the joint initiative is to analyze and quantify the on-road performance and safety improvements of consumer and commercial vehicles equipped with Luminar’s lidar and proactive safety technologies, for both the industry and Luminar’s new insurance program it plans to offer.
The objective of this testing is to validate accident prevention capabilities of Luminar-equipped vehicles. Swiss Re will collect and analyze the data and it will be distributed to Luminar while also being made available to Swiss Re’s clients.
Luminar is also launching its own insurance initiative in parallel headed by Alex Tsetsenekos, whose team successfully led the creation and deployment of Tesla’s insurance program. Luminar Insurance is expected to be available to consumers of production vehicle models equipped with Luminar beginning in the US next year, with the opportunity to provide substantial discounts to consumers while also capturing the safety savings.
Founded in 2012, Luminar went public in 2020 and its market cap is $3.25 billion. The company has built an advanced hardware and software platform to enable its 50+ industry partners, including the majority of global automotive OEMs.
“Reduction in accidents and lives saved with Luminar-equipped vehicles will naturally drive lower cost of car insurance and savings to consumers. Just as the introduction of electric vehicles has reduced the cost of energy to the consumer, Luminar-equipped cars can reduce the cost of insurance. We’re collaborating with Swiss Re in order to accelerate this process and give consumers the economic credit they deserve.” – Austin Russell, founder and CEO, Luminar.
“Swiss Re’s mission is to make the world more resilient, so we’re delighted to partner with Luminar on a project that can make our roads safer. By capturing tech advancements and their impacts on road safety we can deliver more accurate risk models, pricing competitiveness and risk knowledge for Luminar-equipped vehicles to our clients – insurance providers.” – Russell Higginbotham, CEO of Swiss Re Solutions.
