Following BYD's launch of the "City Navigation Safety Guarantee" service, on June 22nd, Huawei announced the "ADS Assisted Driving Worry Free Rights". In less than a month, two leading car companies have successively promised to provide a "backstop" for intelligent assisted driving functions, giving a new answer to the old question of "who is responsible for smart driving accidents". However, the "chest slapping" style of safety net by car companies is ultimately not a long-term solution. To provide car owners with a truly reliable intelligent driving guarantee, it is necessary to establish a unified, standardized, and multi-party collaborative sharing mechanism.
Is the responsibility for accidents occurring in the context of intelligent driving due to the driver's negligence in operation, or is there a defect in the intelligent driving system itself? Intelligent driving technology continues to iterate, blurring the responsibility boundaries between humans and vehicles. The attribution of accident responsibility is no longer as clear as before, and driving risks are no longer solely borne by drivers, but gradually transmitted to vehicle manufacturers and software and hardware suppliers. Car companies can no longer stay out of the matter, so they have to respond directly to consumers' doubts in a spontaneous way. It is not a new phenomenon for car companies to provide support for smart driving. In the past two years, more than 10 brands such as Xiaomi, Xiaopeng, HarmonyOS, and Avita have launched their own smart driving protection plans.
However, behind the lively promotion, car companies' fallback services can only be considered as a transitional compensation measure and cannot replace the standardized car insurance provided by insurance institutions. From a legal perspective, most car companies do not offer insurance products, but rather value-added services that they operate independently. The more prominent contradiction is that the car enterprises have mastered the background data of all vehicle operations and intelligent driving, and the accident definition and claim settlement scale are all the final say by themselves; Being both an athlete and a referee makes it difficult for consumers to obtain evidence and protect their rights. In addition, due to the lack of unified standards in the industry, there are huge differences in charging models, guarantee timeliness, compensation limits, and coverage scenarios among various companies. The scattered and chaotic guarantee rules are easily misleading to consumers.
Intelligent driving cannot rely solely on car companies' confidence, and the deep participation of the insurance industry is essential. The current car insurance policies do not exclude liability for accidents that occur during intelligent driving, so car owners do not need to be swayed by various anxiety marketing tactics. The insurance industry does face many practical challenges in launching truly intelligent driving exclusive products: rapid iteration of intelligent driving technology, multiple vehicle models, insufficient accumulation of compensation data, and difficulty in accurately pricing with traditional actuarial models; Accident data is often held by car companies, making it difficult for the insurance industry to access; In addition, there are also challenges such as the complexity and diversity of responsible parties.
The good news is that true exclusive car insurance for smart driving is already on the road. At the beginning of 2025, the State Administration for Financial Regulation and four other departments issued guidance to explore the establishment of an insurance vehicle risk classification system, promote the linkage between insurance vehicle classification levels and commercial vehicle insurance premiums, and encourage new energy vehicle enterprises to optimize production design and improve component supply. At the end of March this year, the Beijing Financial Regulatory Bureau announced the launch of the development and application of intelligent connected new energy vehicle commercial insurance, fully considering the specific scenarios of intelligent driving and risks such as software and hardware losses that consumers are concerned about. It optimized and upgraded existing new energy vehicle insurance products, further covering all levels and scenarios of intelligent driving, and enhancing consumers' confidence in safe use of intelligent driving.
BYD and Huawei have made a good start. But what truly drives intelligent driving from "daring to use" to "reassuring to use" requires innovative insurance products, data integration, unified standards, and making the system the most reliable "airbag".