Redefining Safety & Risk Management in Road Transportation

In this exciting episode of the InsurTech Geek Podcast, our hosts James Benham and Rob Galbraith interview Mark Goodstein.

The Idea of Automation

After a series of conversations with friends and mentors, Mark discovered that Pasadena didn’t have companies that were focused on building autonomous vehicles. In response, he joined forces with a group of other business innovators and thought leaders to start developing an autonomous control system for cars. This was between 2015 and 2016.

“We tried to solve what we thought was going to be a very big – and still is – a huge problem for cities. How can cities manage the deployment of these technologies safely, in an equitable way? How can they manage the data implications and everything else from these waving sensors with cameras and lights and radars and whatever else?”

The group realized six months later that they were too ahead of their time.As a result, their investors took their funding from them.

“That may not be controversial now, but back then it was pretty controversial, and we realized back then that the consistent ability to objectively evaluate safety was going to be the biggest obstacle to the wide scale deployment of autonomous technology,” said Mark.

Learning User Behavior in Automobiles with Telematic Data

After ending company, in 2019 Mark started Streetscope, a method for measuring collision hazards so they can have an accurate thought on what the dangers are in the environment..According to Mark, as opposed to engineers, who are still designing with their gut, “We measure the hazards posed by all pairs of objects continuously. We have a continuous measure of hazards.”

Mark believes that insurance is one of the main drivers for innovation since it provides coverage for property and casualty for infrastructure, for autonomous fleets for semi-autonomous fleets, or even the vehicles driven by us humans. While other companies measure trailing indicators -which are ethically challenged- other companies measure collisions and accidents instead of safety. Streetscope’s method does not require collisions, instead, they have a big set of data that can be used by any company instead of their measurements. It’s a standard approach to evaluating safety.