Inside Admiral

As a leading motor insurer, responding to changing mobility trends by embracing innovation and technological advancements is essential to ensuring that we stay ahead of the curve and continue to meet our customers’ evolving needs. Since 2018, we have partnered with Wayve, an autonomous vehicle technology company, to provide insurance for their autonomous test vehicles in and around London.

We’re proud of the way that our partnership is supporting innovation and Tom Barnes, our Autonomous Vehicles Manager, and the Corporate Affairs team, took Baroness Caroline Pidgeon MBE, the Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson for Transport, Samantha Niblett, co-chair of the Financial Technology all-purpose parliamentary group (APPG), and Scott Arthur, a member of the Transport Select Committee, to Wayve’s headquarters in London to show them how autonomous technology is evolving and the role that insurance plays in enabling its development. The visit included a tour of Wayve’s workshop, an explanation of how the technology works in practice, including how artificial intelligence maps roads for potential risks, and a ride around the City in an autonomous vehicle.

The team also discussed the challenges that the industry faces, including the need for skills, and how we are collaborating with Wayve to ensure that the regulation around autonomous vehicles delivers safer roads.

Baroness Caroline Pidgeon MBE: "It was a fascinating visit to experience first-hand autonomous driving and how safely and calmly the vehicles moved."

Dr Scott Arthur MP: "“It was a real treat to visit Admiral and their partners at Wayve, one of the UK’s leading autonomous vehicle software companies. I experienced firsthand what it’s like to be driven by an AI system that can adapt to roads it has never seen before - no hand-coded rules, just a sat-nav and machine learning, trained on real human driving. Wayve’s approach is bold: they believe intelligent driving can’t be programmed - it must be learned - just like for humans. Their end-to-end AI learns from experience, not instructions, and navigates even the trickiest London streets using only basic sensors. This isn’t the future - it’s happening now.”