Swiss Re has partnered with Stockholm-based auto technology firm Veoneer to drive improvements in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

The reinsurer says almost 1.4 million lives are lost on roads globally every year, while 50 million people are injured, and assistance systems show “huge potential” in reducing these crashes and mitigating fatalities and injuries.

In the last decade, car manufacturers have been accelerating the rollout of ADAS but insurers have been “slow in catching up as they still mostly rely on static demographic factors for premium calculation rather than taking the full implications of ADAS into account,” Swiss Re says.

Swiss Re created an ADAS Risk Score, a vehicle-specific insurance rating that carriers can use to calculate premiums taking driver assistance systems into account. The new partnership with NASDAQ-listed Veoneer is aimed at gaining insights into the safety effects of ADAS to help tailor systems to drivers’ habits and accurately evaluate them.

A better understanding of how a vehicle is driven in specific contexts, such as differing road or weather conditions, will reveal the opportunities and limitations of current systems.

“With extended knowledge about the real-world performance of various ADAS technologies in different parts of the world, we can develop systems used by vehicle manufacturers globally that support drivers in an even better way,” Veoneer CTO Steven Jenkins says.

Swiss Re says Veoneer’s expertise will feed into the Swiss Re ADAS Risk Score to the benefit of car manufacturers, while insurers will gain from being able to assess the latest car safety technologies.