While attending a recent car show, I came across a reproduction window sticker displayed in a mint-condition 1966 Mercury Marauder. Full-size Mercuries from the 1960s are some of my favorite cars, so I spent a lot of time examining this one.

What caught my eye on the window sticker was the list of standard equipment. Under the subheading  "safety equipment" were such high-tech features as four-way emergency flashers and a driver's side door mirror.  While these did have a marginal impact on accident avoidance, they added little to the overall cost of repair if damaged in a collision. 

In today's world, safety equipment is a lot flashier and accident-avoidance technology has advanced exponentially. It includes a combination of:

• Telematics, a broad range of technology that combines mobile/broadband telecommunications and computing that produces raw vehicle data, which is overlaid with GIS map data like road type and speed limits.
• Black box technologies like on-board diagnostics parameter IDs (OBD-II PIDs codes that request data from a vehicle and are used as a diagnostic tool).
• Event data recorders (EDRs) that developed out of vehicle air bag technology.

The impact of these advances on automotive claims is and will continue to be significant. While accident avoidance technologies hold the promise of reducing crashes and the frequency of claims, the complex technologies in place in the modern automobile have great potential to increase claims severity.