Motor insurers have long treated cars that have advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) as lower risk. New RACQ survey data shows that more than one in three Queensland drivers have admitted to switching off safety features in their vehicles.
The RACQ’s 2026 Annual Road Safety Survey found that 35% of Queensland drivers had switched off lane departure warnings, 34% did not use adaptive cruise control and 22% had disabled autonomous emergency braking. The results were released with Queensland’s road toll at 250 deaths so far this year.
The figures follow a national study from Insurance Australia Group (IAG), the Driving Safer Outcomes Report, which the insurer produced with Queensland University of Technology and the iMOVE Co-operative Research Centre. It analysed 100,000 collisions in police-reported crash data from Queensland and Victoria over 11 years and surveyed 2,024 drivers of ADAS-equipped vehicles. It found that 60% of Australian drivers actively switch the systems off.
Only 57% of drivers in the IAG study used the systems regularly. That means the lower-risk assumption motor insurers rely on holds for just over half of drivers with the technology.
IAG acquired RACQ’s insurance underwriting business in an $855 million deal approved in May 2025, and the purchase gave it market-leading positions in Queensland motor and home.
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According to the IAG research, full ADAS use could potentially prevent 7,850 of the roughly 40,000 road fatalities and hospitalisations in Australia each year, or one in five casualties. Sideswipe collisions could fall by up to 40%, head-on collisions by up to 21% and lane change collisions by up to 15%.
The sideswipe reduction came through lane keeping assist, the head-on reduction through autonomous emergency braking and the lane change reduction through blind spot monitoring. IAG commissioned research firm Fifth Quadrant to produce the casualty estimate.
“In a modernising vehicle fleet with driver-assist safety features as standard, we would expect to see a positive correlation in reduced accident and casualty rates,” said Shawn Ticehurst, head of the IAG Research Centre. “But that’s not happening and it needs to change if we want to see fewer accidents.”
In September, Zurich Australia became the first local insurer to build Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised), a Level 2 driver-assistance system, into its pricing. The discount is understood to depend on whether the car has the technology, not on how often the driver uses it, while Allianz has indicated Tesla customers with the system will stay on standard terms for now.
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The technology is also adding to repair bills for motor insurers. The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) says the average motor claim has risen 32% over four years to $6,266, with repairs accounting for around 60% of payouts. A minor knock on a modern car can now mean recalibrating radar sensors and cameras.
Car-to-car autonomous emergency braking became mandatory on new passenger vehicles in March 2025 and car-to-pedestrian AEB followed in August 2026. Lane keeping assist requirements take full effect from March 2029. Austroads projects that about 40% of Australian vehicles will be ADAS-enabled by 2031.
Some Queensland drivers who turned the systems off said the alerts were too sensitive or too frequent, while others preferred to stay in control or worried about relying too much on technology.
Joshua Cooney, RACQ’s executive manager of road safety, said ADAS was designed to lower the chance of human error causing a crash. “ADAS is not there to take over – it’s there to help you stay safe,” Cooney said. “Vehicle technology is constantly evolving and while some alerts may feel too sensitive or frequent, these systems are continuing to improve.”
He said the club wanted Queenslanders to understand how the technology worked and use it to their advantage, rather than switch it off.
In IAG’s on-road trial, one supervised drive across six ADAS features more than doubled the share of participants who reported no barriers to use, from 8% to 18%, yet only 19% of drivers who had recently taken a driving lesson said ADAS was covered in any meaningful way.
Queensland is on track to exceed 300 road deaths for the third year running.
“It’s terribly concerning that we have one person dying on our roads in Queensland nearly every day. We need to be doing everything we can to be better drivers for ourselves and each other,” Cooney said.
