If you own a car, you’ll know that one of the biggest banes before you can even legally drive on the road is getting insurance……..
There are plenty of comparison websites out there and I tend to use them when looking for insurance mainly for two reasons.
1. It saves on the phone bill.
2. I can get a good idea of what I’m likely to end up paying.
But what strikes me is the differences between companies and it seems to show that there are no “standard” settings when it comes to insuring a car, it doesn’t matter whether it’s second hand or brand new, the price fluctuates either minutely or astronomically.
I’m not going to say anything about first time drivers on this post, although I do agree that their premiums could be made a bit cheaper, I think anything over £1000 for a first time driver, or in a blokes case the next Lewis Hamilton, is reasonable mainly because they are untested on the road. Yes you may have passed your test with flying colours and received no majors or minors on your test, but you’re in the real world now and like anything in the real world, it doesn’t follow a textbook and is very unkind when it wants to be.
I remember my first insurance premium was £1,200 for a small 1.3 litre, G reg Suzuki swift, quite possibly one of the best cars I have ever owned and the price I had to pay seemed pretty reasonable, in that year I drove like a saint and received my first no years claim bonus which for a first time driver is a pretty good accomplishment. So I went back to the comparison websites and found that my insurance dropped like an anvil falling from a very tall building, I was staggered by what I was now having to pay. Eventually I went with the AA who charged me £460 for a year.
Now this is where the problem begins!
After I received my second no years claim bonus, I decided I would stick with the AA even though my dad suggested I look around as I would possibly get it cheaper, but being twenty-one I felt I knew best and contacted the AA, to which they said my new premium would be £440, which seemed odd since I now had two no years claims under my belt and thought I’d be paying a lot less than that, So I promptly made my excuses and went back to the comparison site, lowest quote was £400…..The car was now worth half that amount.
Fast forward two more years and I changed my car to a Skoda Felicia 1.3 litre, mainly because I needed more space and again I had to insure it…£360….By this point I now had four no years claims and was becoming frustrated since I thought and felt that the more you built up your no claims the faster your premium would shrink, again, the textbook on life never mentioned this.
Fast forward to the present day and I now own a Hyundai Coupe 1.6l Automatic (Yeah, I fancied a lazy car), insurance quote £440 with seven no years claims, now I understand that the car is a little more powerful, but £440?
I’d looked at another car before buying my Hyundai and it was an Audi GT Coupe, a trimmed down version of the Quattro, it was a 3 litre monster, I say monster because I’ve never had a car that powerful, anyway I looked up some insurance companies and the cheapest quote came back as £500, only £60 more expensive then what I’m paying now, but for the first time the insurance company called me to say that they couldn’t insure me and they’d have to put me through to their sister company for classic cars to which I thought the price was going to rocket….nope, £350.
Are you confused yet, because I still am, even looking on price comparison sites now for my car, one company wants to charge me over £4000 to insure my car, but it doesn’t even come with a courtesy car or windscreen cover…..so what exactly would that £4000 get me, certainly not a decent level of cover by the looks of it.
Namely I phoned the company and asked them to which their response was that they don’t give out those details, which is understandable, but even after pressing them that another company could do it for £500 they still refused to give out why they were charging what they were charging. Now people blame it on boy….and girl racers and uninsured drivers pushing up the premiums, but I think this is all wrong and I don’t think they are, I think the insurance companies are using it as an excuse to bump up the prices they charge and then try to prove it by using them as scapegoats.
Here’s another example, my car is off the road at the moment undergoing repairs so I got put on as a named driver on my dads car, but for some reason, his insurance company wouldn’t touch me because I was classed as a risk…….I have seven years no claims, I think I’ve proved by now that I can drive a car safely, We did however find another insurance company that would let me on the policy. Another problem I keep hearing about are drivers saying that their premiums are going up even after adding more no claims bonuses…and before any woman starts complaining, your insurance premiums went up because a bloke proved that it was sexist that women got cheaper premiums than men and that it was sexual discrimination because women were just as dangerous as men on the road, plus your great grandparents wanted to be treated and fought for the same rights as men because they felt it was unfair to be treated differently and I’ve seen plenty of women drivers putting on make up in the rear view mirror or talking on the phone while driving, so in retrospect, I think it’s perfectly justified.
But at the end of the day I’d like to see two things.
1. A standard set of rules for car insurance across the board with percentage drops for each yearly no claims bonus rather than increases, with sharper drops over 5 years because I feel by that point you have proved yourself a worthy driver and effectively a low insurance risk.
2. The national car registry to be overhauled so that the insurance cost reflects the cost of the car, If you own a car from the nineties, it should be cheaper to insure because the car is basically worthless and if it was crashed, the likelihood is is that the car will just be scrapped rather then claimed on, if it is a big powerful sports car from two years ago, then the insurance should be higher to reflect the cost because lets face it, if you crash that, you’re not going to scrap it!
But until this happens, we’ll just have to keep getting shafted by these robbers because lets face it, insurance is a rip off…..no matter what it is you’re insuring
