So......an end to cheaper car insurance for women

jase1

The thing is, every time I have ever shopped around for insurance the difference between the least and most expensive quotes has always been of the order of 3 or 400%. And it's not always the same suspects at the top and bottom of the list either.

This says to me that, to a large extent, insurance quotes are picked out of the air with a saliva-coated forefinger.

So does this ruling really make any difference?

Strider590

MsHoarder wrote: »

But dinting a car in a supermarket costs in the hundreds of pounds. A young driver who seriously injures 3 friends by coming off a country road at 60mph+ costs tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The insurance companies are more worried about the latter and price insurance accordingly.

That's exactly what im saying..........

Lots of small "dints" compared to the occasional huge accident.

I think young drivers have less accidents, but when they do it's exponentially more costly (as you mentioned).

But instead of saying this, the insurers just lead us all to believe that young drivers simply have more accidents.

It annoys me in this sense because the public assume young drivers crash at every corner, while everyone else is "Perfect".

Combine this with the "speeding causes all accidents" nonsense and it means we're not focusing our attention on issues such as OAPs driving the wrong way down the motorway, or excessively slow driving, or middle eastern drivers who don't read road signs or markings, or people who don't know they have to stop at pedestrian crossings (i've been hit twice as a pedestrian), or vigilante's who ignorantly "think" they know the highway code and try to enforce their version of it onto other drivers.

All things which I see every single day and yet we say "young drivers cause all the accidents" and then bury our heads in the sand. :mad:

jase1

The irony is of course that a minor supermarket ding is treated very similarly to a nasty crash by the insurers -- I played around with the figures on confused.com and changing a £500 supermarket "meeting" to a crash that wrote off a £20,000 car resulted in exactly the same quote.

That is madness.

Inactive

[QUOTE=Strider590;41625848
I think young drivers have less accidents, but when they do it's exponentially more costly (as you mentioned).

:[/QUOTE]

Think what you like, you are wrong.

boyse7en

It's irrelevant whether younger drivers have more accidents, or fewer accidents but higher value claims.

Insurers charge more for younger driver, not because they have more accident per se, but because the overall amount of money they (the insurers) have to pay it higher than for other age classifications. Eg. Five OAPS having accidents costing £10,000 is far less costly than 1 young driver having an accident that costs £100,000 - in this example OAPs are 500% more likely to have an accident, but the payout saving for the insurers is 100%, so an OAP is a far better bet than the younger driver
Its purely a risk vs reward scenario.

Strider590

^^ Going on measured statistics maybe, but how many minor shunts or carpark "dints" actually get reported to the insurance? yet each one of those is an "accident".

boyse7en wrote: »

It's irrelevant whether younger drivers have more accidents, or fewer accidents but higher value claims.

Insurers charge more for younger driver, not because they have more accident per se, but because the overall amount of money they (the insurers) have to pay it higher than for other age classifications. Eg. Five OAPS having accidents costing £10,000 is far less costly than 1 young driver having an accident that costs £100,000 - in this example OAPs are 500% more likely to have an accident, but the payout saving for the insurers is 100%, so an OAP is a far better bet than the younger driver
Its purely a risk vs reward scenario.

Again, exactly what I'm saying.

jase1

Yes, but if that is the case, why is it that individual policies do not seem to take this into account (as per my post above)?

jase1

> Going on measured statistics maybe, but how many minor shunts or carpark "dints" actually get reported to the insurance? yet each one of those is an "accident".

Oh tell me about it, the number of dings my cars have acquired over the years as a result of my living on the same road as the local primary school... many of those (mostly female) drivers shouldn't be let loose in a 4x4 or MPV, they just don't seem to know where their car ends and mine begins.

One of them got shirty with me for having the gall to present them with a £50 bill when I had to get a bumper repaired... I'd had it done on the cheap!

Inactive

boyse7en wrote: »

It's irrelevant whether younger drivers have more accidents, or fewer accidents but higher value claims.

Insurers charge more for younger driver, not because they have more accident per se, but because the overall amount of money they (the insurers) have to pay it higher than for other age classifications. Eg. Five OAPS having accidents costing £10,000 is far less costly than 1 young driver having an accident that costs £100,000 - in this example OAPs are 500% more likely to have an accident, but the payout saving for the insurers is 100%, so an OAP is a far better bet than the younger driver
Its purely a risk vs reward scenario.

I have a friend that works for a recovery company, he tells me that over 70% of accidents that he attends involve young, mainly male drivers.

Many not even involving other vehicles.

jase1

Yeah that'd be about right, my accident involved me and a post, when I was young(er).....

The fact that I was only doing around 20-25 at the time, and there was a diesel spill on the road leading to my car failing to make a turn, can be put down to inexperience but I would argue that it wasn't entirely my fault.