Car Insurance and Address

AllNancy

I have car insurance with Saga at a reasonable premium. I drive a 204 Rover and an accident free driving record. I lived in a small village with a low crime rate but the car was parked on the road and went through phases of being keyed by the darling yobs who walked by who on one occasion did £800 of damage.....for a laugh!

I recently moved even further into the country where the crime rate is virtually zero and my premium nearly doubled!

Where on earth is the logic in that and where do I find out why?

I'm still stunned.


Nancy

Quentin

No point wasting too much time trying to discover the logic - better to spend it on shopping round for the best deal! (It could just be that saga have had bad experiences in your post code and don't really want the business.)

talulah25

Quentin wrote: »

No point wasting too much time trying to discover the logic - better to spend it on shopping round for the best deal! (It could just be that saga have had bad experiences in your post code and don't really want the business.)

Agreed, life is not to reason why...(especially when it comes to Insurance Companies lol)

scooby75

There are websites that provide the risk ratings for postcodes, but I doubt their accuracy as they only use the first part of the postcode.

My postcode is a high risk one - one of the highest in fact. I'm thinking of moving to an address where the premium has dropped from £1800 to £550 per year (it's in the middle of farmland), yet the postcode I'm moving to is classed as a medium risk. I wonder if they include things like traffic incidents on route between work and home? Dunno. Have you told your insurer of these incidents? They may have logged them as notifications which might affect your premium.

Or the insurers are probably just being their greedy selves....

InsideInsurance

All insurers base pricing on their own experiences, anything like ABI car groups etc are just initial guides. Insurers want to make their rating algorithm as accurate as possible and so will consider interactions between different rating elements eg - is a teen living in the city with pubs close by or a teen living in the country with pubs far away more likely to go drink driving? Whilst they have the data to do the analysis the limiting factor can be the speed at which quotes can be generated.

The other thing, that this site so often over looks, is that insurance is made up of more than just purely the underwriting risk but also a commercial aspect. Insurers go to great lengths to measure customers pricing elasticity/ sensitivity for one and will build this into the model... a mid-old age person in the country may be a very low risk but if they aren't sensitive to pricing then their premiums will be loaded simply because they will pay the price.

agrinnall

When I moved to the country and my premium went up I was told it's because there are more accidents on small rural roads that there are on urban roads. It does make sense when you think about the roads around here, no lighting, very few road markings, crumbling verges, single lanes, logging trucks, tour buses, tractors, sheep, ice, leaves, sun dazzle and poor sightlines, just to mention a few of the hazards. Yes, it's not likely to be nicked or keyed, but I imagine cost of accidents makes up a higher proportion of insurance payouts than theft or damage does.

thegirlintheattic

I'd agree with agrinnall, some of the back roads around my house in a rural village have seen many serious accidents, especially at night, and hence premiums in that postcode are higher than in the village itself which has street lighting.

I also seem to remember someone saying that accidents on rural A roads often write the cars off and cause more serious and fatal accidents.