Why Can't We Insure Cars For 6 Months?

mikeh555

I have an 1996 Impreza worth about £3k as my second car, which is used for days out during the summer. Last winter it was locked away, and I have decided to do the same again this time. As my renewal came due, I therefore asked my insurance company if they would cover me for 6 months insurance, so I could drive the car between 1st April-30th September only. Their answer was that all policies are for 12 months, the reason being is that “they always have been”.

It seems a waste of money to have the car fully insured throughout the winter when it will not be used and the road risk is NIL.

If you can buy 6 month’s car tax, why can’t you now buy 6 month’s insurance? Especially when you consider that the new legislation passed this year has linked them together on the DVLA/ANPR databases, so that you cannot have a vehicle without tax or insurance, unless it has been declared as SORN.

In the current climate, why don’t insurance companies wake up and offer such a product to the beleaguered motorist? The risk whilst garaged is all mine, and they would have to reduce your annual NCB to 6 months in return, but I see no problem with that.

It would only take one company brave enough to offer this for others to follow, as many drivers in a similar position, would surely inundate them with new business.

I have therefore SORN’d the car, but when I wish to tax & insure it next April, I can have a 6 months tax disc no problem, but will have to have a 12 month insurance policy. If I want to cancel the policy 6 months later, there are penalties to pay, and I can’t see me being allowed to do this every year.

I see no problem in offering 6 monthly car insurance, which would surely result in increased business for the insurance companies and give a more realistic insurance option for second cars.

Sally_A

It's an annual contract, but look for an insurer that will still do 6 months LUADF&T (Laid Up Accidental Damage fire & Theft), so whilst no road cover is still OK should a tree fall on it in winter, or any other mishap.

You tend to have to pay up front, and get the refund after the laid up period has finished.

Phantom247

The other option is see if a broker can help they sometimes have more options available for this type of circumstance.

dacouch

It's business that they don't want, this is because they would have the work / cost of setting up new policies (They make their money from customer renewing policies) and also policies under twelve months have a much higher claims incidence and tend to attract fraudulent claimers.

Someone who only drivers an Imprezza for 6 months of any year would also not appeal to a lot of Insurers

InsideInsurance

Most of it is history as you've been told.

You'll see lots of insurer's offering 12 months for the price of 10 but what insurers really want to be doing is offering you 15 months for the price of 12 as this would move your renewal date and invalidate all the data that your competitors have gathered on your customer. When a former client looked into changing their system to be able to do this, even with compromises in some areas, the cost to do it was estimated at £15m with IT only having a 30% confidence factor that it would work.

The reality is that mass market insurance is all done by IT systems, many of which are fairly ancient when what we would now do as parameters were then hard coded. For them to invest the sort of money to make the systems more flexible they are going to need a big business case to put behind it. Simply the vast majority of people dont want mid term insurance, its either short term (covering a courtesy car) or long term