£100 extra even though car is in lower insurance group?

mattio

Hi there,

I just bought a new car today which is smaller and a lower insurance group (2 groups lower) than my previous car, yet when I just called the insurance company they've quoted me £100 more than what I'm paying to continue my insurance with this car. I had to take it or I'd not have been able to take the car home, but does this sound normal? He said there's a £25 admin fee and some other charge included but surely it should still only be a small increase if any? Thanks

Quentin

If your insurer provides quotes online you could do dummy quotes for both cars and have something concrete to back up your argument you are being over charged.

Just_Some_Guy

How old is your new car? If you've gone from a V reg to a 61 plate then your newer car will be worth a lot more so it will cost more to insure, even if you've gone from a BMW 5 series to a Micra. Also insurers adjust a car's insurance group for all sorts of reasons (e.g. body colour); if they think your new car really belongs in a higher insurance group then they'll move it there and charge you the difference.

All you can really do is ask them exactly why your premium has gone up.

Spiderham

2 points may be affecting this. First, as has been mentioned the age of a car may well impact the cost of insurance so the new car may cost more because of that. Secondly, the Thatcham car insurance groups are "advisory" and insurers don't have to follow them, several insurers may have their own grouping system or other methods of rating vehicles. This is partially because the Thatcham groups are only based on the cost of fixing the car (with some tweaks for security) and not to do with how often they have crashes.

vaio

yep, there are many possible reasons for an increase but, as quentin mentions above, it's always worth running a couple of dummy quotes to make sure they aren't taking advantage of the OPs "captive punter" status to unfairly over charge

forgotmyname

A lower group doesnt mean a lower price.

It may be a higher risk. Or have a higher number of claims.

The groups are just a rough idea on repair costs. Risk doesnt come into it.

If you were an insurer and every red Fiesta owner made a claim you would charge more.
But a blue car may have less claims.

Foxn86

Well having worked for a very well know insurance company yes it does sound right. Firstly this large insurer uses totally different insurance groups to what you may think is the correct group so what you may think is the correct group the company may deem this wrong internally. Also you can go from a really popular car to a less popular car making parts more expensive harder to source etc. Also cetain types of cars are a higher theft risk again can cause all these problems, insurance companies use so many different scoring methods to calculate the risk on a particular car and it can be really confusing to a customer, if they buy a car with smaller engine or less value etc. But just remeber a lot more things are taken into consideration

rs65

I understood that repair costs are already factored into the group ratings.

Group ratings are, I believe, not compulsory even for ABI and LMA members so if one insurer is seeing more losses for a certain make/model, they may choose to rate it higher.

Have a read here

http://www.thatcham.org/research/index.jsp?page=33

mattio

Thanks for the advice everyone, the car is a lot newer so this is probably the reason, I just wanted to make sure they weren't ripping me off but I'll do some dummy ones tomorrow to be sure

raskazz

Not forgetting that insurers often use the length of time that the vehicle has been owned for as a rating factor. All other things being equal, generally new purchases are riskier than vehicles which have been owned by the driver for a while.

Also, insurance rating is now so technical that "vehicle group" is often now not a "one-way" factor. For example, the group rating may be a matrix of all the combinations of driver age, vehicle make, NCD and group etc.