How do you explain higher insurance on a lower insurance car??

Not_Me_Officer

I have a 02 plate Golf GT TDI 130bhp.
According to parkers the insurance group is 27.


The car has died so I picked up a cheap 306 1/9 diesel to be going on with. The cars value is £400.
Parkers state the insurance group is 11. The LX.


So the 306 is cheaper, it's a much lower spec & the insurance group is more than halved.


All other details remain the same. Parked in the same place, my job is the same, so on & so forth.




I'm insured with 1st Central. I've just been online to change the details. I'm well aware that I need to pay to change it, but I was expecting the price to drop.


So I was more than a little surprised to see that the change would cost me £95.73 which includes a £15 admin fee.


This bumps my monthly premium from £146.50 to £179.69.




Why am I paying more for a lesser car? Makes no sense to me.

lisyloo

"lesser" cars are sometimes bought by "boy racer" types and have more accidents.

Not_Me_Officer

There wont be much racing with this car. The 0-60 time on it is something like 14 seconds. The Golf being around 9.5. I'd be better racing the snails.

FutureGirl

Not_Me_Officer wrote: »

There wont be much racing with this car. The 0-60 time on it is something like 14 seconds. The Golf being around 9.5. I'd be better racing the snails.

Statistically these are the type of cars boy racers buy and, ultimately, crash. Insurance is all about statistics, not you personally.

It could also be because they didn't want to insure you now as your classed as riskier now, so they push the price way up.

KingS6

It's not just the performance aspect. There's safety to think about too and the cost of replacement parts.

306's are old cars now and safety has come on leaps and bounds since they were new. For all we know 306's may have been involved in more pedestrian collisions than mk4 Golf's. So many variables as to why it went up, that's just one example.

teddysmum

[QUOTE=Not Me Officer;71073732


This bumps my monthly premium from £146.50 to £179.69.


[/QUOTE]

Yikes. We pay less than that for a whole year on one of our cars.

molerat

Not_Me_Officer wrote: »

Why am I paying more for a lesser car? Makes no sense to me.

Because they can. You are a captive audience, it will cost you a lot more to cancel and go elsewhere.

mcjordi

Its normally because your "locked in" as youve already bought the policy they know they can charged a lot more and you have 2 choices
1. pay the money
2. cancel and pay the cancellation charges
they will all round :~)

Faith177

Also you sometimes get an ownership discount based on how long you've owned a vehicle you might have lost this when you got the new car

Aretnap

"Insurance groups" are primarily a marketing gimmick used by car manufacturers. They have very little bearing on how much insurance actually costs for a given car. Insurers will look at their own experience of claims for a given type of car when determining premiums - the only time they might look at the insurance group is to provide a rough guess for a new model of car which they don't have any claims history for yet.

Some types of car, eg Volvos, are in a high insurance group because they're quite powerful cars and parts are expemsive, but it doesn't matter because they're driven by boring sensible middle aged middle class types who very rarely crash them. Other types of car (eg Corsas, 306's) can be in a lower insurance group but still be expensive to insure, because the people who drive them (who tend to include a high proportion of young people) tend to have a lot of accidents.

Additionally each insurer has its own target market (for which it will try to price as competitively as possible) and other markets it's less interested in (so will be less keen to offer rock bottom prices. Hence the cheapest insurer for a large high end saloon car won't necessarily give you a good price for a cheap supermini, and so on and so on.

forgotmyname

Getting quotes for young drivers, I found a car over 10 years old increased the premium quite a bit.

Just getting quotes for my little one and the cheapest quote in on a brand new car with close to double the BHP of everything else i was looking at.