Help! Horrendous quotes for car insurance for 17 yr old!

aylesby

I posted this story on a different MSE board

DS is 18 and just passed his test. In a Panda this is £1800 for insurance. He goes with Direct Line at 10% online discount plus 20% for pass plus prorate to the time on the policy. When he claims the pass plus he is told the maximum discount is 20% and he already has had 10%.
We are combative and challenge through customer services in writing. The missing 10% is £175 and has now come through.
So Direct Line do honour their initial statements but some of their call centre workers are working from an old script.

Pass plus for DS was six more lessons with his instructor on different deiving problems after he passed his test. That cost him £120 but his insurance has now gone down £350. In some areas pass plus is subsidised by speed camera revenue.

raskazz

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

the insurance companies are determined to make people drive without insurance by pricing young drivers out.

Where is your evidence for this outlandish assertion?

Motor insurance is a very competitive market - every insurer has to strike a balance between setting a premium high enough to cover the risk and setting it low enough to maintain competitiveness.

There is no question of any intent to 'price younger drivers out' - the premiums are charged reflect the risk and nothing more. The reality is that the large proportion of irresponsible young and inexperienced drivers price their peers out.

darich

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

the insurance companies are determined to make people drive without insurance by pricing young drivers out.

Wrong - it's young drivers who by their very nature are high risk and more lilely than any other driver to have an accident and therefore claim. Young drivers, for as long as they're the most likely to crash will pay the highest premiums. How often do you see a Citroen Saxo or Corsa with big exhaust, spoilers, stickers, alloys driving quickly - it's almost always a young boy.

Why should ins companies run at a loss? People also forget that a £500 car that costs £2000 to insure is not a rip off - it's got very little to do with the value of the car - it's because most other cars on the road are worth more and therefore more expensive to fix - hence higher payout.

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

tweak his job title a bit. this can affect the cost, don't go picking something that is nothing like his job but they don't normally list every job so you go for one similar. They may be one just as close but will drop the insurance a bit.

Insurance company might take this as lying or fraud - i know you mean tweaking a little but if they want a get out then you've just given them one

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

get an thatcham cat 1 imobiliser

i doubt this will make a difference to a 1.1 car with a high risk driver - the main reason for the quote being sky high is the risk of the driver, not the car being stolen. besides buying a banger for £500 - a cat 1 immobiliser would cost you half the value of the car...upwards.
It would probably make a difference on my £10,000 Celica but not on a £500 Corsa

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

get a tracker

see above reason = cat 1 plus immobiliser would be more than the car is worth

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

Slightly lower the value of the car. They may have paid over the odds and the insurance company might not pay out what she paid. Plus it'll be worth less in 6 months time.

If they're looking for a reason to reduce the pay out then you've given them one - i know they (allegedly) pay market value but if value your car at less than market value to begin with, how can it depereciate slower than every other identical car to be worth market value, in the even of a claim a few months later?

scheming_gypsy

Raskazz & Darich. Does it cost more to repair a car now than it did 10 years ago? The answer will be no, and even if it did cost more to repair i'm pretty sure that it won't be a lot more.
My second car was a Peugeot 205 1.9 GTi and the insurance was around £700 and i was 19. To say a 1.1 Pug 106 is a higher risk is a joke. The insurance companies are raising prices to make more money it's as simple as that.
you can bury your head in the sand and ignore it but these high insurance prices are the reason people drive without insurance.

scheming_gypsy

darich wrote: »

Wrong - it's young drivers who by their very nature are high risk and more lilely than any other driver to have an accident and therefore claim. Young drivers, for as long as they're the most likely to crash will pay the highest premiums. How often do you see a Citroen Saxo or Corsa with big exhaust, spoilers, stickers, alloys driving quickly - it's almost always a young boy.


Why should ins companies run at a loss? People also forget that a £500 car that costs £2000 to insure is not a rip off - it's got very little to do with the value of the car - it's because most other cars on the road are worth more and therefore more expensive to fix - hence higher payout.

So you penalise them the year after if they have an accident instead of penalising all young drivers for the next x years.

Insurance company might take this as lying or fraud - i know you mean tweaking a little but if they want a get out then you've just given them one

like i said, the jobs don't always match exactly so there may be one just as close to the one you've chosen that will bring the quote down slightly.
if you work as a, for example, invoice inputter in a finance department. Data inputter my come out cheaper than something around the finance area when its still a valid description of the work you do. The only identical job match i've ever found is 'retired'.

i doubt this will make a difference to a 1.1 car with a high risk driver - the main reason for the quote being sky high is the risk of the driver, not the car being stolen. besides buying a banger for £500 - a cat 1 immobiliser would cost you half the value of the car...upwards.
It would probably make a difference on my £10,000 Celica but not on a £500 Corsa


see above reason = cat 1 plus immobiliser would be more than the car is worth

you don't have to install them to see how much your insurance would drop if you had them. if the saving is worth it then install them. Plus we're talking about a £2500 pug not a £500 corsa.

If they're looking for a reason to reduce the pay out then you've given them one - i know they (allegedly) pay market value but if value your car at less than market value to begin with, how can it depereciate slower than every other identical car to be worth market value, in the even of a claim a few months later?

i haven't given them one at all. If you read those wordy type things instead of seeing shapes and making your own words you'd see things clearly.

the words 'may have paid over the odds' appeared in there. Just because the car cost £2500 doesn't mean its worth £2500. If they paid over the odds the insurance company aren't going to pay out what they paid for it are they? no, exactly! so why say its worth £2500 if its only actually worth £2000.

Again if you read everything i put you might have got to the line where i said:
When you calculate a lot of things the insurance might be cheaper than paying less and paying for the extras. or did you just want to go picking at everything?

Francophile

Quinn Direct are about as cheap as you'll get for young drivers. Don't know what they're like if you need to make a claim though.

raskazz

Oh dear. This post displays a fundmanental lack of understanding, as your earlier post did.

Car repairs are the least of the insurer's worries. The real risk in insuring younger drivers does not derive from metal and mechanics but third party personal injury/death claims.

If you could actually be bothered to research the subject (or even spend 10 minutes on Google), you would soon have a plethora of reasons for the high insurance premiums young and inexperienced drivers face.

Here's a few factoids for you to think about:

1) The total number of deaths per 100,000 of young licence holders has risen from 9.7 in 2000 to 19.2 in 2004.

2) 25 per cent of drivers who die are under 25 years old.

3) You are more likely to have an accident in the first two years of passing your test than at any other time.

4) Young male drivers (17-20) are seven times more at risk than all male drivers.

I could go on forever. I will instead re-state the truth which you did not even acknowledge - insurers have to balance risk with competitiveness. If any insurer thought that they could cover younger drivers at premiums below the current level then they would reduce their premiums accordingly to make a shedload of money.

scheming_gypsy

no doubt you'd like to go on forever as well.

Which insurance company is it you work for or are you just one of the mindless drones who doesn't have the mental capacity to think for yourself and realise that not everything we're told is the truth.

1 - were the 19.2 young license holders the cause of the deaths or just involved in an RTA which resulted in their death?
2 - see point 1. Are the drivers to blame or a victim of an accident.
3 - And that has what to do with being a young driver? first 2 years can be from the age of 17 to 60.
4 - more at risk from what? causing an accident or being involved in one,.

To say my posts display a fundemental lack of understanding you're doing a pretty good job of lacking any moral fibre in any of your arguments.

raskazz

Haha.

I prefer to base arguments on facts not ill-informed dogma. Given that, perhaps before we start dissecting the information I posted above you could do us a favour and post any evidence at all that backs up your wild assertion that insurers collude to fix prices for young drivers, instead of your petty ad hominem rantings.

I will explain you for the third time:

No insurer can set prices artificially high for young drivers. Motor insurance is a highly competitive market. If any insurer rated premiums higher than the actual risk a competitor would undercut them and take the business away from them.

scheming_gypsy

got you. You've no evidence to back up your claims or to answer my questions. No problem, we'll leave it there then shall we.


Not a bad way to base arguments on 'facts' is it? search the net, throw a few half hearted answers about and have no answers to the questions raised about them. Congratulations, you'll go far in politics.