A few questions on car insurance (for a couple)

Mercdriver

Car_54 wrote: »

It wasn't 120 stickers, it was £120 - 'She paid £120 to cover her car in messages "spreading the gospel".'

That sounds to me like £120 spent on professionally produced vinyl adverts.

On the one hand, she's promoting her "business" of purporting to save "souls" while avoiding business use.

On the other, she may deserve a refund for making the car extremely unattractive to thieves.

I suspect the insurers just thought they had a "wrong un" but gave the wrong explanation to the press.

I do stand corrected, but £120 does buy a lot of stickers.

In any case, using that amount for stickers would suggest business use, and if she wasn't paying for business use in her premiums, she did make herself open to either her premiums being reassessed or her cover being withdrawn.

Gloomendoom

This is the car. There was/is one on the bonnet too.

BeenThroughItAll

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

I have crash protectors on my motorcycle, not because I want to race, but because I want to protect the bike, including should an idiot car driver reverse into it and cause it to drop while it's parked. However, I can understand how it could be associated to aggressive riding.

And if your bike insurer increased your premium because of that, it may be because evidence they have access to suggests that many crash protectors actually cause more damage than they save in a more significant accident. Mine didn't, however, and if they tried I'd find another insurer.

But stickers? That's simply ridiculous.

Not if they're advertising a business, as that's business use. Spreading the word of Jesus is advertising the Church. No doubt Rev. Godly would also expect the decals to be replaced if someone drove into her and the car was resprayed - that's an additional cost over standard which the insurer is perfectly entitled to charge extra for, or void the policy if not declared.

Oh, I also installed handlebar risers. They make the riding position more upright, less racing-like, so, if anything, they should signal less risk, not more, but some insurers still take a generalised approach that you must pay more for any modification.

Maybe because your non-standard modification would cost more to replace than the standard clip-ons, or take longer to fit, or require longer brake lines. Again, an additional cost over standard which the insurer is perfectly entitled to charge extra for, or void the policy if not declared.

I also declared GPS holder and luggage. I cannot possibly think of a single reason why having GPS or luggage would alter the risk profile; if anything, luggage should be associated with less risky riding behaviour (you don't see luggage on racing bikes)! However, I have to protect myself from the possibility, however remote, that my insurer would use any excuse, however ridiculous, not to pay up.

GPS bracket and luggage might suggest to a potential thief that you are a touring motorcyclist with interesting and valuable things in your top and sidecases, rendering your motorcycle more likely to be stolen.


Or a thief may assume that the missing GPS from your bracket is locked in one of the cases, leading them to break into the case and cause damage to the case and/or bike itself which you might claim for.


Or (let's assume you have a 1200GSA for a minute) those nice hard alloy Touratech cases on the back might be subject to a minor lapse, a misjudgement of width when filtering, taking a gouge out of the side of Mr Bigcock's Lamborghini Huracan on Oxford Street.


See the point? It's not all about whether Michael Dunlop has it fitted to his TT bike, you know.

BeenThroughItAll

Gloomendoom wrote: »

This is the car. There was/is one on the bonnet too.

[EMAIL="Life.Anew@talktalk.net"]Life.Anew@talktalk.net[/EMAIL]. Sounds like an advertisement for God to me.

SouthLondonUser

@BeenThroughItAll, I love it how you assume insurers make rational, scientific and well-founded choices based on sound statistics, and not on dodgy excuses to rip off customers as much as they can!

We must have had very different experiences. Can you give me the name of your insurers? I trust mine less than my cocaine dealer! It’s a joke, of course. I don’t have a cocaine dealer. And, if I did, I’d have to declare it to my insurer!

Jokes aside, the reasoning is not always as scientific as they would like us to believe it is. The key proof is insurance renewals: insurers would love us to think that there is always some sound scientific statistical reason behind price hikes that customers struggle to understand. One of the few, if not possibly the only one, situations where insurers can clearly be proven wrong is insurance renewals: I, and like myself many other people, have ALWAYS been in a situation where the automatic renewal quote provided by my insurer was considerably more expensive than the quote I obtained from the very same insurer, for the very same details. So please forgive me if I do not trust insurers. Why do you? Do you have access to their data and their pricing algorithms, which convince you that price hikes for a GPS holder are justified and not an intentional rip-off? Yes, it is theoretically possible that what you said about luggage being riskier etc might hold some water, but, again, without access to the insurers’ data and algorithms, how can you be sure that’s the case, how can you be sure they don’t just use it as an excuse to rip customers off? I cannot be 100% sure it’s an intentional rip off, but you cannot be 100% sure it’s not. If anything, insurers’ behaviour justifies my scepticism.
Also, since you are so well-versed with insurance and statistics, you will no doubt be familiar with the concept of spurious correlations (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations ) , and with how difficult it is to understand if a potential relationship which seems to emerge from the data is irrelevant noise or if it actually means something.

The kind of detailed reasoning you allude to would require way more details, which insurers do not ask for, and without which a proper assessment is not possible. E.g. they do not distinguish between a small topbox which does not affect filtering and huge panniers which do and represent more of a risk. If I have a GPS holder but no topbox, where on Earth would I be storing those potentially expensive high-tech gadgets that the presence of a GPS holder might signal I might have? I have handlebar risers, but if I didn’t declare the value of that accessory I am not entitled to claim for it; oh, btw, a more upright position means better lateral visibility (safer). And, no, the brake line is not affected.

A sticker supporting a certain cause, political party, football club etc might be an invitation for thugs who don’t share that view to vandalise the vehicle. But how much do we want to bet that many insurers would use stickers as an excuse not to pay even in the case of a no-fault accident and a third-party only policy, ie in a situation where vandalism was not covered anyway, and the stickers had nothing to do with the accident?

I get that in a free market insurers must be able to set their own criteria, but “free market” needn’t mean wildly unregulated, especially because motor insurance is not an option: motorists must have it. Think of lenders: each lender is free to set its own criteria, but must treat customers fairly. There’s nothing wrong with a lender deciding they don’t want to lend against properties in certain locations (Northern Irelands, rural villages, islands) or to certain customers (foreigners who have been in the country less than a certain number of years, self-employed, etc.). But this doesn’t mean that, say, a mortgage lender is free to refuse a loan to a customer because of the colour of his skin, the shirt he wears, or where he went on holiday last summer!

Mercdriver

This thread is a first. It's gone completely off the rails - that in itself is not uncommon. It's the OP that has taken it off on some anti insurance tirade after starting it off with pretty everyday questions.

The OP is clearly not interested in the questions he asked at the start...

SouthLondonUser

I believe those questions have been answered clearly. I got carried away.

BeenThroughItAll

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

@BeenThroughItAll, I love it how you assume insurers make rational, scientific and well-founded choices based on sound statistics, and not on dodgy excuses to rip off customers as much as they can!

You're the one making assumptions.

Having been involved in writing the quotation engines for some of the UK's first direct and later online insurers, and having worked with insurance datasets on a number of projects, I can assure you that the insurers make decisions based only on statistics. How each insurer weights their decisions will vary, but all of them are statistically based.

Believe me, there's not a group of evil insurance geniuses reviewing every quotation request looking for ways to trip up the unsuspecting proposer.


And yes, via one of my customers I do still have access to several insurers' datasets, and indeed to datasets created by several of the UK's largest handlers of written off and damaged vehicles.



You're starting to sound as paranoid as Strider.

Car_54

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

There’s nothing wrong with a lender deciding they don’t want to lend against properties in certain locations (Northern Irelands, rural villages, islands) or to certain customers (foreigners who have been in the country less than a certain number of years, self-employed, etc.). But this doesn’t mean that, say, a mortgage lender is free to refuse a loan to a customer because of the colour of his skin, the shirt he wears, or where he went on holiday last summer!

I think you have some of that diametrically wrong. It is (AFAIK) illegal to discriminate against a foreigner if he is an EU citizen. There is nothing illegal - or indeed wrong - about discrimination on the basis of choice of shirt or holiday destination.

takman

The reason that new renewal quotes are more expensive than new quotes are because they offer discounted prices to people who shop around which is subsidised by people who just renew each year.

I have actually asked them in the past why new quotes are cheaper and they have said it's due to introductory discounts to attract new customers.

This is quite common in a lot of industries and is definitely not unique to insurance.

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

So please forgive me if I do not trust insurers. Why do you? Do you have access to their data and their pricing algorithms, which convince you that price hikes for a GPS holder are justified and not an intentional rip-off? Yes, it is theoretically possible that what you said about luggage being riskier etc might hold some water, but, again, without access to the insurers’ data and algorithms, how can you be sure that’s the case, how can you be sure they don’t just use it as an excuse to rip customers off?

You definitely shouldn't trust insurers, just like you shouldn't "trust" any company. All companies are there to make money so you should never put full "trust" in one company and believe everything they say; especially when they are selling something.

Insurance companies are under alot of pressure to be competitive especially since more and more people are comparing prices online. If insurance companies were overcharging for the risks involved then one company would be able to come in and undercut all their prices and get a massive increase in business.

Also as BeenThroughItAll says all insurance companies use statistics to calculate premiums. If they get this wrong and start changing prices to try and get more money it could end in them loosing alot of money and destroy the company.