Getting car insurance

venomx

Does bigger engine mean higher insurance? 
For example would a 1.4 polo be cheaper than a 1.6 ?

Ebe_Scrooge

venomx said:

Does bigger engine mean higher insurance? 
For example would a 1.4 polo be cheaper than a 1.6 ?

The smaller engine may be marginally cheaper to insure, but it doesn't necessarily follow.  Insurance pricing is based on risks and statistics.  At the simplest level, if the stats show that the smaller engined version is involved in more claims than the larger version, the smaller version will actually be more expensive to insure.  That's why you'll often hear of stories where a young driver, in particular, can insure a "boring" old Volvo estate with a 2 litre engine, much more cheaply than a 1 litre Corsa.

There are many many factors that go into insurance pricing, but statistics form a large part of it.

Sandtree

venomx said:

Does bigger engine mean higher insurance? 
For example would a 1.4 polo be cheaper than a 1.6 ?

Claims frequency x claims amount = claims exposure

The higher the claims exposure the higher the premiums. Insurers try to segment the business and look at the claims exposure at a granular level and so separate out what happens because the car was being driven by a 18 year old and what happens because the person has VW Polo 1.6. How accurately they can do it is debatable and most will accept that if a vehicle appeals to younger drivers it may become slightly tainted from an insurance perspective.

So which will be cheaper? There is no universal answer. For most insurers you would guess that a 1.4 being a lower powered car would be fractionally cheaper but that could easily be outweighed by the fact that the cheaper car is more affordable to younger drivers so has a worse claims frequency.