Best car insurance

jessy1

Can anyone help recommend a good car insurance please that is not Hastings or Hastings backed. They have being our insurer for the past year but after a small carpark at fault accident have vastly increased the cost to renew and we now have zero no claims. I am finding it difficult to trawl through all the many car insurers and having to fill in the details over and over. Compare the market takes me to badly rated insurers?!

dunstonh

Best in what respect?

TimSynths

It's all subjective, someone will say X is naff and someone else will have a positive experience but a quick Google throws up Direct Line.

Best car insurance for customer service

Finder’s pick: Direct Line car insurance

Finder rating 

★★★★★

Customer satisfaction 

★★★★★

We chose Direct line car insurance as our top pick because:

• Direct Line won Finder’s 2021 Car Insurance Customer Satisfaction Awards, scoring 4.5 stars out of 5 for overall satisfaction.
• There’s no charge for mid-term amendments.
• Direct Line offers exclusive deals for existing customers.

Need to know: The claims line isn’t 24/7, but there is an out-of-hours emergency helpline.

clive0510

confused.com. best site ever invented . I all ways use them every february when my insurance is due, and everytime I go for the cheapest but including screen cover and ncb protected. 

dunstonh

clive0510 said:

confused.com. best site ever invented . I all ways use them every february when my insurance is due, and everytime I go for the cheapest but including screen cover and ncb protected. 

This is the problem with defining best.  Confused would be an absolutely awful option for me and leave me either underinsured or uninsured.   What is best for one can be the worst for another.

Sandtree

clive0510 said:

confused.com. best site ever invented . I all ways use them every february when my insurance is due, and everytime I go for the cheapest but including screen cover and ncb protected. 

If you think best means cheapest then it and its peers are both reasonably good but if you consider best to be the highest level of cover then its one of the worst sites you can go to.

Unfortunately cheap insurance can prove very expensive when you find it doesnt cover certain normally standard things which have been stripped out to get the cheaper price.

csgohan4

I avoid the cheapest insurers on the comparison, often expensive mid policy changes and high excess. One insurer wanted 3k in excess regardless of fault per claim

Sandtree

csgohan4 said:
One insurer wanted 3k in excess regardless of fault per claim

Excess is always regardless of fault, excluding certain uninsured driver/vandalism etc type "promises". Many insurers will waive the excess in a non-fault claim where all TP and TPI details are known but its a guesture of goodwill to do so.

Having a very high excess can result in higher premiums for the same negative selection type reasons that TPO and TPFT can be more expensive than Comprehensive 

anotheruser

TimSynths said:

Best car insurance for customer service

Finder’s pick: Direct Line car insurance

And how much do Direct Line pay Google to have their result at the top?

clive0510 said:

confused.com. best site ever invented . I all ways use them every february when my insurance is due, and everytime I go for the cheapest but including screen cover and ncb protected. 

The initial reason confused.com existed was so users didn't have to keep entering their details over and over again.
I use them all the time.  I'm fine with missing out on Direct Line and others that "aren't on comparison websites" - they are usually a lot more expensive anyway.

Sandtree

anotheruser said:
The initial reason confused.com existed was so users didn't have to keep entering their details over and over again.

I use them all the time.  I'm fine with missing out on Direct Line and others that "aren't on comparison websites" - they are usually a lot more expensive anyway.

The reason they existed was because they realised they could charge insurers £50 for each sale which arguably is better than the insurer paying £5 per click from sponsored links on Google which may or may not even be someone looking to buy insurance that day let alone liking the price they see even if they do get a quote.

People were already able to get quotes from a large number of insurers simply by going to a broker and only giving their details once. If you actually look at confused.com and the other aggregators you'll see that for some types of policy, eg Business Insurance, what you actually see is just a broker (almost always Simply Business for Business Insurance) displaying their results in a similar way to aggregators do.

Amounts paid tend to be higher than to brokers but then the vendor owns the relationship with the policyholder and can direct cross sell and renew whereas a buyer via a broker is "owned" by the broker and they alone control those aspects.

Things have moved on a lot since those days though and now many insurers/intermediaries have special low quality products exclusively sold via aggregators because its all about price whereas direct customers more often have more of an eye on quality or value