Car insurance extortion

Dannydee333

Emmia said:

Does the car cost prevent/ make it more difficult for you to get your own home? Could you look at something like a zip car / car sharing to give you car access when you need to see family etc. without many of the costs which are associated with having a lump of (depreciating) metal sat in front of your property...

I'm posing these questions not to be annoying, but to challenge you to think about the choices available to you. I don't have a car, but I live in London with excellent public transport (and I walk a lot)... I also don't miss having a car, the costs etc.

No, it doesn't make it more difficult to get my own home. Looked at ZIp Car - sounds like a good idea but it seems to cost anything from £60 to £100 for a day, and to pay 80 quid anytime I want to drive up to see family would be insane.

It would be more viable to ditch the car where I live now and use public transport (I had to use it before I drove) but if I was to get rid of the car it would just be more of an inconvenience than not. It's not the most expensive vehicle, it's just a Peugeot 206, which is one of the reasons it's so annoying to be hit with almost double the insurance.

Indout96

Whilst I appreciate your annoyance with the situation at the moment things always come & go, the problem is that we as a nation have become used to low inflation for the last many years and the large rises seen in the last 18 months are the first real rises many have seen, my own son & daughter have never really known inflation so it coming as a big shock to them.
my insurance went up around 50% this year and whilst I have not had claim since 1996 (small bump - my fault) there is virtually never a day in Bradford when there is not a major accident in the local paper, many cars (specifically Golf / Audi A3) which magically seem to end up on there own roof. someone has to pay for all this.

Lorian

I'm old and don't drive something likely to set a car park alight however even after shopping around my best renewal is a 49% increase over last year, so I guess not many will be immune to this. 

sheramber

from MSE Weekly Money Tips

Take cover! It's got worse...
Martin: 'Car insurance prices now up, gulp, 61% and average over £900/yr.

LessThanSte

I've noticed almost universally that as well as premiums rising (my best renewal quote (which commences on the 4th) was £30/month (~50%) up), the compulsory excesses have also shot up. My renewal quote went from £100 compulsory to £400 (the premium i finally plumped for had a significant increase in voluntary to get it somewhere respectable!).

Looking at all of the quotes offered on comparison sites, its £400-500 compulsory excess almost across the board until you get to insurance products with premium's approaching £1500/annum - and even then its still well above what I paid last year.

I was a little surprised when my compulsory excess went up at renewal - I'd assumed (wrongly?) that the renewal should be like for like.

I saw a comment elsewhere that the insurance market feels inherently unfair. It's a legal obligation to have car insurance yet there seems very little consumer protection/championing to keep prices at a sensible level. Of course the insurance companies will say that there are 1) more claims, 2) more accidents through bad driving, 3) more uninsured drivers, 4) higher cost of repairs, etc. (which I have some sympathy with), but the current approach which bungs all that cost/risk on to the individual customer seems wrong somehow...

DullGreyGuy

LessThanSte said:

I was a little surprised when my compulsory excess went up at renewal - I'd assumed (wrongly?) that the renewal should be like for like.

I saw a comment elsewhere that the insurance market feels inherently unfair. It's a legal obligation to have car insurance yet there seems very little consumer protection/championing to keep prices at a sensible level. Of course the insurance companies will say that there are 1) more claims, 2) more accidents through bad driving, 3) more uninsured drivers, 4) higher cost of repairs, etc. (which I have some sympathy with), but the current approach which bungs all that cost/risk on to the individual customer seems wrong somehow...

A renewal is a whole new contract, it may be identical to the previous one or may be massively different. No doubt anyone buying business interuption insurance a few years ago will have seen a notable change in the wording to ensure pandemics are excluded in their 2020/2021 renewal.

Your renewal should advise you to check the schedule and the policy to ensure it's still appropriate to your needs. Any material change in the policy wording should be called out in a separate leaflet. 

There can be some advantages for the insurer to keep you on grandfathered T&Cs but it also creates an administrative headache from both an IT and Ops perspective with claims having to remember the differences between all the variants of wording still in force or even last in force up to 6 years ago. Most therefore renew you onto the new terms. 

Car_54

LessThanSte 

I saw a comment elsewhere that the insurance market feels inherently unfair. It's a legal obligation to have car insurance yet there seems very little consumer protection/championing to keep prices at a sensible level. Of course the insurance companies will say that there are 1) more claims, 2) more accidents through bad driving, 3) more uninsured drivers, 4) higher cost of repairs, etc. (which I have some sympathy with), but the current approach which bungs all that cost/risk on to the individual customer seems wrong somehow...

If not the customer, who do think should pay? 

The taxpayer? The tooth fairy?

oldagetraveller1

Sadly we've all got to pay for these BEVs being written off after a minor prang because there's no way to determine the condition of the battery afterwards.

DullGreyGuy

Car_54 said:

LessThanSte 

I saw a comment elsewhere that the insurance market feels inherently unfair. It's a legal obligation to have car insurance yet there seems very little consumer protection/championing to keep prices at a sensible level. Of course the insurance companies will say that there are 1) more claims, 2) more accidents through bad driving, 3) more uninsured drivers, 4) higher cost of repairs, etc. (which I have some sympathy with), but the current approach which bungs all that cost/risk on to the individual customer seems wrong somehow...

If not the customer, who do think should pay? 

The taxpayer? The tooth fairy?

Other countries have fundamentally different methods, if you look at NZ there is no compulsory insurance on cars. Insurance you do buy covers property damage not bodily injury. Bodily Injury for everyone, irrespective of blame is covered by the ACC and covers things like treatment and loss of earnings but no basic PSLA for injuries you'll recover from... you simply get nothing for whiplash etc from anyone. 

Emmia

DullGreyGuy said:

Car_54 said:

LessThanSte 

I saw a comment elsewhere that the insurance market feels inherently unfair. It's a legal obligation to have car insurance yet there seems very little consumer protection/championing to keep prices at a sensible level. Of course the insurance companies will say that there are 1) more claims, 2) more accidents through bad driving, 3) more uninsured drivers, 4) higher cost of repairs, etc. (which I have some sympathy with), but the current approach which bungs all that cost/risk on to the individual customer seems wrong somehow...

If not the customer, who do think should pay? 

The taxpayer? The tooth fairy?

Other countries have fundamentally different methods, if you look at NZ there is no compulsory insurance on cars. Insurance you do buy covers property damage not bodily injury. Bodily Injury for everyone, irrespective of blame is covered by the ACC and covers things like treatment and loss of earnings but no basic PSLA for injuries you'll recover from... you simply get nothing for whiplash etc from anyone. 

As I'm not from New Zealand, I don't know what either the ACC or PSLA is...