Car insurance cartel?????

wightfellrunner

My car insurance is due for renewal in early March. Like everyone else my premium has nearly doubled. I have shopped around as usual and find that ALL QUOTES are within £5 of each other! I even used a broker this morning and his results were exactly the same!! This has never happened before. Is there dirty work afoot???

DullGreyGuy

wightfellrunner said:

My car insurance is due for renewal in early March. Like everyone else my premium has nearly doubled. I have shopped around as usual and find that ALL QUOTES are within £5 of each other! I even used a broker this morning and his results were exactly the same!! This has never happened before. Is there dirty work afoot???

Would love to see a screenshot of Confused.com where every quote is within £5 of each other. Last quote I did ranged from £750 to £21,000 but most were clustered around £1,100


It really depends on who you are getting quotes from. Prices are set by the insurance company generally so if you go to 10 brokers and they all use Aviva's standard terms and all get a quote from Aviva you'd expect their pricing to be very similar and only varying by the percentage brokerage they are taking. 

dunstonh

ALL QUOTES are within £5 of each other!

That is highly unusual.  I would also have suggested it was not likely given my experience of pricing.  I had a renewal through last week and the differences  in the top dozen ran into hundreds.  And it ramped out even more as you went further down beyond that.

Also, the types like quote me happy and direct line have multiple levels of cover and appears multiple times and the differences between those would be more than £5.

400ixl

It could be that the most competitive quotes are comping from companies which are all part of the same group and using the same quotes engine and underwriters.

There will likely also be a bunch of outlying quotes as other people have mentioned. Unless of course there is something unusual and these related companies are the only ones willing to quote.

But to answer the question as to whether there is a cartel, then outside of the companies owned by the same parent then no, they all keep their own quoting engines very secrative from each other.

[Deleted User]

Mine went down this year. My guess would be that you did the comparison too early or too late to get the best deal.