Car insurance prices during recession

[Chris152]

I thought of taking out cover myself (no no-claims, mine's on another vehicle) and having him as a named driver - that was over £3k; for me alone, £86. Bizarre. And it seems now if you search 3rd party, far fewer insurers are offering so it works out more expensive - fully comp brought the price down. Car insurance, beats me!

Have you tried clearing the cookies relating to companies giving your quotes? If the insurance companies behave like airlines (I see no reason why not) then they will manipulate the quotes.

The downside of putting the car in your name is that your son won't build up (hopefully) his own no-claims bonus.

Telematics ? Any better ?

That's the black box, right? I think he's including that in the quotes but I need to check with him.

As for the cookies, I do wonder. I just did a search on a different site and got £2200 for just him named, and £1725 for him to add me as a named driver, which is getting way closer to where I expected us to be. The really odd thing is that's with Admiral, who I'm sure are on the original search site, and what's more there were lots more close to that price on the second site. The lowest on the first site (I think it was comparethemarket) was over £3k; gocompare (second site) seem to use pretty much the same pool of insurers yet came up with way better prices. I might clear the cookies and try again on the first site, just for interest.

We haven't yet bought the car (I'm not sure I made that clear originally) but the auction's up soon-ish - I thought finding the right car was tricky, but it seems insurance is far more difficult to pin down!

 

[Blackswanwood]

Unfortunately it’s an opaque market. Confused.com is actually owned by Admiral and several large providers tactically price using different brand names across different platforms.

I just skimmed back through the thread and noticed you mentioned it’s a thirty year old car. The mainstream insurers are set up for high volume typical risks. Anything that falls out of that they will either just decline or lob a loading on. I would suggest trying a specialist broker.

 

[Chris152]

Unfortunately it’s an opaque market. Confused.com is actually owned by Admiral and several large providers tactically price using different brand names across different platforms.

It's certainly confused me - it wasn't gocompare, it was confused.com that had the admiral quote :roll: And I'm reassured by the quotes that appeared there - having just the one available at a decent price was always going to carry the risk it'd disappear.

ps I plan to call around the classic car insurers Monday - I already tried a couple but no joy with those so far.

 

[DBT85]

Unfortunately it’s an opaque market. Confused.com is actually owned by Admiral and several large providers tactically price using different brand names across different platforms.

I just skimmed back through the thread and noticed you mentioned it’s a thirty year old car. The mainstream insurers are set up for high volume typical risks. Anything that falls out of that they will either just decline or lob a loading on. I would suggest trying a specialist broker.

Yeah there's not nearly enough enforced transparency about who you're actually insuring with as so many are owned by just a few companies.

That and auto renewals going up only to magically come down if you question it.

 

[RogerS]

I do recall that I read somewhere that car insurers were moving towards a pricing model that was time dependent....ie. Tuesday it's one price...Wednesday ...a different price. And that they were even thinking about increasing the granularity and factoring in the actual time :shock: Quite why they'd want to do that is beyond my ken.

But the key question we're all dying to know the answer to. A 30-year old classic ? What model ?

 

[Phil Pascoe]

They are also linking different insurance policies, household, motoring etc. - if you even make an inquiry on one, another may well go up when you renew. I believe by now they are linking travel insurance to these as well.
A woman writing in The Times some while back rung her company to see if a leaking tap was covered - she was told it wasn't, which was all she wanted to know - and when she tried to insure again it had gone from £400 to £1400. The fact that she had inquired apparently made her more likely to claim, and all insurances were to be on a central database.

 

[Chris152]

But the key question we're all dying to know the answer to. A 30-year old classic ? What model ?

Nothing to get over-excited about, Roger - and certainly nothing in the class of DrBob's classic, as I recall! It's a Volvo 240 estate. From his perspective, it's like a little camper - sleep in the back, chuck surfboards in and all that. Plus there seems to be a growing interest in rallying them (well, the saloons, not so much the estates) which he's got his eye on at some future date. I'm 100% behind him - I had a couple of 240s back in the day, loved them, and they're relatively easy to work on from what I can see - you look in the engine bay and can see, and generally reach all the parts (unlike modern cars). he wants to get into auto engineering so it'll be a good learning tool as well as a 'cool' motor...

 

[Chris152]

They are also linking different insurance policies, household, motoring etc. - if you even make an inquiry on one, another may well go up when you renew. I believe by now they are linking travel insurance to these as well.
A woman writing in The Times some while back rung her company to see if a leaking tap was covered - she was told it wasn't, which was all she wanted to know - and when she tried to insure again it had gone from £400 to £1400. The fact that she had inquired apparently made her more likely to claim, and all insurances were to be on a central database.

My dog's not insured at the moment. Over a year ago he got a swelling in his neck, so the vet had to do tests to check it wasn't a tumor. The lump was about the size of an apple. Couple of rounds of tests (paid for by insurance) proved inconclusive, til one morning I woke up and found puss and blood all over the place. It had been an abscess from a tiny twig thing.
Next time I tried to get insurance the premiums from same company had gone nuts - I called, apparently his file had a code that indicated cancer. A few phone calls later I'd got nowhere in spite of the first person telling me it was an error, there was no way back from that error. I even got the vet to confirm to them that it had only been an abscess. When I try other insurance companies they ask if he has any pre-existing conditions and it all starts again...

 

[Rorschach]

Scrap my idea about insuring in your name, seems a bad idea even if lots do it.

Try confused, I always get the best prices there. They are also the only one that allows you to add a dashcam and that takes off more than 10% for me, it covers the cost of a dashcam anyway but in your case it would be a hefty discount maybe.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

... My dog's not insured at the moment ...

Mine is, thankfully - he tore a meniscus and a cruciate yesterday.

 

[Chris152]

... My dog's not insured at the moment ...

Mine is, thankfully - he tore a meniscus and a cruciate yesterday.

Just saw that Phil - hope the poor fella's ok.

 

[Chris152]

Scrap my idea about insuring in your name, seems a bad idea even if lots do it.

The lad sometimes talks about little things he'd like to do when he gets a car to get it looking the way he wants. I've been explaining to him how insurance companies work - any significant claim and they'll come looking for reasons to invalidate the insurance, regardless of how relevant or otherwise they are to the claim.

 

[RogerS]

Great choice of car, Chris. A real Passion-Wagon to boot !

 

[Phil Pascoe]

... My dog's not insured at the moment ...

Mine is, thankfully - he tore a meniscus and a cruciate yesterday.

Just saw that Phil - hope the poor fella's ok.

Not as lucky as I'd have liked - the insurance covers £750 of a cruciate ligament injury. The estimated bill is £2500.

 

[Blackswanwood]

Great choice of car, Chris. A real Passion-Wagon to boot !

Does it have a proper handbrake so he can do handbrake turns? A rite of passage sadly denied to the emerging drivers of today. Probably not in keeping with the topic of how to get cheap car insurance for a young male though

 

[Lonsdale73]

Anyone else remember when insurance premiums went down each renewal as driver got a year older and (presumably) older, wiser / more experienced, another year's NCD added (providing no claim had been made in preceding year) and the car had another year's depreciation on it? Now thy rise, sometimes seemingly exponentially, year on year regardless.

 

[Rorschach]

Anyone else remember when insurance premiums went down each renewal as driver got a year older and (presumably) older, wiser / more experienced, another year's NCD added (providing no claim had been made in preceding year) and the car had another year's depreciation on it? Now thy rise, sometimes seemingly exponentially, year on year regardless.

:| Mine has gone down every year.

 

[u38cg]

Why are unemployed people more likely to crash than employed people?

To be honest, insurers don't really tend to seek out the explanations for the data they have. They record lots of factors - age, job, experience, miles driven, type of car, locations, etc - and they crunch it all through a model and it tells them what the statistically fair premium for that driver is *according to their model*. Sometimes the link is obvious - a less experienced driver or a higher crime area is obviously more likely to cause a claim - but often all you can say is that there's an association. Different companies use different models and may include or exclude different factors, and so they get similar but slightly different results.

The associations can sometimes be backwards: for example, when pricing by gender was allowed, women got cheaper premiums, not because they crashed less, but because they drove less miles and therefore had fewer claims.

So you can come up with all sorts of stories about why unemployed people might crash more, but all you can say with certainty is, well, that's what the data tells us.

 

[DBT85]

You're also statistically more likly to have an accident if you've already had one, even if the first one was in no way your fault. Car insurance logic for you!

 

[Rorschach]

You're also statistically more likly to have an accident if you've already had one, even if the first one was in no way your fault. Car insurance logic for you!

That makes sense to me. I know it isn't always the case but I can definitely see their reasoning.