You might assume that you know about car insurance and how your particular insurance policy affects you. However, if you look closer at the jargon and small print, you could find that this isn’t entirely the case. The world of car insurance can be unpredictable and puzzling…
One big reason why is the dramatic change in which insurers calculate premiums. The Telegraph shines light on early insurance, where customers would each pay the same amount of money for the same type of policy. However, today, the size of premiums is also heavily based on how likely the insurer deems a customer to make a claim, throwing up some strong peculiarities…
Your insurance may not cover you for snowy weather driving
Driving through snow can obviously be treacherous – and that’s a situation where you can feel especially fortunate for having insurance in case you accidentally damage your car. However, would your current policy really help you pay for repairs to such damage?
It’s worth looking again at that policy’s terms and agreements. Despite the extent to which snow and ice can impair your car’s handling and your own visibility, your insurance might not actually account for damage caused by snow or ice, Express cautions.
Though many comprehensive policies will cover you in this way, this is not guaranteed. Meanwhile, you are very unlikely to get such coverage from third party policies, which tend to account strictly for damage brought about by other cars and property.
Damage to a parked car could still increase your premiums
You might consider an insurer reasonable for hiking your premiums if, through your own clumsiness, you have caused a road accident and so given the insurer reason to judge you likelier to cause another accident in the future. However, what if the accident wasn’t your fault?
Believe it or not, this can still adversely affect your premium – as, sadly, even people blighted by a no-fault accident are statistically likelier to end up in another. Unfair? Of course it is – and that’s before you consider that you wouldn’t even necessarily need to be driving the vehicle.
One Telegraph reader, Mary, has recalled when a van driver wrote her car off – and the insurer reacted by increasing her premium by over £100.
Moving to a newly built home could similarly affect those premiums
You can probably understand why living in a place where car theft is common will see you shelling out more for insurance.
However, your insurance could also be costlier if you simply move to a freshly built house – because it might not even appear on your insurer’s database. Therefore, the insurer lacks obvious means of assessing car theft in your area and so could too easily charge you over the odds.
Just moved to Britain? It’s unpredictable how your insurance could be affected
If you have indeed only recently taken up residence in the UK, your premiums could be seriously affected – though in what way is not wholly clear.
The Telegraph cites the example of a housewife who, having always lived in the UK, received a quote of £622 from one insurer. However, from the same insurer, that quote would have been a daunting £1,448 had she moved to the UK only in January the previous year.
Nonetheless, a recent move to the country could still have saved her money on car insurance, as she was quoted just £590 by the cheapest insurer.
Even your email address could affect your quote
One car insurer, Admiral, recently admitted to The Sun that it used one particularly peculiar factor in calculating quotes: email addresses. Enquiries from Hotmail users incurred £31.36 costlier quotes than requests made by Gmail users, but Admiral cited a simple reason for this…
“Certain domain names are associated with more accidents than others.” You can remove many headaches from looking for cost-effective insurance if you use a broker like Call Wiser.
