The importance of shopping around for car insurance has never been higher after the AA revealed a record increase in the cost of premiums today and Parker’s received a quote of £102,000 to insure a car for a year.
The insurance arm of Britain’s well-known motoring organisation has been compiling an index on car insurance rates for 16 years and it reported an all-time high this month.
Parker’s obtained quotes for four drivers from its own comparison site (Parker’s Compare), Go Compare, Confused.com as well as the AA.
An AA quote for a 44-year-old male after a year’s third party cover on his MG ZT was £12,690, compared with the cheapest quote from Confused.com at £933. Interestingly, the AA insurance through Confused.com was £6,244 – around half the price if the insurance was obtained directly from the AA. Parker’s spoke to an AA spokesperson who said: “in theory the AA direct quote should have thrown up at best, a request to call the AA as it should have been picked up as having inadequate information and at worst a refusal rather than a silly quote. There was no previous insurer listed which the system took to mean that the driver had not previously been insured and thus was regarded as having no NCB (even if those items were identified elsewhere). This is a system issue that we are now looking at.”
In another quote for a 26-year-old from Hampshire the AA would have charged £1,982 for fully comprehensive insurance with a £250 excess. The cheapest quote for the same person with the same car was with Go Compare at £698 with a £500 excess for a year’s cover.
The AA’s figures due to be published this week revealed that young drivers bear the brunt of the rise: premiums for 17 to 22-year-olds have risen by 47% in a year.
But a round-robin quote-gathering exercise for a 50-year-old Parker’s employee wanting third party cover for a Mercedes-Benz E-Class 220 CDI worth £29,840 included a staggering £102,000 quote from Insure through comparison site Confused.com. It’s even more surprising since our employee has eight years’ no claims bonus and lives in a rural area.
Insure is not alone – there were a number of other insurance companies quoting premiums around the £80-90k mark on the comparison site’s menu of insurers. When asked why the quote was so high, a spokesperson from Insure told us that, in general, insurance companies want any car worth over £5,000 insured on a fully comprehensive basis. However, Insure could not explain why a premium over three times the value of the car was quoted instead of refusing to supply a quote at all like many other firms on the same website.
The six-figure quote came through the comparison site Confused.com with the cheapest quote for third party cover on the Mercedes coming in at £433 through insurance provider Onecall, which does, at least, highlight the importance of shopping around for your insurance cover.
A Confused.com spokesperson explains: “Different insurance providers rate on different risks, and its worth bearing in mind that some companies will effectively price themselves out of the market based on how much they would like the business.”
Parker’s top tip
The AA is advising motorists to shop around – a sensible move -.given the massive range of quotes we have uncovered.