Insurance renewal....

I today found out a bit more info about why it costs so much more with insurance premiums..The main reason for sky high insurance is to do with the avarage insurance claims now exceeding 17k..Nowa days vehicles are more likely to be written off as apposed to being repaired due to the crumple zones vehicles have these days and most decent vehicles cost on around the 17k-19k figure new apparently...So insurance companies are actually forcing our premiums up by paying out for replacement vehicles rather than repairing them... :shock:

Insurance companies are to blame for the forced hyked premuim prices it seems :twisted:

The words you are looking for are "Beyond economical Repair"

Being reasonable if a car costs 17k new and 1 year later is hit head on, the depreciation of the car and the final bill for the repair meet.
So the car could be worth 10k after 12 months, the new parts and labour and spraying plus any hire car charges soon mount up, so its cheaper and easier to pay out the claimant then sell the car and recoup some of the money.
In that scenario, the claimant would only have a hire car for a few day or possibly a week, if it was repaired the car could be away for up to 4 weeks depending on how busy the garage is or parts to arrive, on top of that you have insurance administration man hours to process the claim, its all down to time and wonga :wink:

The main reason for the high claims is the increasing amount being paid out for "injuries". Its not only the actual money given to the injured party (if they really are), but also the legal costs incurred. My now wife was in a 7 car pile up in her iddy biddy Pug 106. Some idiot in the snow of February 2009 was tanking along and just drove into the back of her. After she pin-balled off 4 other cars on both sides of the road, including two effective head on collisions, she fortunatly walked away with massive amounts of whiplash, lost her front tooth, concussion, and also a modicum of amnesia. (tougher than you think those Pug 106's). Now fortunatly an off duty copper was on scene (in fact he drove his one week old signum into the back of her vcar to stop it from hitting anything else summising that after what it had been through whoever was in there was probably dead and didn't want it to cause further damage) and saw it all happen so there wasn't any doubt as to the cause of the "incident". We are now two years down the line and the legal wrnglings of that one are still being sorted. Its taken this long pretty much to just work out who is responsible and what as each individual collision is classed as a seperate claim. Idiot into wife = claim 1, Wife into car in front = claim 2, Wife into oncoming car 1 = claim 3, Wife into oncoming car 2 = claim 4, Copper into wife = claim 5. Then there is all the other bits and pieces. So its never seen as one incudent. Each collision is a seperate claim and to be honest she technically was responsible for claims 2-5 but mitigating circumstances dictate that she would of never been in that situation if it wasn't for the initial incident so the entire amount for all 5 of these has to be back tracked to the idiot. Now you add into that the 5 legal teams who are all fighting for as much as they can and you can see it mounts up. Thats just to work out who pays what and is responsible and the initial payback for the damage to the cars.

Now the fun bit ... injury compensation. My wife (Chloe) was bloody lucky not to die in that one, but stil was pretty knocked up. She is only 22 years old and imagine the loss of confidence of not having a front tooth for a young girl. Its not attractive and she hates it. She is nevous and often refuses to drive if it evens threatens to snow. She will live for the rest of her life with a false tooth not something for a young girl ... thats the thing for grannies. She finds it embarrasing to say the least. On top of that there is the cat she is still suffering amnesia due to the concussion. I think we were fair in asking for a bit of compensation. She had to have physio for the whiplash etc, a whole load of dental work, a psychtherapist for the emotional and mental affect of the accident (she needs to drive all year round as she commutes to Lincoln for University from Norwich as we cannot afford two sets of digs and she can stay with her grandparents for free during the week). We are still sitting here awaiting some kind of decision. Oh and the fact that every six months her case is passed onto another representative as each one can only hold the case for that long.

That must cost a fortune and it has to be re-couped from somewhere ... i.e. the customer.

Lol ... don't worry about it. We have been waiting two years now. The guy responsible eventually pleaded guilty to driving without due care and attention and got a £300 fine 6 points and a series of drivers awareness courses. They Police asked if we were happy with that result and to be honest we were happy he admitted fault so said OK ... Chloe said he looked like he was going to die with guilt at the scene.

As for the claim its going to take ages. We are now in the situation where we are going to start proceedings against the other insurance companies as the FSA guidelines say that no claim should take more than a reasonable amount of time to resolve and have been advised that over a year is too long. All fun and games. At least I have learnt a good deal of how Insurance companies work due to it.