car insurance no claims question

Posted by: Bruce Woodhouse on 08 December 2017

Can I run this past someone who knows how insurers work?

I had 15yrs No Claims with protected discount until this year when managed to have 2 scrapes within 2 months (both my fault) and made two claims. I naively assumed my premium would be unaffected because of the protected NCD, ie that this would mean claiming had no effect the next year.

My renewal premium has now gone from £240 to £570 on the same car!

I rang the insurer (eSure) and they advised that my discount is protected but my premium has gone up because I claimed. If not for my NCD it would have been far higher.

Part of me thinks that sound logical and another part thinks it sounds like a con. Which is it?

Bruce

Posted on: 11 December 2017 by Huge

Both use a 'black box', but neither will tell you what sort of algorithms they use to determine who is a "safer driver".

Some things that are safe in a car with good quality tyres would not be safe with dodgy budget Chinese (or Korean) tyres!  I'd also be interested to know how they take into account road conditions and traffic as well as simply the road configuration.

Posted on: 11 December 2017 by winkyincanada
Eloise posted:
winkyincanada posted:

I did see  an article a while back that suggested a model whereby you could elect for speed-tracking on your car that would lead to reduced premiums, if you demonstrated safe driving speeds. It presumably didn't use an actual phone, but an installed tracker, as a driver could just leave their phone at home before a fast and dangerous drive, only taking it with them when they had time to drive more sedately. Nor should they be "penalised" for being a passenger in a car with a reckless (but not wreck-less) driver.

Both Ariva and DirectLine have something similar ... and yes they do use phone apps (though a quick look shows the DirectLine also has a "black box" which supposedly is easy to install - I assume it plugs into the OBDII port.

A black box that uses bluetooth to "call-home" via the phone network makes sense. The black-box would be GPS enabled and presumably store data until a cell-phone connection was established for it to be uploaded (so as not to miss the driving where the phone was not present. A phone-only system would seem subject to much abuse.