It's that time of year again when I trawl the web for car insurance.
Does anyone know of any car insurance comparison sites that show which insurance quotes offer driving other cars?
Like how MCN Compare show riding other bikes, except I'm after for cars, of course.
^ £280 for my ER6 :(
No, AFAIK none of the comparison sites have the ability to filter or search for insurers that offer D.O.C cover. I'm guessing too many variables from each insurer. All with differing criteria and most you now seem to have to request it as it's not given as standard.
Unless it was an actual emergency, or nothing more than moving the work car park around I'd usually go down the route of either insuring the car yourself or being added to the original policy for peace of mind (and more than the bare minimum TPFT)
I still use a broker, not a comparison site. Every couple of years, I run my details through comparison sites, and they have yet to save me more than about a fiver, and regularly, the broker is actually cheaper, despite restricting him to "decent" companies, and obviously, paying a commission to the broker.
He knows my criteria, including both what I do, and don't want included, and for his £25 or so, does all the leg work for me.
Clearly, not all brokers are necessatily equal and just maybe I got lucky. But I have to say I don't trust web comparison sites to be any more comprehensive, competent AND UNBIASED than I do my broker. I certainly don't necessarily trust comparison sites not to be be ranking, or even filtering, according to commission criteria over my needs. I don't know that they do, but I just don't assume that they aren't. My broker, on the other hand, has been giving me service I'm happy with for about 30 of the last 35 years.
Just sayin'.
Does fully comp not include DOC, then?
I don't drive cars (yet), y'see....
Generally fully comp includes DOC, TPFT doesn't include DOC.
I usually just use the comparison websites gocompare and confused.com.
- take the lowest quotes from both sites (Use these as negotiating figures/baseline)
- phone the company directly and state I'm looking for quote
- provide details
- If they offer me say £200 for full year (just a figure), state "I'll come back to you as I'm waiting on other companies getting back to me"
- Phone the 2nd company, provide the info.
- State I've been offered £200 fully comp etc. "Can you provide a better offer?"
- Most cases they tend to beat it.
(You can try this with more than 2 insurance companies, entirely upto you.)
When I drove a Fiesta ST, Gocompare quoted me in the £400 mark and comparethemarket quoted me £360. I got it down to £295- this was 2/3 year ago mind you. And I was 24/25 at the time.
Some will get better results than I will. The Car Insurance has always been a funny market.
Be careful about assuming that, though. It used to be pretty much always the case, but not so much now. I know someone that got caught, and prosecuted (successfully) because he just assumed his policy covered him, because for many years, it always had. However, he changed to a sligntly cheaper policy and one of the reasons was that, unknown to him, the new one didn't.Originally Posted by Butcher
So, two pieces of advice :-
1) If DOC cover matters, specify it when getting quotes.
2) If you're going to rely on that cover, check your policy, when it arrives, to ensure it does.
Getting this wrong can get VERY expensive, both in fines, and the resultant insurance premium hikes, as my friend can attest.
The painful and expensive irony is he only saved a nominal amount (I don't remember exactly, but of the order of £10-20) by switching to the cheaper policy that didn't cover him from the older one, that had, and it made his high performance can unviable to insure. So he had to sell it. All over a 'detail' in insurance cover he was utterly unaware had changed.
Yeah, I knew FC for bikes usually has ROBs while TP (w/wout F&T) didn't, so I was just wondering if cars were different.
As Saracen says always worth checking, although it's something I am very careful to make sure of during the quotation process anyway.
This years car insurance requires a bit more research than usual, this will be my first time as a car driver where;
- Telematics box insurance is no longer the cheapest option
- FC and TPFT insurance don't have insane excesses
- FC quotes are generally cheaper than TPFT or TPO
- My non-fault accidents have decreased some premiums
- I don't consider insurance to be expensive - prices have gone down by almost a half
I feel old now
DOC isn't something I need, it's just nice to have. I called up a few insurance companies about DOC, of which every FC quote included, but I wasn't able to haggle the price below what the comparison sites could offer, computers said no basically.
Finally, I guess there aren't any comparison sites which compare DOC... Oh well.
Well, of course, if DOC isn't essential, then by all means don't worry about it too much. For me, it isn't essential. Most years have gone by without needing it at all, to be honest.
Just remember, when your policy arrives, check if it has it before DOCing on the assumption that it has. Forewarned is forearmed, as it were. It was the assumption that it was included, after about 30 years of it having been, that caught my friend. When I started driving, it was standard. Every policy I ever saw had it. Then when my friend got caught, I checked my policy at the time (which was via the AA, IIRC) and, lo and behold, there it wasn't.
To be honest, I regarded it as rather disgraceful that such 'standard' cover had been removed without being very explicitly warned. So, but for my good fortune in hearing about a friend's bad fortune, it could so easily have been me that got caught. And I'm MUCH more anal about such things than many. I do, for instance, read my policy booklet when it arrives. But while spotting something it does say that I don't like is relatively easy, it is FAR harder spotting what isn't there unless you're explicitly looking for it. Which I wasn't. Well, you live and learn .... and grow more cynical.
I too read though my policy documents.
My last two years on telematics insurance explicitly state that the policy, which although is FC, doesn't insure me to drive other cars. Which I thought was quite nice, rather than having no information on DOC whatsoever.
Though on my last motorcycle TPO insurance policy, riding of other bikes was included, not that I opted for nor made use of it.
The main reason that I'd like DOC now is that many friends and family have moved in to properties that can accommodate a number of cars, but only if arranged like a car dealership with an excess of inventory. As I'm always the punctual one, I'm invariably the first in...
Oddly my previous insurer gave DOC on Fully Comp for free, but my current insurer on Fully Comp I had to pay extra for it. Annoyingly I cant recall by how much and think it was something as little as an extra £20 for the year...
I'm with admiral at the minute and I was with LV prior to that, both insurers offered it on the policy documents for FC however on all occasions I've been below the required age of 25 to use it, even now when I turned 25 halfway through my policy I'm still not able to use it as I took the contract out at the age of 24 (talk about been stuck in the stone age). I'm looking forward to finally getting it, not necessarily to drive other cars as I'm a named drive on a couple but we've got 4 vehicles in the household at the minute and it can be a pain to get out of the drive at times!
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