01 July 2015

Car Insurance; Young Driver Clamp Down

It has long been a fact that young and inexperienced drivers are penalised for their lacking in these two areas. As a newly qualified driver you can expect to face hugely inflated insurance premiums and will be lucky to drive a car with any sort of decent acceleration. Unfortunately things could be about to get a whole lot worse if certain plans are set into action.

It has been proposed that young drivers should be made to learn to drive over the duration of a year to stop inexperienced drivers getting onto the road too soon. This could be viewed as a good thing by the rest of us who already own a car and make our daily journeys on roads seemingly packed full of teenagers with far too much ambition and very little experience. But we have to remember we've all been there ourselves and once upon a time we would have been considered the boy/girl racers. Some of us, and I include myself here, may drive no better after several years of being on the road.

The unfortunate fact is that car insurance is a matter of risk assessment and all policies are quoted on the basis of how risky you will be to insure. This process will take into account carefully gathered statistics relating to particular age groups, car types, localities and many more varying factors. Due to this young drivers will always be penalised as they account for a significant proportion of motoring accidents, especially during the evening hours. This is the very reason why police and motoring chiefs have met to discuss actions that could be taken. It has been proposed (under plans that may come into effect early next year) that a night time curfew should be imposed upon young and inexperienced drivers. These new regulations could also affect the number of passengers a newly qualified driver is allowed to carry.

A positive thing to come out of these new proposals could be cheaper car insurance as new drivers would be seen to have more experience and therefore present a lesser risk to the insurer.

We have of late seen indications that insurers are willing to make things a little easier in the area of young driver car insurance. Take the advent of the ?Pay as you go? policy introduced by the likes of Norwich Union. This policy allows the user to pay just for mileage with a curfew placed on late night driving. The main downside is that if you are to travel in your car during the curfew restriction, you will be charged a one off fee which could quickly negate any saving made by taking out the policy in the first place. Still if it's a matter of saving ?1000 on your first years policy it may be worthwhile.