Shop around for car insurance

I got an early christmas preset  – my car insurance came up for renewal.  Guess what, the car insurance quote I got from my existing insurer was a lot higher than last year. And guess what… I couldn’t find anywhere tat was charging quite as much.

Once again an insurance company was determined to lose my custom, though I have yet to make a claim. In other words I am free money. So why is car insurance so expensive?

One reason simply has to be the constant advertisements on television. But apparently another is the rise in the number of injury claims – many of which of course a fraudulent. That doesn’t explain why insurance companies put such huge store by grabbing new customers – only to lose them a year later.

I don’t have much sympathy with car insurers. If injuries are now such an issue, why do they always offer you legal protection… a helpful hint that all those personal injury claims lawyers are lurking by the phone to help you get some free money in an accident, no matter how trivial.

In point of fact, if you are thinking of having an injury, you might be interested to know that some techy whiz has provided a natty personal injury calculator – just so you can see how much a particular injury might be worth.

I suppose we shouldn’t blame the legal profession too much. In this recession, their easy money for pushing a bit of paperwork around at the pace of an arthritic tortoise (conveyancing) has more or less dried up – so a bit of ambulance chasing is needed to fill the void.

However, the bottom line is the same in 2010 as it was in every year of the last decade. Never, ever accept a renewal. You simply have to shop around for a car insurance quote - and don’t forget to let your previous insurers know why you are leaving them. One day the penny may drop.

Car accidents

I nearly had an accident this weekend. And it wasn’t my fault – or the other driver’s. It was the council’s crazy idea to make our roads far more dangerous with lunatic safety schemes.

You must have these council-made death traps near you. They usually consist of huge concrete obstacles put in the middle of the road near a village – or in once perfectly normal road in the middle of a perfectly normal town.

The idea seems to be that it is somehow safer to pull out into incoming traffic, rather than drive safely on your side of the road.

Near me there are some wonderful examples of bureaucratic incompetence that have indeed created death traps out of quite normal pieces of road.

I live near the road from Haverhill to Cambridge that has been described as one of the most dangerous roads in Britain. It is regularly targeted by do-gooders as requiring stringent policing, ‘safety’ cameras.

Yet recently a lorry driver was killed when he ran into a lump of concrete that had been put into the road for ‘safety’ reasons. As yet the council have not seen fit to remove this lethal obstruction.

Another tragedy awaits as I drive into town to pick up my Sunday paper. On a perfectly straight bit of road there are two lumps of concrete in the road, with drivers both sides invited to ‘give way’. And now the council has seen fit to let a block of flats be built between the two with residents given no way out if any traffic is coming on either direction.

And if I get through that hazard safely – I take my life in my hands when I get back to my village, because the bridge has been modified to be single track.

Having it wide enough for two lanes of traffic and a footpath was way too sensible. Now it is one way only – with visions so restricted from either way that you have to pull out into incoming traffic from either direction. Madness is too kind a word to describe this insanity.

Maybe ‘safety improvements’ are a key reason for all the whiplash injuries? All speed cameras seem to do is invite drivers to speed up between them and brake suddenly when one hoves into view. That is another sure fire way to have accidents and increase insurance premiums.