I’ve been driving around without insurance since December.

[Userr46372644]

Please don’t come at me. I’ve been driving without insurance since December. I’ve just had a letter to say I’m not on some kind of car insurance database and if it wasn’t for that arriving I would have carried on being blissfully unaware.

Been with the same insurer until December for about 2-3 years and they’ve always sent out reminders about renewal by letter of post but had nothing - always checking emails and I open any post I get. Makes me wonder if a letter had been sent but lost.

I am mortified, mortified that if I had to make a claim I couldn’t - thankfully I have not had to. Mortified at I could have been done for driving with no insurance.

this is partly my fault. I should have realised that it had been 12 months but I’ve had a lot going on with my MH and the kids having complex needs etc.

obviously shopping around for insurance as we speak but Jesus, I feel an idiot. I just wanted to vent. I’ve been driving for 13 years and never been as stupid.

Yore lucky that the DVLA haven't fined you for not being continuously insured (we got done for that on a car parked on our drive that we didn't use and hadn't declared SORN for some unfathomable reason).

You're sorted now and more alert for next year's renewal. It's so easy to let life details runaway when you're going through the mill.

My mistake was paying twice the amount of subs needed for my daughter's football. It took me a year to realise and hell of a lot of pleading to remedy because she'd left the club.

Hope things are smoothing out for you now 💐

*you're stupid fat fingers

Helpful comment!

Crikey. I just didn’t think as I’ve always been contacted with any insurer I’ve been with in good time before it’s due. I’m surprised they haven’t tried contacting me, even by phone as sure they must have my home and mobile number too. My partner is with a totally different insurer than me but am thinking that when his is up he might go with the same as I’ve insured with today.

I have no idea who would have been given potential points if I did get caught. He is the registered keeper of the car, but I’m main driver and him named on insurance! We both use it, but me more so as he has a works car! 🤷‍♀️

Glad you realised before anything happened.
We found out (about 2002) that we had been a year without house/buildings insurance. I had cold swears over it. We had quite a serious fire in 2006. The feeling of panic over seeing the damage and then reassuring myself that we definitely had insurance was such a relief, although an unp,easantvexperience.

No ones saying being uninsured makes you a bad driver. Someone crashed into me one time uninsured driver. my car was written off. Had no money to buy a new one. Took some time for the insurance company to give me the value of my car which wasn’t enough to buy another.

I am sorry to hear about the fire but yes house insurance is important too! My partner deals with that one but I may double check after todays events!

I’m not surprised in the slightest that letters sent out in late November/early December were not received. Royal Mail were on strike so often that there were millions of letters and parcels piled up in delivery offices and regional mail centres that some going missing would not have been unexpected. As a pp says some have only reached their final destinations in the last couple of weeks.

One thing that is odd, and might be revealed by the December 21 renewal, is that when I’ve had car insurance on monthly payment is that it is on auto renewal - might be worth checking if it was supposed to be from your last set of documents.

The same thing happened to us and we were driving around without insurance for 4 months. We were alerted when we got a letter from the police with a warning so we must have been picked up via a anpr camera.
The policy was not on auto renew and we had no reminder letters or follow up correspondence from the company. We felt sick thinking that we had been driving around all that time with no cover.

I know someone this happened to, just because your insurance auto renewa it doesn't mean that everyones doea you know

The person I know is extremely responsible it just some.how went under her radar

This happened to me - everything aligned then it wasnt. So in my mind for the last few decades this date - but it no longer is. I am setting up spreadsheets for insurance - it has got that complicated!

A while ago I discovered by chance that my driving licence was over a year out of date. I should have had a letter but am sure I didn't get one. It was only as I was using it for ID online and had to fill in the expiry date that I realised. Fine would have been £1000 plus points on my licence. DVLA did not ask me if I had been driving- just issued a new one after I applied.

And no, car insurance doesn't auto renew unless you enable that. But we always get a letter ahead of the renewal date.

I presume it would be the same as getting caught speeding etc. If you are driving another person's (your partner's) car, they get sent the fine but can declare that someone else was driving.

Every car insurance policy I or DH have ever had over the last 20+ years has always had the disclaimer that it auto renews unless you tell them not to.

A couple of posters really sticking the boot in to OP on this thread. In modern life, a perfectly normal average human being, with a normal average human brain that evolved to do hunter gatherer things, is expected to remember dozens of important but infrequent tasks with no apparent intrinsic saliency at arbitrary points, and have often been in effect trained to rely on things happening a certain way (reminders, auto-renewal) so they don't get forgotten.

Multiple insurance policies, multiple maintenance things, multiple licences, multiple health-related things, multiple payments and fees and subscriptions and installments, and each one treated as though it's the only thing you might have to remember. It's too much for a lot of us.

Difficult life events, mental illnesses like a bout of depression, a house move, differences like dyslexia, ADHD, ASD, lower than average IQ, early stages of dementia, or poor education, or a lost diary or phone or problem with an online calendar service (e.g. getting locked out of your Google account)… there are so many things that can make these expectations unrealistic, or which can put a spanner into even a smoothly-running system

We went several months without realising we had no home insurance. No idea why it didn't auto-renew like usual — I think it might've been because the bank decided to switch from MasterCard to Visa several years before the card used on the insurance account was due to expire, so the insurance company didn't know to contact us about an expired card but the payment didn't go through. That bank card switch messed up a lot of things. And DP was in trouble for defrauding the NHS once, because his prescription prepayment certificate ran out without him realising, and he hadn't received the usual reminder. And yes I suppose he should've put his own reminder on a calendar, but being a fallible human being, he'd got used to being sent one.

I know that it would've been horrendous for anyone who OP had hit while uninsured, and for OP herself, but I'd think she knows this and doesn't need berating any further. The system shouldn't rely on nobody ever messing up. We're just human and the expectations are difficult for many of us.

Something similar but not illegal happened to me - suddenly realised I had no contents insurance because it had just stopped renewing and nobody wrote to me (or if they did I missed it, which is rare as I check emails daily). Thank goodness we didn't have a fire or anything.
Good luck getting it sorted asap

To be honest, if you were imprisoned for causing death through dangerous driving your insurance status would be very much a footnote.

The victim would receive a payout from the MIB so would be no worse off: still dead, still financially compensated.

My car insurance didn’t renew last year because my credit card changed, not my choice, the credit card provider decided to change it. But there was no letter or email sent to alert me that the automatic renewal didn’t go through.
Weirdly I paid twice the year before, once by automatic renewal, then I was charged again for some reason. I got a letter in the post saying that I wasn’t insured, which was a surprise to me! No letter or email from the insurance company telling me that my credit card had failed.

Op I was once stopped by the police for having no insurance....I had insured the wrong number plate. I'd spent 6months driving around technically uninsured. The police were thankfully very understanding

Wow, in Australia if an insurance company doesn't send you renewal documents within a certain timeframe they have to provide free cover under statute for a period of time. Can't believe insurance companies in the UK have taken such a lax approach.

Back in 2018 DH was provided with a courtesy car by the garage that was supposed to be fixing his. Turned out they didn't have a clue what they were doing and handed his car back in bits, but in the interim DH was stuck with this courtesy car for what turned out to be ten months.

It was only when he was finally on the cusp of giving up with his old car/the useless garage and buying a new car, that we discovered the bloody courtesy car had no MOT/insurance and hadn't had for the previous six months. Nice of the garage to let him know! Fortunately he never got stopped by the police.

I know someone who accidentally killed a cyclist who shot out from a side path with a pillion sitting in their bicycle basket. The pair of them were drunk. The driver is always to blame even though the fault was totally the guys on the bike. The driver went to prison & had to pay compensation for their lives in the form of millions. At least the insurance covered that latter bit.

Do you not have a phone or computer? This stuff is 99% done online these days. Who still gets letter!

We found that our insurers had cancelled the insurance on the car we kept rather than the car we had sold. Also mortified but they admitted it was their fault. Relieved we hadn’t had an accident though.