To wonder how any teenagers and young people manage to drive?

[connedbird]

It's so expensive to insure cars! Quotes of £300-600 a month! That's obviously before MOT, Tax, Petrol, and the cost of the car itself.

I don't know how any of them manage it.

My Dad tried to teach me when I was 17. He drove for a living (sports cars mostly) so was a very advanced driver. Of course it all still ended in a screaming row half way down the street and me abandoning him and car and marching home in annoyance.

In our case neither of our cars were suitable to teach DS in at the time, it was extortionate to add him to our insurance. There is a possibility of adding DD to my insurance as I've now changed my car but she'd going to have some professional lessons for some time first.

This is incredibly unfair on the rural poor.

Young lad next door misses job interviews, losses jobs and is in permanent trouble with the job centre (and on one occasion the police) because he can't afford to keep a car running, taxed and insured.

Nor can he afford to move from his hopeless alcoholic dad's and rent a flat that isn't three miles from the nearest bus.

I think it depends where you live. DS (17) recently passed his test and we pay £900 (inTotal) to have him as a named driver on our insurance. We have looked at him getting a car of his own (we live in a rural area, so it would be for our convenience as well as his) and were quoted £1400-£1500 from a number of companies for DS as the main driver and that was for a 3 year old car with a 1.3 diesel engine. I think we live in a farily low insurance area in general though. DH was previously paying £150 pa fully comp for his car before adding DS!

There's an increasing trend (or so it seems, we live in a city) for teenagers to simply not bother to drive. Or even try. Compared to my youth when everybody at sixth form started driving at 17, our DSs crowd (around 16-19 in age) has only 2 out of 10 with a license (one has passed andn has a car). The rest just shrug and say there's no point - they use buses, walk or get lifts.

There was a story on it on the BBC website a couple of years ago. It appears to be a generational thing, as it's the same in the US (apparently).

Good for the planet, though !

This is incredibly unfair on the rural poor.

Car insurance is most certainly not a license to print money: the companies that offer it are solvent, but it's a competitive market and if someone could make money while charging a bit less they'd clean up.

So the only way to make it "fair" would be to charge people who are better risks more money, in order to charge worse risk less, and then pass savage legislation to make it illegal to run (say) Saga insurance, which only insures "good" (or at least "less bad") risks.

I'm not sure how you fix this problem. Young drivers are very bad risks. Rural communities have poor public transport, because most of the older residents have cars and therefore the demand for buses is low (the same applies for elderly rural residents who can no longer driver). Thirty years ago the rural communities would have had more "local" work, which now doesn't exist. Rural residents were extremely unlikely to have post 15/16, never mind post 18 education, so access to colleges was a non-question. Now people want/need/whatever to live in rural locations with poor connectivity, but not be excluded from things that are only available in towns. Answers on the back of a postcard, please.