Car insurance- how is this increase possible?!

[forjustnow]

Context-
40 year old female
Held a clean license for 21 years
NEVER claimed on car insurance (have the maximum NCB)
Car valued at £7k
Parked in drive during the day.
No other named drivers.
Fully comp.

With the AA last year my premium was £297, paid annually.
My auto renew option came today- no changes other than me/the car being a year older and another year of NCB.....
Quoted premium this year....£502.

What on earth is driving (excuse the pun!) this horrendous price hike?

Obviously I've just had a quick look elsewhere and can get id down to £400 ish but, still. Bloody hell!

It's the same for everyone unfortunately.

Insurance through the roof for most people. Combination of inflation, greedy companies facing higher wage bills and cars such as range rovers getting stolen hand over fist

Also EVs. Even a minor bump can mean the car is written off as there's no way to tell that the battery is undamaged. More write-offs equal higher premiums.

Mine has also gone up crazy amount, i couldn't find it cheaper anywhere else either

I’m around your age, similar driving history, bigger car, lowest I could get was £700!

Crazy increases this year, with no changes our quote went from £300 last year to over £800 this year. In fact our previous insurer ‘more than’ had withdrawn from the car insurance market presumably due to profit issues. We don’t drive very far so managed to get it down to £450 using a pay by mile policy but anything except black box was over £600!
When I worked in financial services I remember being told that car insurance was a loss maker for many insurers but was offered due to profit from add ons and linked insurances.

Yep. Mine has almost doubled. Absolute joke.😤😤😤

It’s because the robdogs in insurance act as a cartel, and they know that we have to buy it if we want to drive.
bastards.

I have had the same with my house insurance, it has gone from £280 last year to a renewal price of £650!! It’s crazy, I am going to have a look around.

Shortage of parts meaning people need hire cars for longer - hire car companies are now charging whatever they like. More cars being stolen, more claims in your area. EV cars driving claims costs up.

also in 2022 the FCA made it so companies can’t offer discounts to new customers any more, they have to charge the same price for renewals and new business. Which on the face of it is a good thing. New business used to be a loss leader for insurance companies in the hopes of getting people through the door then they’d slowly increase the price to start making money on you. Now everyone is finding out what insurance actually costs.

easy to blame “greedy” companies but actually a lot of insurance companies are in a bad way right now - not raking it in

Greedy companies is one .. as are greedy claimants, chucking in a few extra passengers all with “injuries”

It's really not. MoreThan aren't pulling out of the market because it's a licence to print money, a look at the reports of all the major companies makes it obvious that margins are slim to none. Car insurance is ruthlessly competitive, and because of the aggregator websites, if all the big companies were operating an overpriced cartel then it would be trivially easy for someone to step in, undercut them by twenty percent and make an absolute killing.

There are real problems with aspects of the UK motor insurance market, but it's not as simple as "they're choosing to over charge you"

^this

A friend has recently had a crash (not their fault) and after initially getting a hire car while theirs was being fixed, the insurance company then decided to write it off because the wait for parts was going to be over 6 months.

Lordy. I’m dreading mine then.

I’ve got telemetry, and a great score, so would love to think that will help. I hate shopping for insurance, there are so many variables!

Parts and labour have increased so the cost of a potential claim has risen. Also people pretending to have injuries and claiming through ambulance chasing firms has pushed up the cost.

I looked into moving to 3rd party as my car is so old that it wouldn't be worth fixing if it were in an accident, but it's more expensive than fully comprehensive, over £900

Last year a friend with a similar aged car was paying £300 with 3rd party.

I’d heard about the hikes in insurance and my husbands went up by over £300 - no accidents.
mine has actually dropped by £60 per year on an auto renew which I wasn’t expecting.
Thats with Sheila’s wheels.

You might be lucky. One of mine only went up £40 and another £3.

On the other hand, my house insurance went up by 40%. No claims in over 20 years.

It's actually insane. And kind of a ticking timebomb as presumably way more people are going with the cheaper companies that are massively shit. So if you need to make a claim, chances are it will be delayed/refused/some other nonsense that can cause a lot of financial hardship.

Ours went up (an awful lot! Without any changes in circumstances and all drivers without any claims or penalties, this is a multi car insurance) last February. I couldn't get anything lower through other providers.
So I think the problem has been ongoing for a while because cars are now more expensive and very slow manufacturing for parts and cars.
We changed one of the cars (unbelievably long delays in delivery because of this manufacturing shortfall). So this year's insurance is higher for this particular vehicle but, surprisingly, the other cars have not increased. I think our big increase happened a year ago.

Strangely enough, our home insurance was cheaper than the year before.

Same here. My 6 year old Toyota Aygo insurance went up to £1,300.

I paid about £250 the year before. Never claimed on it. Parked on driveway over night. In secure work cat park during the day and all service ,MOT up to date. I ended up putting it on SOrn and then selling it.

My family car Hyundai Tuscan insurance went up double to £700. Again no issues. But I got a letter from the insurance company saying they won't renew my insurance. So I did a search snd couldn't get anything below 700. I don't know why this is happening.

Martin Lewis gave some great advice which I’m acting in before my renewal. The closer you wait to your renewal to get quotes, the higher in price they will be. 23/24 days before your car insurance renewal is due… get quotes. You’re classed as lower risk because you’re more proactive in getting the prices. If you leave it till the day or night before it’s due, prices rocket. Let me know! Good luck

Yes this happened to me to. Said they couldn't give me a new quote and I just took out another one with the same company for £200 more. Make it make sense.

Mine was £346 last year renewal quote this year £597 almost double. They couldn't answer why. When I called them they issued me a 'special one year only discount' which brought it down to £427 which was cheaper than I could find in confused etc. Call them and challenge it

It's electric cars. If someone crashes into one of those then the repair bill can be huge because they will quote for a replacement battery because they can't tell if it is damaged.