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!

Mine went from £330 to £500, 26 years driving, clean licence, good postcode...everything is just going up, up, up!

@DRS1970

Surely it is far cheaper to retain an existing customer, than it is to entice a new one.

Most of the insurance firms are just "shop fronts" for a very small number of actual real insurers in the background. It's all just branding. Often it's the same staff in the background doing the work, but just using different "front" names, stationery, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. The "shop front" firms just have slightly different algorithms for pricing etc, but the real firms in the background don't really care which shop front sells you the policy as they get your business anyway if you change, just from a different route!

The shop fronts don't care if you move to a different firm, as they'll have a steady stream of new customers via the comparison sites.

If you enter the same driver details onto a comparison site, but try with two different cars, you'll almost certainly find the "top 10" will be the same names, but in a different order, that's because they create artificial "points of difference" in their pricing algorithm.

My son works for one of the UK's biggest insurance firms (a "proper" firm, not a front) and he tells me which of the "fronts" use them as the real insurer - it's a lot! Even his firm "re-sell" partial blocks of policies to other "proper" insurers to spread the risk, and in turn, his firm "buy" partial blocks of policies from other proper insurers - it's just like betting shops who "place" bets with other shops to "hedge their bets".

You'd be surprised how little "genuine" competition there is in the insurance market. The comparison websites are all "smoke and mirrors" to give the illusion of lots of competition and choice, but it's not genuine!

Are EV drivers being subsidised by other drivers then? If so, that's not right!

Insurance doesn’t only cover your car, so if cars get more expensive or harder to repair then Insurance goes up across the board.

Cars got more expensive during Covid.
EV are more expensive
Parts are harder to come by
Inflation at an unusual high- so policies and repairs are impacted, double whammy.

And- we all pay to cover the uninsured driver fund, which covers e-scooters and so on.

You might think your silly comment is valuable but it’s not.

Whilst costs have gone up, insurance companies are being greedy and profiteering.

Don’t like the price? Shop around - you might get lucky, but they are all putting their prices up with nothing in place to prevent them from doing so - the sky is the limit. Result, some people will stop insuring. Result of that, we all pay even more. Such a racket.

Same here. Last years quote 240 this year 450. So annoying

Mine went from £500ish to nearly £800 in a year for no reason at all. Very annoying.

It's getting ridic.

I checked the insurance premium for my 17yo for when he starts driving - estimate £3k. No joke!

How are young people supposed to get started in their driving career? Driving lessons are going to keep increasing each year so it's best to start as soon as possible.

My son's went up by several hundred this year too.

His financial advisor (we're not rich he's got a pi trust fund) said that it's linked to the increase of electric cars. Don't know how true that is but he said that the move to electric vehicles means that a crash involving one will cost £££££££ and so we can all expect higher premiums from now on even if we aren't (yet) driving one ourselves.

Like I say, this is just what he said, I have no way of independently verifying that.

It's ridiculous, the poor are going to be priced out of driving because the rich want to drive their Fabergé eggs on the public roads and we all have to pay for it.

Mine's coming up to his test and I'm feeling sick with anxiety about how he's going to stay on the road to keep in practice after he passes, let alone if he gets an apprenticeship and needs his own car. Bet there will be kids passing then not driving for years.

Ours went up 30%. No claims ever. I'm old enough to remember that your car insurance went down each year you didn't have a claim ...

Mine went up 35p last renewal

@forjustnow get some other quotes from comparison sites.

21 days before your renewal date is the prime time to get the cheapest quotes.

Martin Lewis always says this and it was true when I was helping dm to get quotes a short while ago.

Looking too soon or too late can increase the premiums.
Looking a certain times of day can be cheaper
Doing too many searches with slightly different figures can make it go up as they start to think you are telling them what they want her hear to get her best quote rather than the truth

We got stung a few years ago when we had accident that wrote off our car in the 11th month of our policy. They paid out but terminated the policy so we had to start from scratch. As we desperately needed the car it was just 2 days between seeing it for the first time and collecting it. We didn't get confirmation on the collection day until the day before and out quotes were double the amount from the test quote before going to see it. It went up 40% between viewing the car on the Thursday and buying the insurance on the Friday evening. It went up 10% half way through purchasing the insurance as it clicked outside of working hours by a minute.
When we came to insure it the following year they put it up by the standard amount but didn't take off the extra amounts we had to pay for arranging it with short notice until we contacted them with quotes nearly half the price. We moved to a different provider

Same car a few years on and we have just had a reasonable quote just under 10% higher than last year so not complete universal that prices are high

I have just had a very similar conversation with LV. My policy has gone up by over 130% , no claims made and been with them for years. They couldn’t have been less interested 😔. I do have a legal issue with my house but haven’t taken it up with the insurance formally yet, as not sure how it will progress. I have rung to ask for advice previously. I apparently now have to ask them to take it up before renewal or it won’t be covered if I cancel ☹️. Not sure whether to just pay their extortionate price?

Our car insurance renewal quote went up a lot. I looked on Compare the Market and found quotes with the same conditions as our current insurance but for far less than the quote we'd had.
But the best quote was from - the company we were already insured with.
Mr Pika phoned them and told them there was a better offer online - from them. They gave us the lower price. They could have offered that in the first place.

It’s all a con let’s face it. Most people never bloody claim but are paying for others accidents. Electric cars costing a fortune for any bump because of the battery pushing up costs for every bugger else.

You think your car getting older and worth less and you getting another year experience with no accidents meant something but not these days. Dh’s goes up every year despite the above.

heaven forbid the fat cats pay rise or bonus is a little smaller aye.

Be grateful that was they tried to increase it by.

I'm same age etc and my last company tried to increase from £290 to £730 for same cover!

Said I could cancel via online.

I couldn't.

Found alternatives via comparison website all quoting same (around £305 mark) and accepted the increase with inflation so went with one.

Rang up to cancel.

It was not simple. They tried all the tricks in the book to get me to say what I'd paid to match it. Wouldn't take no for an answer.

Even told me they'd go cheaper and I had 14 days to cancel the policy I set up by law.

Still wouldn't just cancel at "no thanks".

My mum had died a few days before and I really just wanted it over with.

In the end I asked if they were recording the call. Told yes. So I said they had a record of me requesting the cancellation as per their policy repeatedly and so the conversation was over. And I hung up!

...

Not looking forward to getting ours tbh.
It was actually a fair bit cheaper last year than previous years, so it will seem like a double jump!
We're all going down the pan.....

Find your best price online then call your current company and say you want to cancel the renewal unless they match your price. The retention team always have special offers and can sometimes match it.

Mine also went from £300 to £520 on renewal. Cheapest comparison I could find was £550.

Apparently it’s down to a number of factors - a decline in driving standards post Covid, more uninsured cars on the road, and a reluctance to increase prices over Covid resulting in a huge jump.

Just did ours. Last year was 297, Auto renew for this year was 570 🙄 managed to get it on gocompare for 480. Eyewatering prices!