meet the TFS Mobile II plus a car insurance WTF!
Erm… ok it’s not really this colour.
Just a really quick post today as I’m up in York for the FI/Bloggers meeting, and seeing as our new car got us all the way here without any major hassles I thought it was time so say….
Meet the TFS Mobile II!
The real colour is dark blue if you were wondering but I just might have save up and splurge on the green paint job and purple lights as I think it looks awesome </sarcasm> 🙂
One weird thing was with the insurance and I’m keen to get opinions or if anyone else has had a similar experience. We got the old car insured for £220 with Tesco Insurance, finding the cheapest deal via MoneySupermarket. The new car is exactly the same model. I mean, it literally could not be any more similar. It’s the same year, same engine, same model – an LX – and yet when I phoned up switch the insurance over to the new car they informed me it would be an extra £129!!!
I was thinking more along the lines of a £20 admin fee not over one hundred pounds more!
Incredulous, I asked if they could insure me for one day, so I could drive home and recheck other insurance companies and if I found it cheaper elsewhere I would be switching, they said of course and charged me £11 for the privilege.
The next morning, another search on MoneySupermarket revealed that yes indeed, this new car was somehow and inexplicably much more expensive to insure, with most brokers coming out with quotes nearer the £400 mark. Just to double check I wasn’t going mental I put in the old car details and yes in fact that car still had quotes that were around £100 less.
Further weirdness: Tesco Insurance had seemingly disappeared from the MoneySupermarket listings! They were cheapest by far before so now rather than £220 for the old TFS Mobile, the lowest quote was £300.
what gives?
I’m thinking a few factors could be at play here so here are my best guesses:
- Car Insurance prices really do change from week to week, for reasons unfathomable to yours truly, and we just happened to get lucky when renewing the insurance on the old car (which was only about 10 days earlier!)
- Tesco Insurance realised they were selling insurance too cheaply compared to competitors and so pulled themselves temporarily from the comparison sites while they reevaluated their pricing structure
- Our new car has been stolen 11 times and so is deemed higher risk than our old one!?
- Despite being the same LX model, our new car, admittedly, has got a few more after market mod-cons than the old one – Nice touch screen head unit, rear view parking camera, parking sensors. It also has a few extra features that were clearly put in by the manufacturer such as cruise control, trip computer and so forth. So maybe it is a slightly newer model despite being the same calendar year, or either way the insurance companies will have all of this information from previous owners and so deem it a higher risk?
That’s all I could think of really.
Has anyone else had a similar experience, or works in the insurance industry and can shed light on what might have happened here?
Cheers and hope you all enjoy what’s left of the weekend!
Discussion (13) ¬
The only explanation I can offer is that insurance companies are, on the whole, a bunch of
A bunch of what Jim?! Come on don’t leave us in suspense!
You know swearing is allowed on this blog right? 😉
hehe – become an old man. Car insurance on a motorhome – and believe me I could break into mine with my bare hands – is about £250 for an old git 🙂
> Our new car has been stolen 11 times and so is deemed higher risk than our old one!?
WTF? I know it’s tough in the Smoke, I had a bike nicked from my mother’s drive FFS, but 11 times? Yikes! That’s a bad rap, I wouldn’t insure that either… And I own a bit of three insurers 😉
Haha, thanks ermine, I am assuming you were joking with your comment as well there 😉
Just to clarify to others, it may or may not have been stolen 11 or even 1 times (I never checked), I was just postulating that is why the insurance might have been so much higher than the old car.
I look forward to old man prices 🙂
That green and purple looks awesome lol! I’m currently insured with Tesco, they were the cheapest plus gave the best cashback (at the time) on TCB.
I think I could have started a nationwide craze here. Better snap up greenandpurplecarmakeover.com before it goes!
Yea they were miles cheaper than the next best for me and also got some decent cashback, although it should be noted I may have shot myself in the foot by getting the comparison quote from moneysupermarket first, then going back in via TC – They actually declined the cashback request, I am guessing because the source of the quote has been disputed (I have put in a counter claim but do no hold out much hope). Silly me and will have to remember that next time!
Really curious as to how insurance works in the UK. Your prices seem awfully cheap especially given the high cost of gas an everything.
Here in the US, you can just get any insurance, and then when you find a cheaper deal, you can switch, and the old insurance is required to give you a full “unused” portion of the insurance less a small administrative fee ($20-$25). Insurance is also transparently priced at the outset, but you can usually call directly for some steep discounts. Good luck!
Hi Hannah,
To be honest it sounds exactly the same as over there in terms of how it works and the administrative fee is in theory all I should have paid.
I guess the difference is your quote:
“Insurance is also transparently priced at the outset”
We have comparison websites which make it easy to find the cheapest quote for your particular vehicle and situation, but what actually influences that price is not very transparent at all IMO, and I often find myself redoing the quote over and over again tweaking each variable to see what will affect it either up or down!
In this case there was no reason given why the new car was so much more, it was just “The computer said so”. Great! 🙂
Saying that, you’ve just told me that the price seemed cheap compared to over there, so maybe on the whole this is nothing to get all that worked up about!
Maybe the cover is more expensive in the US due to the fact that everyone sues everyone elses asses off about pretty much anything over there so the legal costs of an accident are potentially much higher? 😉
I just thought of something else, this is a 12 year old car worth about £1000. Car insurance obviously varies wildly with how much the car is worth and how old the car is. I am sure if I were driving a 2 year old BMW I would be paying at least double that if not more (I have no idea as I have always bought 10 year old cars though!) – not sure what you drive but that may have something to do with it.
Ours is 11 years old but worth approximately $7K (Toyota’s hold value here). We have what is called collision coverage which means our car isn’t covered, only the other person’s car.
Once you hit this point, coverage is all about what other people’s cars are worth and how good of a driver you are. I just realized that I at first converted using Euros instead of pounds, so your insurance is not really that cheap at all.