tfs mobile ii

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 modelI 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!