What Causes Insurance Premiums To Go Up?
We all know car insurance companies will increase your premium for lots of reasons, for example if you receive a motoring fine of any sort. However, are you aware that even for the same value of fine, the increase in your premium can be very different depending on what the fine was for? You might think speeding fines would be penalised more heavily, but it is mobile phone use that leads to a really hefty increase in your premiums.
Insurance companies have to work hard to analyse all the behavioural possibilities – drivers who do any one of a wide variety of things will be more or less likely to make a claim. The companies work out the percentage likelihood of each individual driver making a claim based on these characteristics, and that will determine the cost of their insurance premium.
Research has shown that whether you are making phone calls, checking text messages, emails or social networking sites, or even just anticipating the possibility that you may receive a phone call or a text message, your reaction time is increases. All this means that if you are caught using a mobile phone while driving your car, both the police and your insurance provider will punish you.
A first speeding offence will increase your premiums by about £240 over the following three years as insurance companies have calculated that drivers with one speeding conviction are around 10 – 12 percent more likely to make an insurance claim. However drivers caught using their mobile phone, are twice as likely to make a claim and so their insurance premiums will increase even more.
These days insurance companies are gathering more and more data about us as drivers so that they can tailor our insurance quotes to us. How long before they are offering cheaper car insurance to those drivers who take better care of their cars with regular servicing, prompt MOTs and monthly tyre pressure checks? Certainly those things imply that someone is taking more care over their car and their driving, and when it comes to mobile phone use, intention is taken into consideration; while many people may unintentionally let their speed drift above a 30mph speed limit, making or answering a phone call is not something that happens by accident!