Warning - Contains Insurance Rant

Makhaira

Makhaira

Makhaira

Soldato
Joined
23 Nov 2007
Posts
4,994
Location
Lancashire, UK
I'm usually pretty restrained, but now I've succumbed to the need for an internet rant about the lack of logic displayed in car insurance....

So, I'm currently renting in an area mainly populated by ageing stalwart citizens and retirement homes. Hardly exciting, but I'm renting a nice flat and it's done me fine for the time I've been here. In the next few weeks I'll be moving to a house I'm in the process of buying, near a town centre, and as such am lining up various paperwork.

WTF Moment #1

Cue phoning my car insurer to see what my premium change would be, if any, only to be told that they don't insure that postcode at all! We're not talking specific bits mind you, it's the whole XX2 region as a blanket ban?!

WTF Moment #2

So next up I head to various websites (comparison and direct) for quotes. My £1100 premium has suddenly skyrocketed to £2200!!!! A quick fiddle with quotation forms shows that my current policy would be £1200, so that's a £900 increase caused by the postcode alone!


WTF Moment #3

So having briefly resigned myself to the fact that I'd lost in the postcode lottery, the thought entered my head of "Aha, I've said keeping the car on a driveway, but there's a garage I was going to use for storage/workshop space, so I can put the car in there. That should drop the premium back down again if it's just postcode related."

Maybe there would be a few hundred pounds difference with a garage...
Maybe there would be a few tens difference at least...

....

Exactly the same. To the penny. So despite the postcode being the cost driver, securing my car in a garage makes ZERO difference to the premium.

I'm a strange combination of gutted and livid at the moment, and definitely best left alone. I reason there are other factors that could be the cause of this such as there being no theft in that postcode region, but in fact the whole area drives like lunatics in dodgems, but that's not the case. Not to mention that the XX2 region of this postcode contains a lot of very sought after locations, so I can't understand the blanket judgement rather than it being based on the full XX2 YYY postcode.

Anyways, thanks for reading the rant guys, I feel a bit better for typing this.
 
People damadge cars going in and out of garages, guess it dosen't make a difference on your policy. Would brobably make a differnce on something desirable. But yes, post codes suck.
 
[TW]Fox;18941351 said:
Sounds like a not very nice area :eek:
Click to expand...

That's the thing though, it's a good area round there, the problem is how broadly they seem to apply the postcode blocks. To be honest I can live with the fact that postcodes dictate differing rates, it's the fact that a garage makes zero difference that staggered me the most!
 
Some insuress just flat refuse M, R, L, OL etc postcodes due to the risk overall risk, instead of spending time and money on the little nice areas they just write it off.

Try insuring a Nissan GTR on the street and in the garage... there will be a difference
 
Eliot said:
The worst is when you have a newport postcode but dont actually live in newport you live in a town next to it.
Click to expand...

i remember somebody being very insulted when i worked in customer services and read out her address to her because she had Slough in it.
She lived in a village outside Slough, so her address was in the format, Street, Village, Slough, Postcode

She got proper shirty and demanded that it be removed from her adddress. All the address data comes up automatically so there was nothing i could do about it, but she took it as some kind of personal insult !
 
Putting the car in the garage made about £30 difference to my premium which was nearing £1k anyway, so not a massive difference.

There is of course the issue of the night you decide you cba to clear whatever it is you left in the middle of the garage out of the way to put the motor in it. So you leave it on the drive, find it's been winched the next morning and your insurer won't cough up as it wasn't in the garage.

Unless you can stage a break in to your garage...
 
What really annoys me is when people make daft, whiney threads, and then don't actually provide any real information?! :rolleyes:

The first part of the postcode would be useful so we can either laugh at the area and the fact that your car will be on fire in 3 days, or all go WTF?! at the same time.
 
That's what happens when you live in the Ghetto :p.

One other thing though;
Makhaira said:
Not to mention that the XX2 region of this postcode contains a lot of very sought after locations.
Click to expand...
If you're a car stealing scrote living in bandit country and all your neighbours (who are also scrotes) have rubbish cars, are you going to a) Steal their rubbish car, or b) Steal a nicer car from a nicer area.

I'd be going out of the hood and nicking something nice from elsewhere!
 
MrLOL said:
i remember somebody being very insulted when i worked in customer services and read out her address to her because she had Slough in it.
She lived in a village outside Slough, so her address was in the format, Street, Village, Slough, Postcode
Click to expand...

haha that was probably my missus! We live in Burnham which is in a different county to Slough but still SL1 and Slough is the postal town. She goes mad when I say we live in Slough. ;)

There was a big uproar in the village when some 'Welcome to Slough' signs were installed in the Slough council controlled part of Burnham.
 
I get this with a few insurers in the BB postcode. I live 9ish miles away from Blackburn itself where the postcode comes from, in a rural area on a street with its own postcode to it self where nobody has ever had a car broken into or stolen in at least 26 years. Madness.
 
the only way she could have been more prentious was if she pretended she didn't have a house number and instead had a made up house name

eg.

"Nooks Cottage" or something like that.

Despite the fact next door is 22 and 26, they have to be different lol.
 
I used to live in an L (Liverpool) postcode (about 30 miles outside Liverpool though), and my business premesis were 100 yards down the road but had a PR (Preston) postcode. £700 premium dropped to £450 when I insured it using my business details.

I've never had a garage make any difference to the premium either.
 
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