If you’ve ever passed your driving test, you will have likely looked at getting insurance, so you can hit the road.
Perhaps you look for brands you know, or who has the best rating – but let’s face it, more often than not, price is the largest contributing factor when it comes to buying car insurance.
As you can imagine, your price is often largely determined by the type of car you drive, how do certain makes and models affect the price of your insurance? Take a look as we talk through how insurers calculate premiums, how to avoid common pitfalls, and which cars are cheapest to insure on average.
Who decides how insurance groups are calculated?
Funnily enough, insurance groups aren’t actually formed by insurers themselves.
They are assigned by an insurance advisory service, who oversee the Association of British Insurer’s (ABI) Group Rating system.
They will assign a rating to every model of car, which we will then use to competitively price your insurance policy. Although, it’s worth mentioning that these are advisory, so your insurance company is not required to follow this rating.
But, what is this grade based on?
How are insurance groups calculated?
To help effective grade your car, there are a series of factors that first need to be established. Most of this is based around how much the car will cost your insurance company to repair.
So, things like how long it takes to repair your car on average, the cost of parts, and whether your bumpers meet the insurer’s criteria will be factored in.
A good rule of thumb is to think about it is – the higher the group number (grade) given to your car, the higher the premium is likely to be.
On top of this is a suffix that is attached to your advisory rating. This is often denoted by a letter which will indicate the security features fitted to your car as standard, and be another factor in pricing your car. Generally speaking, the higher the rating, the higher the more security needed.
To find out more information about the rating system works, and their suffixes click here.
How many car insurance groups are there?
This may sound a little overwhelming, and difficult to wrap your head around, but there are 50 different car insurance groups.
Each group is defined by how they score, across a wide range of different categories (i.e. Safety features, engine size).
Whilst we briefly explained what these groups mean in the previous section, we thought that instead of going into depth about each of these 50, and what they mean for you, we’d just skip along to the good bit – of course, meaning the cheapest.
What are the cheapest types of cars to insure?
We can make this super simple to understand (hopefully) – if we imagine that the higher the rating is, the more expensive car you will be to insure on average, what number are you picking?
Of course, you would pick 1.
Rightly so – we would all love for our cars to be placed at the lowest rating, as it often helps to keep the costs down, which can be a great bonus if you are a young or inexperienced driver.
But, you’ll need to do a little digging yourself, to find out if your car, or the car you plan to buy meets the criteria. So, what are some of the common cars to look out for, that fall within this group?
- Vauxhall Corsa
- Fiat Panda
- Hyundai i10
- Kia Rio
It’s important for you to understand that just because one Vauxhall Corsa is in group 1, it does not necessarily mean that it will be rated the same as another. For instance – a more pricey interior trim, bigger engine size, and more custom add-ons may see one bump up to a different rating, and become drastically more expensive.
What other factors influence your insurance premium?
If you have ever completed a quote for insurance, you will understand that there’s a fair bit of information that you will need to provide before you can get an accurate quote.
As you can imagine, the information you input is extremely important for us insurers – from your location to your occupation.
The make and model are heavily factored into the pricing of your insurance, but other information you enter can be extremely important on giving you a quote that is personalised to you, including:
- Age
- Occupation
- Location
- Type of cover required
- Driving record
Without going into massive amounts of detail, these pieces of information can help to reduce the cost of your insurance quote, or increase it depending on the amount of risk you pose – for instance, less experienced drivers may be more susceptible to having an accident, and priced accordingly.
But, what are method to potentially bring down the cost of your insurance?
What else can reduce price of insurance?
Most of us look for a bargain – whether it’s on car insurance, or simply shopping for clothes. You may be a bargain hunter, who scours the web for the latest discount codes, or the type of person who tirelessly searches for cheaper alternatives, that fall within your budget.
Whichever you identify with, you will be united in wanting the best deal possible.
That’s where black box insurance can somewhat help – by placing a small telematics device in your car, you may be able to reduce the cost of your insurance premium at renewal, giving you that extra bit of money needed for that t-shirt you’ve been eyeing up.
Primarily targeted at younger drivers, telematics can be an effective way of battling the costs of traditional insurance policies, and give drivers more autonomy over their driving data, to check out exactly how they drive.
Find out more about how you could be rewarded for safe driving – with over 1 million customers so far, we know a thing or two about telematics insurance (LINK).