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True, most of them will pay the full value of a car within 1 year of new, but with finance deals lasting 3 years or more (5 years is common in 'sub-prime' finance) then you could potentially face a large amount of negative equity should you be unfortunate to write the car off. Depriciation is a killer, so often the market value for which you will be paid out from your insurance won't come close to the amount of money owed on finance.

With rising body-repair costs, its becoming more common for cars to become economic write-offs, even if they are repairable. Of course it's unlikely that you are going to have an accident that writes a car off, but its always a possibility - and you would stand to lose out. GAP insurance is definatly worth considering, especially if someone is buying a high-value car that suffers badly from depriciation.

But surely, if a car is written off that has depreciated badly, one can replace it with a like model of the same age that has suffered from similarly excessive depreciation, restoring the status quo?

I think it's a rip-off. mind you, I think ALL insurance is a rip-off, but some, unfortunately, a necessary rip-off.

You could do that, but it would be a pain if you had kept the car pristine and serviced on the dot, when your more then likely only going to get book value for it. Your then paying finance on a used car that you may not know a great deal about its previous owner and how well or not they have treated the car. Personally, though I'm sure not everyone would agree, I'd rather have the finance settled through GAP insurance, leaving me free to go back and by a brand new car again. That way I'd only be paying the same repayments, but with a new car to show for it, albeit with longer to pay off.

The cost may seem steep at £300, but when you consider that you would probably have to pay at least this extra to get the same car as you had before as a dealer is going to have a profit mark-up, the difference is negligable I think.

Yes, but you have to bear in mind the likelihood of having a write-off during the term of the insurance, which is negligible. What is the shortfall likely to be, a maximum of maybe £2000 or £3000? The chances of a write-off are far lower than that.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I suppose it depends on the car purchased, depreciation is going to far more for a big petrol engined lard-barge from an undesirable make then a chic city car. I recently helped my mothers partner buy a new car and I advised him against taking this GAP insurance because he got a cracking deal for a 1000 mile '05' Ford Ka(£4500) and so the shortfall is going to be minimal. But on a more expensive, brand new car its worth considering - although I readily admit its not for everyone.

But it is not me who says that a driver will cause an accident simply because they have a conviction. You say that it does not follow that drivers with convictions don’t cause accidents, any more than average. Yet actuaries say that that risk increases with the number of convictions a driver has, and that is why every insurance form has questions about that, isn’t it?

We know that insurance companies succeed in making profits for their shareholders from accurately assessing risk in this way, so there can be no non-sequitur here at all. If there were, they would loose money!

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Not the whole story basingwerk. Insurers don't simply count up the number of penalty points or convictions. They ask for the specific offence code in each case (in fact I'm not sure mine even asked about points at all). Why? Because different offences are associated with different levels of risk. Tell 'em you've got 3 points for an SP30 and there's a good chance it won't change the premium at all since millions have got speeding fines and aren't crashing all the time. However, tell 'em you've got 3 points for driving with uncorrected eyesight or jumping red traffic lights or driving a car with defective brakes or something ..... sure as hell they'll load the premium and maybe even refuse cover altogether. Pretty clearly having duff brakes is a lot more risky than speeding, yet they are each one offence and the penalty points may well be the same, which means that number of convictions is a totally inadequate method of risk assessment unless you also know what they were for.

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However, speeding fines are indicative of exposure - drivers who do greater mileages are on average more likely to pick up speeding fines and on average more likely to have crashes.

So more fines does mean more risk, but frequently not because the behaviour is a risky one.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Very true. All extra information can change the risk knowledge, although there is a limit to the level of granularity an insurer can use; after all, the whole point is to provide an insurance market for many comparable drivers who want to (or must by law) share risk with each other.

The basic fact is that ‘indications of behaviour’ exist. They can include the number of claims made, age, miles travelled, occupation, sex etc. etc. One of these ‘indications of behaviour’ that is used to assess risk is number and type of convictions.

As a person who buys insurance, to keep the risk and costs low for me, I want the other drivers (that I share risk with) to drive safely. If a driver has a low risk profile, I have no problem allowing them to be compensated for accidents that they cause, because things sometimes happen that are outside our own control. In any case, post-accident, their risk profile is higher, so such a system would be closed loop - a good thing.

If, on the other hand, the ‘indications of behaviour’ show that the driver has a high risk profile, for whatever reason, I want to levy a cost incentive on that driver to influence their driving style and reduce risk/cost to me. One coarse measure within the limits of granularity is to make comprehensive insurance unavailable to those with a number of detrimental ‘indications of behaviour’, such as convictions.

This is a way to reduce the risk of poor driving behaviour by penalising it with higher costs – a bit like cameras!

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If you get crashed into, it is irrelevant whether the cause of the risk was because of poor behaviour or excessively high mileage, isn’t it? To achieve the same low risk as a low mileage driver, a high mileage driver must be much better behaved. Luckily for me, my insurance company penalises high-mileage drivers, so that I can get a better deal.

This shows that a good way to increase road safely is not to drive at all, or to drive much less. Where do you say that on this ‘road safety’ web site?

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Yes, yes, all very market driven and all that. But that same market has established that panalty points for speeding do not a crap driver make. My insurer says they don't load premiums for speeding until you've got either 9 points or more or (for 3 or 6 points) you were going fast enough for at least one offence to end up in court. They recognise that the chances of competent low risk drivers getting a few points is a hell of a lot higher than the actual risk they present.


Again, pretty much what happens anyway except that if you've got sufficiently deep pockets you'll always be able to find someone who'll insure you at a price. Usually a pretty exhorbitant one for really bad drivers though, since the "bargain" ones will be more likely to refuse cover for drivers with bad histories. On the subject of which, if a driver has a habit of crashing or for whatever reason is considered a high risk, it makes little sense to pull the comprehensive cover. The most costly claims are going to be on 3rd party after all, especially if the driver has some horrible old nail (no offence meant to your basingwrecks mate - my car's over 10 now but gets driven with care as well as enthusiasm). 3rd party claims will be likely to cost the insurer a damn sight more than the comp bit would, doubly so if an injury is involved. So the sensible thing for the insurance company to do when asked for cover for a high risk driver is to make the 3rd party quote sky ing high plus the normal rate for comp, or simply refuse cover entirely.


It does indeed go some way to penalising bad driving with higher costs. But in that respect I'd say it's almost entirely unlike cameras, which of course merely penalise driving in a far more general sense and occasionally ping a bad driver who coincedentally happens to be driving badly above the limit (always assuming it's not some git with an untraceable reg). Cameras, as you well know, do square root of bugger all about TIBMINs rolling about in their own fluffy little world at legal speeds until they run into something, which frankly I find far more worrying than the vast numbers of people who speed when conditions allow but manage to avoid crashing 99.999something% of the time.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Then I can't understand why BikerPaul's new insurance policy can be 60% cheaper than any other company. It is by eliminating risk from speed violations, drink driving or disobeying traffic signs that they gain a commercial advantage.

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I don't think so for two reasons. First high mileage can never be a cause of a crash, and therfore cannot be the cause of the risk either. It is simply a proxy for the amount of risk you have due to your exposure (to use Safe Speed's term). Secondly, you are assuming that a high mileage driver is more likely to cause a crash, but that is not necessarily so. High mileage drivers are more likely to experience a crash, but that could esily be of someone else's making - a low mileage TIBMIN for example. You can be a terrible driver irrespective of the amount of miles you do each year, but of course if I do 50000 miles a year my chances of finding your car in my back seat is greater than if I only do 25000, which in turn is greater than if I only do 12500 and so on. That doesn't change no matter how good a driver I am or may become in the future. It's kind of like cancer - all other things being equal the longer you live the more likely you'll get it.


No, the behaviour of the high mileage driver really doesn't help him avoid encounters with bad drivers, though the experience of the extra miles may just help them prevent an encounter becoming a collision. That'd be ironic as in that case it would be your putatively low risk driver avoiding a crash solely because they had the good fortune to encounter a high mileage driver, but I don't want to get into scenario building. I just said may.As I explained above, it's a numbers game. Look at it in regards to something other than crashes. Breakdowns perhaps? Would you not agree that your chances of breaking down increase with mileage? At an extreme you can avoid breakdowns entirely by never leaving the house, but leaving aside the fact that that isn't terribly desirable it tells you absolutely nothing about how well maintained you keep your car (or not, as the case may be).

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

It may simply be because by peppering the small print with excuses to avoid paying claims, which keeps their overheads down and passes on a "saving" to the customers. I've had this before with cheap home insurance - the policy said fences were covered, so when a storm blew mine down I rang 'em up, only to be told that they didn't mean that fences that got blown over were covered. If the fence had caught fire, Mr Gatsobait, or had been stolen... at which point I didn't know whether to lose my temper or fall about laughing. Who the hell is going to steal my fence? I settled for changing insurers the same afternoon.

Cheap insurance can mean one of two things. Either it's a genuine bargain, or cheap=shit value.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

It IS irrelevant to me if I get crashed into whether the cause of the risk was because of poor behaviour or excessively high mileage! I am killed, I cannot care!



Then argue with SafeSpeed, who said that high mileage increases risk. If high mileage does not increase risk, then insurance companies would not use it to set their price - but they do, so it does! Look at it this way - how could I cause a car crash when I wasn’t there at the time?!?



Yes – it doesn't matter if your car is poorly maintained if you don't use it, so you can save money AND make the roads safer!

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Have you ever spent much time in Birkenhead?

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I repeat, the cause of the risk cannot be the high mileage except perhaps in cases where a crash is caused by mechanical failure. The BiBs keep telling us how rare that is these days though. As mileage increases your own personal risk also increases, but the one is not the cause of the other, and for the same reasons nor does it necessarily have anything to do with the risk a driver poses to others.


Read it again. He said it increases exposure. That does not mean that it increases the risk a high mileage driver presents to others. In fact he specifically said that it doesn't mean that the behaviour is risky.


Assuming for the moment that this is indeed the motivation for insurers charging more for high mileage drivers, that in istelf doesn't actually mean they're right. Have you never heard of a company doing something on what it thought was sensible grounds only to find out later that it was irrelevant bollocks? Anyhow, you're sort of right for the wrong reasons, and that's because you're equating risk to other road users with risk to the high mileage driver themselves. In fact it might be better to look at high mileage as an indicator of financial risk to the insurance company. As I keep saying, high mileage is a proxy for the risk that a driver, even a very good driver, will encounter a TIBMIN or other roadgoing mobile hazard zone... [b]but that's it[b]. It doesn't tell anybody anything about the likelihood that the policyholder will have caused the incident that prompted the claim, only that a claim is more likely. This doesn't even necessarily mean a crash related claim. High mileage drivers (and I speak from experience) often have to park in public areas with which they're unfamiliar, and sometimes that means the dodgier parts of our cities. And sometimes that means you come back to find a missing aerial or that some bastard has keyed it, or even that they've run off with the radio and the A-Z that you were relying upon to navigate your way back out of the f:censored:ing place. A financial risk to the insurance company which is indicated by high mileage (though probably more by occupation), but physical risk to people? Zilch (unless I catch the bastard who nicked my Pink Floyd tapes ).

High mileage is merely a proxy for the risk the high mileage driver experiences themselves, and also the risk that the insurance company has of being forced to deal with a claim. That is all that is reflected by the mileage calculations in insurance premiums. Driver behaviour may well present risk to other road users, but this cannot be determined by mileage and that's not what the insurance companies are trying to do. They're not rewarding low mileage drivers by being safe (though they may be that too), they're rewarding them for being less likely to cost them time and money by not being out and about so much. Nothing to do with the risk posed to other road users - why else would they want to ask all those other questions?


I'll respond to those points when (or if) I work out what you're on about.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Actually reducing vehicle usage (fat chance!) doesn't change 'road safety' directly at all. The basic indicator of 'road safety' is deaths per billion vehicle km driven. That's the indicator I'm interested in improving.

I think it's literally a fatal mistake to muddle up road safety and social / political issues.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

The risk of accident is magnified the more you drive, plain and simple.



I’m only intersted in exposure. If more miles means more risk (as it does), then it specifically means that the behaviour is more risky. This must be the case because we know that, all else being equals, it is safer to drive 1 mile a week than to drive 1000 miles per week, and it is even safer again not to drive any miles at all per week.

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A weakness in your main case is that it is an absolute one, based on the (so-called) fatality gap. It does NOT account for more cars and longer journeys. Even if it did, you are missing a good way to avoid the risk of a dangerous activity – just don’t do it!



You will suffer misunderstanding because driving IS a social / political issue!

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