Safe Speed Forums

Think exactly how 3rd party insurance on fuel tax would work? How would you make a claim? No more no-claims bonuses to protect so drivers might be more careless / take more risks (no higher premiums if you have accidents). Would there be an excess and if so how much? (There would have to be an excess of at least £200 and probably more to prevent the above, and then what if a driver were untraceable, eg they hit your car when it's legally parked then drive off?).

Ok, so you'd probably want to also purchase insurance on your own vehicle (comprehensive cover) and for that premiums would vary, but remember that old bangers are often among the most dangerous cars.

To answer the original topic about scanning number plates, number-plate cloning is fraud, a serious criminal offence, and deliberately doing this could mean a heavy fine and jail. But it's easy to see a situation where a gang of people get together to "share" a number plate:

- All of them drive the same make and model and colour
- Clone the number plate (at a legal dealer as you do actually own the car) and put it on all the other cars.
- Insure the car just once
- Get MOT for at least one of the cars (though obviously it's worthwhile having a car in working order).
- Forge the tax discs, but tax at least one of them so DVLA think it's taxed.

Of course if you sell one of them the new owner will probably tax and insure it all for you. (Likely to get suspicious if he gets any NIP though). And be warned doing all the above could land you in jail if caught.

I'd love to see a basic third party cover linked in some way to fuel, but I fear that the culture of association of cost to risk would be hard to break. The break of this association works well with the NHS, so why not with insurance, although third party risk would probably have to be removed from the commercial arena. Has anyone any knowledge of any other countries where this works?



I don't think that normal safe driving is achieved purely by the incentive of maintaining a low third party risk. Nutter drivers will give little thought to any consequences, and if insurance becomes too difficult to afford, they will opt out.

I'd be interested to hear what kind of surcharge could be placed on a litre of fuel to incorporate third party cover. 10p per litre would be about £150 per annum for the average motorist. That'd probably be a bit on the shy side.

One aspect I'd be concerned about is the deception collision, where a person drives his scrapper into the previously damaged bonnet and wing of his mate's much more expensive motor, to allow his mate to make a claim.



How insular we are in Cumbria.

It is in force but has not yet been adopted in Cumbria.

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Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot, yet the best remedy is to step on them.

Ian

You don't need to wait for insurance to go on the cost of fuel, that has been happening for years (along with a whole host of other scams that people really don't give a second thought to).


No offence Ian, but the first time I got stopped in Barrow (1991), the police officer in question forgot all about what he had stopped me for because he was coming in his pants while looking at my car.

The car in question...........a MKII Escort RS2000

Nothing special by a Londoner's standards, but it was obviously something special up there at the time.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

No, never give them a second thought mate.



Hmmm.....

I started in Barrow in 1991...

And I remember getting into a sticky mess once or twice

MKII RS2000 eh?........ ..............

Were you short fat and spotty Gixxer?

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Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot, yet the best remedy is to step on them.

Ian

Blimey! We're not going to turn into 'tugs reunited' are we?

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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

PMSL!!!

LOL, 5'8, medium build, and clean complexion.

It was around 10.30 or so one evening, and I was "two up" with a friend in the passenger seat.
We came in to Barrow down the 590, and we were travelling at "more than a fair lick" towards a set of traffic lights which had a cinema on the corner of the road that led to Ormsgill.

The lights changed to red, I applied the brakes with "mucho gusto", and the blue Sherpa van that was on the opposite side of the road noticed the front end of the car dipping under the heavy braking.

We duly got pulled in a car park up the road (right next to Barrow police station), and the copper went through the plastic bags in the boot of the car with much fervour.
While he was searching and pulling everything about, he asked the pair of us what was in the bags.....

"Our dirty underwear from the last 3 days" came our reply

Strangely enough, he decided to cut the search short, and at that point he noticed the RS badge on the boot.

"Is this a real RS or a made up one" came the next question

"It's a real one mate" came the reply.


Long story short, we had a very amicable chat, he told me to watch my speed, and then he showed us the location of a nightclub where we could pull a couple of slappers for the night (it was called the 99 club).

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

The subject was discussed at length on Pepipoo a while back.

It is an offence not to carry your documents but it is a valid defence if you can produce them within a reasonable time period.

So yes, there is a requirement to carry your documents but if you don't then you get a 2nd chance.

Not long after I'd started driving I got pulled for a random check, and when I handed my docs over all smug for avoiding a producer he advised me not to keep anything more than my licence handy in future as keeping the docs in the car would make it easier for a car thief to shift.

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

Ah, the delights of Barrovia!

So you actually survived the 99 club. Its still there on Dalkieth Street, in all its understated glory. I'm sure it has already outlasted every other club in town.
The expression 'Happy Slappers' I believe was defined for the 99 club. Its always a shame when they move the meaning of these phrases away from their original intended.

In any case, I'm glad you enjoyed your visit, and managed to leave with your licence intact.

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Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot, yet the best remedy is to step on them.

Ian

I have concerns with the crushing of cars without proper checks.

Many years ago a Hampshire police officer got confused as to what was public highway and private forecourt. I had a motorbike which I had dropped , broken the number plate and got a new numberplate. Some how, probobly my fault, two numbers got swapped,

Excited hampshire copper swiped the bike and hid it for 101 days in a local police station, I reported the bike stolen , police denied for 99 days that it had been "found"

There was no tax disk on the bike as people kept nicking it due to its near street position. I only displayed the tax when I used the bike.


I have a number of colleages and friends who have been fined for not taxing thier motorbikes, mopeds and classic cars. I have concerns with snatch squads crushing classic cars parked on land where the boundery is not so clear like back alleys to terraced houses. cars that may not display number plates or tax ... It happens!

My mum parked her car on the street, got very ill, unable to speak, sign her name, walk, we had no power of attorney, we could not tax her car, insure it, we could not sell her car, move her car... would you crush it?

Government thinking makes life sound so simple
There are millions of people without an offstreet parking space. If somthing expensive fails the mot they have nowhere to move it to. It wont be long with computorised MOT's before they come looking for your car when the MOT runs out. because not having a MOT invalidates the insurance, and no insurance means crusher!


equally worrying there was a hotwired car no tax disk , near our house with cracked windscreen rear window, no side window, sharp edges broken lightss and it was being driven around and moved parking spaces

very dodgy yet no one would impound it...

I agree there are two sides to this. but I want to see dodgey cars removed but care not to crush cars just because the owner is forgetfull or in hospital.

I enjoyed it so much, I ended up moving in with a girl called Jenny (a friends sister) who lived in Greenhill Close in Ormsgill and stayed there for the best part of 2 years.

I managed to get myself in to quite a few "scrapes" while living there, including (unknowingly) being pursued in the aforementioned RS2000 all the way from Barrow to Southend one weekend (some 300 miles) for suspected child abduction

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

For sure - my bike lives on the street outside our house (along with 3 others, and there are several more down the street). I came home one night to find that some little scrote had snapped the tax disc holder off mine (with a 2 week old disc in it ). So I went straight down the cop shop to report it etc etc.

I can't begin to express what I would have felt if my 1979 classic had been crushed because of some little a$$ wipe with nothing else to do!

To be honest, if the DVLA have a central record of all taxed vehicles (and yes of course they NEVER make mistakes ) why on earth do we need to display a disc at all?! Its all well and good in a nice metal box where you can't get to it, but on a bike there is no real way to secure it (appart from glueing it to the tank....)

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

I missed this by Earl Purple earlier. Apologies for going off topic.

I'd suggest modelling it fairly closley on the Australian Compulsory Thrid Party system, in which part of the "rego" (their version of the tax disc) covers 3rd party claims. I'm guessing that an Aussie injured in a collision makes a claim to whichever state provided the rego to the vehicle at fault, and that the insurance company involved would be determined from there. Here it would depend on whether the scheme was county, region, country or UK wide, and whether the government effectively became an insurer istelf or got one or more companies in to provide cover. But for simplicity's sake let's say it would be run by the government and claims came out of the DoT or Health Department somewhere.

Some changes would obviously need to be made. For one thing it might be desirable to provide full 3rd party cover, where the Aussie rego system provides 3rd party injury cover only. If an Aussie chav (? - whatever they call 'em) writes off an expensive car and the owner walks away without a scratch then there is no cover provided by the CPT part of the rego. Another change is to put it on fuel rather than VED. Although there's no reason why it can't be put on VED the attraction of putting into the fuel duty is obviously that your 3rd party premium becomes proportional to the amount of fuel you buy and therefore the amount of driving you do. Also, a chavmobile will still be drivable without VED but won't go far without fuel. Not perfect, since it doesn't take account of varying risk according to driver ability/attitude, but I think it could be acceptable for low risk good drivers since they would know that all the bad ones do at least have cover, which ain't necesssarily so at the moment.

I'm not sure how long 3rd party insurance has been provided this way in Australia, but I think it's been some years. AFAICT it was the same earlier this year as when I was there in 2001, and I got the impression it was nothing new even then. If making claims had been a real problem I think it would have been binned by now.


Since the idea is to eliminate uninsured drivers this seems unlikely to change. At the moment uninsured drivers don't have any NCD to protect anyway.


Yes, probably there would still have to be an excess, if only to provide a small stick to deter risky behaviour. Not sure how much it would be though. Too low and it provides too small a deterrent. Too high and it might just make skint drivers run off and buy another cheap car in the pub. I'd suggest making the excess slightly lower than the going rate for a throwaway banger, so maybe £200 would be a little high. Or not - I really don't know what the going rate for throwaway bangers is . Anyhow, we want to make doing the right thing after a crash the path of least resistance from the point of view of the sort of person who is currently happy to drive without insurance.

It might be an idea to scale the amount of excess payable according to a driver's crash history in the same way that premiums are now (and still would be for privately bought insurance). Say £150 for less than 12 months since the last crash dropping £15 per year down to £75 for > 6 years? I don't know what actual times and amounts would be appropriate - just chucking numbers about really.


Yes. Those who can only afford bangers will be the least likely to buy their own insurance on top, and their vehicles are also the least likely to be safe, and that's a problem that isn't going to go away with a compulsory insurance scheme. However, at the moment they're also the ones who are most likely not to bother with insurance at all, and the cars aren't any more or less dodgy than they would be with 3rd party cover in the fuel. So even though it can't tackle the actual physical risk we'd at least be better off than where we are now. I feel the only way to deal with dangerous cars is better policing. Perhaps any surplus revenue the government made from 3rd party insurance in fuel could be ringfenced into policing that, though I'm in two minds about encouraging them to make a surplus. Also it would mean that when many claims are made they might not make a surplus at all, and that might well be the sort of time when extra money needs to be spent on that very thing. Maybe it would be better to spend all the excesses on that instead. More collisions means more excesses mean more funds to chase wrecks.

Edited slightly after some Googling into the Aussie scheme.

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

the worry with 3rd party insurance through fuel is that every newly quallified teanager would not have a pug206 or nova they would go and buy an old rs2000 or supra or a pontiac firebird now thay dont have to spend £2000 on insurance.....

or maybe you could limit the scheeme to cars under 15 years old and under 1500cc

and I would get ..... now that is another story!

I doubt that very much.....spending £2K on a Pontiac means you have bought a sack of shit that needs heaps of work.
A decent 6.6 will set you back £6K easily, while the 5.0 goes for around the £5K mark
Even if they could afford a decent one, they would soon get pissed off with 9mpg (even less if you fit a 600cfm 4 barrel Holley and floor it everywhere you go ).

Besides all that, insurance on those sort of cars is very, very cheap to start with because they are classed as classics (so if the kids really wanted one, they could have them now).

Likewise an RS2000, £2K won't get you what I'd call a decent one....and they ain't that fast by todays standards anyway.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

But that's a crap scheme isn't it? We price the poorer 17 year olds out of quick cars. Anyone with enough cash can drive anything at 17. If it's important to (say) keep 17 years olds out of Porsches, then we need proper legislation that treats everyone equally.

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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

Perfection in any system is rarely an achievable goal. We don’t have to keep all 17 years olds out of Porsches to make the roads safer - we can make them a lot safer by just keeping the vast majority of 17 years olds out of Porsches. This isn’t a communist country, so everybody isn’t treated equally. Life’s not fair? Tell me about it!

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I stole this .sig

Err. Excuse me. That's ENTIRELY beside the point.

We point was that perhaps we needed individual insurance policies to keep young drivers out of quick cars. We don't. Where such youngsters are concerned about legalities we could do the job with legislation that targets the exact problem. And we could draft the legislation to target the real risks as accurately as possible.

Who said anything about perfection? You twisty turny thing you!

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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

I couldn't find a classic car insurer to cover me until I was 21, and then it was actually more expensive then bog-standard insurance. This was due to the limited milage they put on the classic policies, and I believe you have to proivded your MOT slips? Not sure on that. If I limited myself to 1500 or maybe 3000 miles it would perhaps be cheaper - but then I'd have to buy a second car as I do close to 10 000 a year in the Capri. I've heard of some companies convering drivers from 19 on classic policies, but from what I've heard they tend to be only on small engined classics.



It's perhaps not fair, but is perhaps the best way. Having 3rd party insurance included in fuel would I feel increase the numbers of young drivers flying around in high-powered motors as you can get fast cars for very little money. While in may seem a little unfair that a posh 18 year-old could be driving a Ferrari, at least he will be paying huge sums of money for the privelege, a percentage of which will go into the M.I.B. fund for unisured drivers. It maybe unfair but I don't think the alternative is better. I'd love a Ferrari, and theres no reason I can't get one other then fact I couldn't afford it. Should I complain about it? On a rare occasion I agree with Basingwerk, I have to admit he's right that we are not a communist country and so injustices happen.