Safe Speed Forums

Are you confused?



Drivers need insurance policies so that they can pay for their screws ups. If young drivers screw up more in quick cars, they pay more for their policies to cover that risk. As a corollary to that, because insurance is dear for young drivers in fast cars, so it DOES keep some young drivers out of quick cars.



The exact problem is that young drivers screw up more than us, and even more again in fast cars. How can you legislate to stop that?

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Surely it is fairly easy to frame some legislation to restrict young / inexperienced drivers in terms of what they can drive, where they can drive it and even perhaps when and with whom.

The current system of devolving this responsibility almost entirely to greedy self-interested insurance companies is a very vague and inaccurate way of targetting a problem which you have managed to frame precisely in just one sentence.

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The problem we were discussing was the special risks associated with young drivers in powerful cars.

The best way to address this problem is a power to weight ratio limit for young / inexperienced drivers.

The wider problems of young drivers are harder to deal with, but I believe we could make a good start with school lessons about road user responsibility and perceptions of danger before driving age.

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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

And it wouldn't be before time either.

They did exactly that to motorcyclists more years ago than I care to remember, why they never applied the same to car drivers at the same time I will never know.


I've always thought that, so much so that both of my kids (7 & 9) are physically capable of driving & maneuvering (at speed) a motor car already.
They have had a slight advantage though in that they both compete (at competition level) in schoolboy motocross, where speeds of 60mph are not uncommon.

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But isn't that unfair on the young drivers that are capable of handling a more powerful car, and are prepared to pay extra for that? Perhaps its less unfair then having the system based on your ability to pay, but theres no way of making a system perfectly fair. The current insurance set up does have some adavantages with the NCB syestem, especially for young drivers. Gaining that all important 1 years NCB can make a huge difference to premiums and provides an incentive to drive safely - well it did for me anyway.

That's fairly easily fixed. Anyone who could pass (some sort of) advanced test could get the entitlement early. Clearly this idea has other benefits too.

But we shouldn't try to aim for 'perfect fairness' because there's no such thing. We just have to do our best to make it fair. Clearly pricing the poorer young drivers out of more powerful cars isn't fair either.

We also need to consider the proportion of young driver high powered vehicle crashes that are caused by drivers WAY outside of the law (stolen car, no licence etc). We won't fix these crashes with power to weight ratio or insurance price rules - because they won't pay any attention to those rules either.

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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

My question was not rhetorical - I wanted to know your ideas. The problem is exacerbated by the relative cheapness of fast cars. In my day, cars were dear and insurance was not cheap but affordable just. Now insurance is astronomical (if you are a poor risk) while cars are dirt cheap. This means that any reckless teenager can get a ton-up car, so more do and go without insurance. The answer, in my opinion, is mileage-metered insurance. As a lot of those callow youths can’t afford the petrol to leave town anyway, this would be quite cheap, and we would have the added advantage of less risk due to less teenage miles.

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But if people buy NCB protection to protect their insurance, there is no advantage to the NCB system.

Aside: I wonder if some insurance company, somewhere, is offering protection insurance for your NCB protection that protects the insurance that protects you financially if you crash!

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Thats the trick of the insurance companies - it's NCB protection - not 'premium' protection. Yes paying the extra money to protect your NCB will mean you continue to get 65% off the standard premium. However, they can still raise the premium because you have had an accident and so are statistically a greater risk - but of course you still get 65% off, although this time you get 65% off a higher amount. So in effect there is still an incentive there.

Also, you can't normally protect your NCB bonus until you have 4 years, which by that time you should be out of the inexpierenced driver group. Plus, when a new driver is going for their 1st years NCB(the most important one with the greatest percentage off a premimum) they don't have anything to protect.

Also you have to remember how the insurance indusrty works NCB protection. Mine is lost if I have two or more own fault claims in (I think) two years, but an "own fault" claim is defined by whether the insurance company can recover all costs or not rather than who was at fault in reality. That coming together I had with the cyclist last year was unrecoverable and goes against me as an "own fault" claim, even though the insurance company had a witness to talk to and agreed that it was entirely the cyclist's fault and that I could not have avoided it. That means I'll lose my NCB if anything happens in the next year and a bit which the insurance company themselves have to pay for. If it gets vandalised or broken into I'm stuffed, though I'm careful and don't think that's a high risk. I'm far more concerned about uninsured drivers buggering up my NCB for me, which is why I'd like to see a system where just seeing that a car is moving under its own steam means you can be sure it has 3rd party cover.

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The standard scheeme could apply to young cars , cars limited by size and or power to weight ratio. with a low claim rate. This would cover most people to get to work, go to university leasure use etc.

If you choose to drive somthing big, fast or sporty or if you have a claim history then you need top up insurance based on your risk.

I disagree with protected no claims policys for blame accidents. However I have one myself after loosing 1 car, 4 radios and a dashboard with airbags!. therefore protected no clains for fire and theft would be a better idea.

There would be a bigger problem with insurance fraud with ghost accidents. Where imagiary drivers were hitting pedestrians and cyclists for payouts.

If "blame" really meant what it said I'd be inclined to agree, but if they're going to define blame in terms of where the money is going to come from then I think we very much need to have protection for blame accidents.

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

This is actually yet another problem with the current system - it penalises people based on how lucky they are in terms of locating the guilty party. If someone witnesses someone running into my parked car then I might get to keep my no claims, if no-one does then I may lose it etc. Or if I am lucky and the guy who runs into me has insurance I don't lose out, if I'm unlucky I do, and so on.

If a surcharge on petrol built a central fund from which all third party claims were settled without prejudice, then this is yet another unfairness that would simply drop out of the equation.

Such a system clearly wouldn't be without it's problems, but taken on balance I think it would net out a hell of a lot fairer than things do now.

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
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