Car insurance for a day

The advent of online commerce may well have been a boon to commerce itself, particularly in terms of marketing and sales volume, but there is no denying that it has injected such a healthy level of competition into most markets that the consumer has benefitted equally.

For this ‘benefit’, read ‘power’.

Try as one might, you cannot break the simple laws of supply and demand, and the advent of online purchasing has certainly given businesses the advantage of ‘ease of supply’ – but it is easy to overlook the fact that the consumer now enjoys a level of choice hitherto unknown.

Car insurance for a day; it isn’t too long ago that the idea was almost laughable. You wanted to borrow a van to move house, or borrow your friend’s car. Maybe you just wanted to allow your son or daughter to take your own car for a day, or pick up a new one from the garage – the potential need and therefore the demand for car insurance for a day was easily identifiable and endless.

But it was seldom, if ever, really satisfied or even reasonably addressed. You would contact an insurance company, or a broker and you would explain your problem, there would be a pause on the line, then some huffing and puffing and then, if you were lucky you would be asked if you were sitting down before some patently ridiculous number was delivered glibly into your ear by somebody who clearly didn’t want your business anyway.

It was all too hard to do you see. Too ‘bespoke’, too ‘irregular’ and most irritatingly of all there was apparently ‘not enough call for it’.

So you replaced the receiver, cussed and then you picked up the phone again and tried to hire a car.

The great thing about modern online commerce, particularly here in the UK, is that if one confounded service supplier refuses to supply the public with it what wants, there will almost always be another one out there that happily will. Online car insurance comparison has both opened up the field to those willing to supply none-mainstream services to the public, and made it, for those who previously weren’t, commercially necessary to get their collective acts together and to do so.

It used to be the case that (assuming you could find an online quote at all), you would be penalised for the fact that you only required car insurance for a day. Most of us would multiply the quote by 365 and exhale sharply… and perhaps a trifle unfairly because it does need to be born in mind that administering 365 single one-day policies is a little time consuming and ought therefore to justifiably attract a premium.

So, nobody should realistically have expected it to be cheap, but here’s the thing – a cursory online car insurance comparison now throws up a few basic discount figures of as little as £10.50 per day.

So, research companies, compare quotes, check levels of cover. It’s all at your fingertips these days, it’s easy.

And as for that annoying voice on the phone, well it will have a Latin name soon, something like quotus hilarious – because like the dinosaur, it is about to become extinct.