Cheap Short Term Car Insurance: A Guide

Insurance cover has come rather a long way since a couple of men in a 17th century coffee shop came up with the idea of calculating the betting odds in relation to shipping risks. How likely is it that a ship be lost with all its cargo? And what would it take to underwrite all risks?

Once upon a time, when you insured your car, you insured your car and that was pretty much it. Nowadays however, as ‘risk analysis’ becomes ever more refined and defined you will find that it isn’t quite as simple as that. Your policy of insurance is a contract and it has strict terms that essentially place conditions on who can drive your car for what purpose, and often upon when and where they can do it.

A valuable little asset has consequently been thrown up almost as a by-product of this contemporary and sophisticated mix and it’s called your no-claims discount, and if you don’t think of your no claims discount as an asset, then ask yourself why you insure against losing it.

Which is why these days the words ‘Can I borrow your car?’ are not generally heard without an inner sense of impending doom. This feeling sounds irrational at first but really it isn’t, because in more accurate translation the question would sound more like this:

‘Would you mind me taking temporary charge of your £10,000 investment whilst running the very real risk that I may cause your annual insurance premium to double, possibly even treble… or worse than that… I may place you in long term financial penury whilst facing a police prosecution. Incidentally, did I mention that there is absolutely nothing in this for you by way of guarantee reward or recompense?’

Now that puts a slightly different complexion on things doesn’t it?

Modern insurance is no longer a ‘one size fits all’ product and this is why loaning your car out or borrowing one is no longer a simple matter of throwing the keys over to somebody and hoping for the best. There is a good chance that they will not be insured, particularly if they do not themselves hold a policy of insurance.

And even if they do, the likelihood is that they will only be covered for third party risks in a vehicle not owned or kept by them.

What you really need in this circumstance is cheap short term car insurance. This is a facility you could barely (if at all) have found not too long ago, and even if you had, you could hardly have called it cheap short term car insurance – primarily because it was expensive and usually prohibitively so.

Fortunately, thanks to the demand fostered by today’s highly specific insurance policy terms and the competition created by online car insurance comparison sites, this is no longer the case and there are new companies being added to the comparison databases almost weekly. Most or many of them specialise in cheap short term car insurance and it is fast becoming a sector of the market in its own right.

The benefits of such a service are clear in terms of convenience and peace of mind. Cheap short term car insurance is for instance a much more viable proposition than short term vehicle rental. Expect it to be proportionately more expensive than its annual counterpart but keep in mind that you can obtain cheap short term car insurance for as little a period as one day, and you will no longer have to face the embarrassment of refusal, or the consequences of poor judgement.