Do You Bother To Read The Car Insurance Policy?

When you enquire about arranging car insurance how many of you bother to go to the trouble of reading the full policy document before purchasing your car insurance? The answer is probably: “Not many”.

It would be a sensible idea to read the full car insurance policy document to help avoid this happening

Perhaps this is hardly surprising when you consider how long some car insurance providers’ policies can be. Such a document doesn’t make for good bedtime reading, yet, in some cases, it can be longer than some novels.

Research from Fairer Finance certainly seems to confirm the above with Endsleigh’s car insurance policy document being the longest that they came across at 37,674 words. Yet LV’s car insurance policy is under 7,000 words in length. Why does there need to be such a difference in word length?

Although it is believed that not many people read the full policy wording let’s not forget that you can still read a summary of the policy wording often referred to as the Keyfacts document. That provides quite a bit of useful information such as a summary of the cover provided including details about optional extras plus any exclusions.

At very least, if you don’t want to go to the trouble of reading the full policy wording which really would be a sensible idea, you may wish to consider reading the Keyfacts document along with the illustration that the car insurance company provides. After all, surely you would agree that it is important that you are aware of what you are considering buying.

Having said that, we suspect that not many people will even bother to read the Keyfacts document and, instead, merely focus on the level of cover they require, any suitable optional extras and how much the premium will be. It is perhaps only when you wish to make a claim at some point in the future that you may wish that you had read the full policy wording!