The Road to First Time Car Insurance

The time has come, you have finally decided that you need to drive.

You may have learned to drive in the past or you may intend to start learning, but whatever the case, some imperative has driven you to identify ‘now’ as the time and you will fall into one of two groups of people.

Those for whom the cost of insurance is not a concern since it is one to be met by your employer, or those less fortunate individuals for whom the cost of insuring a motor vehicle is now going to represent a sizeable annual overhead. You have joined the quest for first time car insurance.

Welcome, but here in the UK you should brace yourself for the quotes. It may not even be so much a case of you being a first time driver, more the fact that you are a first time insurer and this fact is a significant one.

It is one that to a large degree you are going to have to accept, first time car insurance is going to make your premiums more expensive and before you waste your energy on derision, remember that there are sound reasons for this.

The insurance companies base their financial model on the assessment and calculating of risk. It needs to be so, otherwise it would merely be a cash distribution machine, operating at a loss, and that really wouldn’t work for very long now would it?

It isn’t that you are necessarily a risk, although factors such as your age and the length of time you have held a driver’s licence are quite relevant in terms of how much of a risk you actually are.

Then of course there is the factor of gender. Male or female? If you are in the former group, it’s an incontrovertible fact, you crash more cars and your crashes are more expensive to put right – which unsurprisingly is going to limit you if you want cheap cover.

But even this is not the whole story, the simple fact that you are a candidate for first time car insurance does not automatically mean that you are perceived as a future menace on the roads. It does however, mean that there is no evidence yet to indicate that you are not.

In the world of car insurance, unlike science and philosophy, and particularly when it comes to the concept of competence as a driver, you must simply accept that absence of proof is assumed to be proof of absence. First time car insurance, by its very nature implies that you have no such proof and are therefore a risk.

Which is not altogether unreasonable. Would you for example purchase insurance cover from a man who called at your door with a laptop and printer in his hand? Of course you wouldn’t, you would wish to see some evidence of a track record in financial integrity.

Your ‘proof’ is a thing called a ‘no claims discount’. An annual percentage discount earned for being a non-claiming (and therefore assumed more competent) driver.

But to start earning this, you do have to start. There are companies out there who specialise in helping people like you to do this. You need to find them and to do that, the online car insurance comparison community is your greatest ally.