Our advice on finding the
best motor insurance in the UK
Before
we can talk about how to get it, we have to know what it is. So, what
is the best motor insurance?
Even those that, misguidedly, always like to buy as cheap as they can
when it comes to renewing their car insurance would tend to agree that
the cheapest is not the best - its merits begin and end purely with its
economic price tag.
At the other end of the spectrum, it's hard to argue that the most
expensive policy that you can find, albeith, no doubt, with very
impressive cover, constitutes the best motor insurance either.
If it's accepted that the best motor insurance is somewhere in the
middle of these two extremes, can we come up with a working definiton
that has some practical utility? To which the answer has to be: only
partially - because there are so many subjective and objective
variables to consider.
Even your personality and certainly your past experiences (if you have
needed to claim on your car insurance before) are subjective factors
that can have a major impact on your choice of policy. The more
cautious individual and some of those who have claimed before are
likely to want more inclusive cover than those with an over-optimistic
disposition especially where they haven't claimed before. Other
personal factors, for example, your level of disposable income also
impact on your policy choice.
Even more objective factors - for instance the age and value of your
car - are filtered through your own subjective assessment of how much
risk you want to take with your final choice of cover. Also, people's
attitudes and circumstances vary as to how necessary it would be, for
example, to have a free courtesy car if their car is off the road.
All of this begs the question as to whether it is even possible to
define the best motor insurance in any valid, meaningful or practically
useful way. To which the answer is - it certainly is hard because the
answer is inevitably generic and non-specific. The effect is that the
best working definition can only be along the following lines:
'The best motor insurance achieves the optimal, if elusive, balance
between securing an economic premium while providing sufficient cover
to meet your needs in an accident. Implicit in this is a degree of
pragmatism in terms of those policy features that are considered
essential to ensure that the cost is not more than is necessary'.
In view of the above-outlined influences on policy choice, people will
vary hugely as to where they decide to set their goal posts in terms of
their must-have policy features but in every case, their best motor
insurance choice will match the above definition.
So what, you might say, of course everyone has their own view as to the
exact car insurance they're looking for. However, the reason that we
have explored this issue more fully here is that in our view the vast
majority of people fail to apply the required approach implicit in the
above definition when they buy car insurance. In order to get the best
motor insurance, you need to first consider what your requriments are,
scrutinise several policies (on the basis of price and policy features)
and take care to ensure that you do actually get sufficient policy
details to determine this in an informed way. Only then, armed with
this information, can you make your final choice.
And the best way to do this in practice? Go direct to leading car
insurance providers where quality is already built in to their standard
cover and allow the competitive pricing of these big players in the
market to largely look after the pricing issues.
To compare
car
insurance from these
large
providers, this site lists them all handily in one place. Policy
information, discounts and current offers are also listed. Price
comparison sites, contrary to popular belief, are not a good way to
find the best motor insurance, as their focus is very much on the
cheapest. More..
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