Insurance | Driving Spirit

AskMID To Check Your Car Is Insured

As a car driver you really should know about a handy website called AskMID. You’ll probably already know that there’s a central database the Police have access to that contains the insurance details of all the cars on the UK roads. The database is known simply as the Motor Insurance Database (MID), and now you can check to see if your car is recorded on there. AskMID Gives You Peace Of Mind By going to the AskMID website you can key in your registration number and get a simple answer. Yes, your car is on the database and you’re fine or No, it isn’t on the database. If the answer is No then you are either uninsured, your insurer hasn’t submitted your details to the MID or they’ve passed on incorrect details. If this is the case you’re at risk of having your car crushed if you can’t prove that you really are insured. If you haven’t...

How Do Different Driving Offences Affect Your Insurance?

How does having points on your licence affect your car insurance premium?

How Do Car Insurance Groups Work?

You almost certainly know how much your car insurance costs, usually because paying for it leaves you slightly traumatised (or is that just me?). There are many factors that determine the cost of your insurance, the biggest being you - your age, driving experience and no-claims bonus. After that the next biggest factor in your insurance cost is the car you drive or, more importantly, which car insurance group it fits into. You might not have realised that the insurance groups used to categorise cars were changed in 2007. Where there used to be twenty groups there are now a staggering fifty, with group 1 representing the cheapest to insure and group 50 only available to winners of the Euro lottery or premiership footballers. What group a car falls into is decided by the mysterious Group Rating Panel. This panel includes members from the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and Lloyds...

Be Careful With Accident Management Companies

Have you noticed a gradual rise in your insurance premiums over the last few years? I certainly have – every time I go to compare car insurance prices I’ve noticed a steady rise in my premium, and the chances are you will have too. There are plenty of reasons for this. Some of the more obvious ones include the costs of accidents involving uninsured drivers as well as the increase in ambulance-chasing law firms claiming huge payouts for ‘physical injuries’ that, a few years ago, most people would have shrugged off as a bit of a stiff neck. There’s another cause of the hike in premiums and, unless you’ve been involved in an accident, you might not be aware of it. This is the growth of ‘credit hire’, which involves an ‘accident management’ company stepping in if you have a car crash. They will then offer you an equivalent hire...

Uninsured Drivers Face Additional Fines

How much does it cost if you don’t insure your car? The answer might surprise you and if, like me, you’re a driver who diligently forks out your annual car insurance premium then the answer may very well annoy you. The government is going ahead with a proposal from the Department of Transport to introduce a fixed penalty fine for owners of uninsured cars. If DVLA records show that a registered car has no insurance the owner will be sent a warning letter. If a second check the following month reveals that the owner still hasn’t insured the car, then a fixed penalty notice for £100 will be sent. That will be reduced to £50 if the owner then pays quickly. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? While this may have some effect on the numbers of uninsured drivers it still gives the more unscrupulous drivers a month to drive around without any insurance. There’s also...

Writing Your Car Off Isn’t All Bad

A friend of mine (we’ll call him Steve) recently had the misfortune of crashing his car into the back of someone at a roundabout. Usually these are fairly minor crashes that result in a couple of scratched bumpers and a bruised ego, but in this case the impact was a bit more severe. Steve has a driving style that involves keeping up momentum by using the brakes as little and late as possible (you have to do that in an underpowered Fiesta), so he approached the roundabout at his usual pace only for the car in front to stop suddenly for no obvious reason (or so Steve says). The impact gave his Fiesta quite a facelift that included a cracked bumper, crumpled bonnet and one shattered headlight. The car in front, an old Volvo 940 estate, got away with little more than a gouge in the rear bumper but the driver was none too pleased. Despite the cardigan, pipe and slippers image of Volvo...