Insurance

Do you have a difficult time figuring out what car insurance companies have the best deals? Here is a slant that you may not have considered. If at year end, your insurer sees that you haven’t driven very much over the course of the year, they feel you don’t really need to pay them the full price anymore and get a price break.

As a matter of fact this has been an insurer mainstay for a long time – the low mileage bonus that they can arrive at either by asking you how much you have driven from day to day, or primarily by looking at how long you’ve had the car and how much you’ve driven. But that bonus is crumbs your way compared to what they are thinking of now. What the insurance companies are planning is that they’re going to calculate your premium completely on a per-mile basis.

A usage based car insurance policy is more forgiving if you drive less. And in some places, it goes by the name of PAYD (pay as you drive). This works in effect to turn your auto into a sort of taxicab; they put in a discreetly-mounted meter on your car that will keep track of the miles driven each year.

Companies like Texas’ Progressive for instance, have been offering Texans a car insurance policy based on the meter called MyRate, for more than ten years now. Now that the trial has worked out, they’re offering it all over the country over this year. Actually, a clutch of states around the South like Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana, and several up North like Michigan, Maryland Oregon already have this option.

How this works is that when you sign up, a PAYD installer places a device in you car to records information. Usually, it finds its home on the underside of the steering column on your car, and it collects more than just how many miles you drive. Pretty often, it records information about your driving style, and how often you use your car. The device uses a wireless connection to the company – where they put your driving information together with other traditional factors that affect your insurance, what your age is, your sex and your driving record, to set up a custom car insurance policy just for you. If you hardly use your car, you could actually shave half off your traditional insurance premium. Get better rates by comparing car insurance premiums today.

If they find out that you constantly drive near the top of the speed limit, and you drive a lot in the middle of the night when they know that the statistics say most accidents occur, you’ll pay more – about 10% more. One imagines that the wireless connection will also tell them what parts you’re driving in, so that they can tell if your chosen area is high accident risk or not. It will even know if you are in a hurry one morning, and really stepped on the gas for about 5 seconds to quickly get to 40 mph in just 3 seconds – and boy, will you pay. Get ahead of the curve and compare: cheap car insurance right now. 

You’ll soon discover that many auto insurance policy majors are testing out a version of the PAYD scheme now with volunteers and their own proprietary devices – Allstate, State Farm, The Hartford – the entire shooting match. It is to help everyone to keep a perspective on their driving behavior, and cut out wasteful miles. And parents can get an idea as to what their children’s driving habits are like, as well.