Insurance, a deal with the devil

Every car owner has car insurance. The essence of car insurance is great. It means that a maniac can rear end your '09 BMW E63 and your heart will hurt, but at least your wallet will be unharmed. According to the Association of British Insurers the average cost of car insurance in the UK is £468 a year.

However, most people do not pay the exact average. Different people drive different cars in different ways. Logically, claim free years are important. It makes sense that a yobbo with his baseball cap on backwards, or anyone who parks his/ her VW Polo in a ditch at least once a month, pays more for the insurance than a sensible VW driver without a baseball cap. Moreover, it matters what car you'd like to insure. It matters how susceptible it is to accident damage, how much that would likely cost to repair, how long that would take to repair and which safety and security features the car has. Insuring a Tesla model X is for instance expensive and insuring the Kia Rio is inexpensive. Again, this all makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is the biggest factor in determining the price for insurance, age. I first noticed it myself in the Netherlands in 2020 when I bought my first car. I was 18 at the time, spent €950 on the car and €1,420.20 yearly on insurance. Go across the North Sea and it is much the same story. In the UK, the average 20 year old pays £851 yearly for their car insurance. That is almost twice the average cost of insurance. I know 20 year olds are known as the crashers of car, but is it true that young people (17 - 24 years old) are involved in so many more crashes than other drivers? Fortunately, the RAC Foundation did some research on this. The RAC Foundation stated: "In 2016, young drivers only accounted for about 7 per cent of all full driving licence holders in Great Britain. Yet in the same year, they were involved in crashes where 25 per cent of all those people killed and seriously injured were hurt. The number of fatal collisions involving at least one young car driver represented 24 per cent of all fatal collisions involving any car driver in 2016." However, the RAC Foundation also said: "It is worth noting that these casualties were not necessarily inflicted by a young driver, or directly related to the young driver personally in any way; they simply occurred as a result of a crash in which a young driver was involved."

The statistics do not lie, young drivers crash their car more often. People that are older than 25 years obviously have more driving experience and it probably makes them crash less. I think we need to give young people the ability to gain driving experience and that means that things can go wrong. Those statistics should be, if anything, a wake up call for the government to make roads an easy and safe place to drive. What it should never be is a reason to generalise all young people as bad drivers and make them pay twice as much in insurance. That is just a deal with the devil.

Thank you for reading. Bump and comment.

Sources: Autocar , What is the average cost of car insurance? , RAC Foundation , Department for Transport: Young Car Drivers Road Safety Factsheet