The new craze lately is to let your car insurance company use a tracking device on your vehicle, but should you?

We are all looking for ways to save money on our car insurance premium and one of the new ways that insurance companies have come up with to help us do that is by offering to track our driving habits. They offer a device that you plug into your car and records how fast you drive, accelerate, stop, swerve and all other manner of driving habits. It takes all of this information and reports it back to your car insurance company.

In most cases, your car insurance company will use that information to provide a customized discount on your policy.  In other cases, your car insurance company uses the information to determine how much premium you should be paying based on your driving habits.

Downsides

• You can’t use the device in older cars, therefore you can’t participate in these programs if all you have is older cars
• Some companies determine the premium from the device and not just give a discount, so you may be better off without the device if you aren’t a safe driver.
• There is no disputing the outcome, the device calculates the end result and there is usually nothing even an employee can do to change the end result.

Upsides

• This is a great way to save some more money on your car insurance if you are a safe driver.
• Discounts can be pretty significant.  At least one company offers up to a 30% discount.
• The device is easy to use, just plug it in and forget about it until it is time to return it.

For more information about your insurance companies vehicle tracking program, contact your car insurance agent or your insurance company directly.

If you drive for Uber or Lyft, you may not have car insurance coverage on your vehicle at all.

Car insurance companies that write personal insurance policies do not like it when the cars that they are covering are used for business purposes. They especially don’t like it when you are using your vehicle to transport people for money, like if you drive for Uber or Lyft. In fact, they dislike this so much that there is a clause in your car insurance contract that states that you will not have coverage if you are transporting people for money. This clause is why Uber and Lyft drivers sometimes have no insurance coverage when they are driving.

Confused? Here is how it works……

Before a driver turns on the app that they are available for passengers their personal car insurance policy covers their vehicle. After they pick up a passenger their coverage through Uber or Lyft then covers them. However, from the time they turn on the app to the time they actually pick up a passenger, there is no car insurance coverage on their vehicle. There is a gap in the coverage.

Insurance companies know about this and some are now introducing coverage that will cover your vehicle under your personal car insurance all the way up to the time that you actually pick up a passenger. This is a special endorsement that has to be added to your policy and not all insurance companies are offering it. To find out if your company is offering this new coverage, contact your car insurance agent.

Non-standard car insurance isn’t the lowest you can go.

Non-standard car insurance is not a good place to be, it’s not the worst place you can be, but it is not a good place. Non-standard insurance is the lowest level of acceptance in an insurance company before they just flat out tell you that they don’t want your business. This level is usually for those that have a number of car accidents, violations, and bad credit.  It can be a combination of two or more of these or just a really bad level of only one.

Non-standard car insurance policies are also treated differently by insurance companies:

• They usually have different billing fees if you go with a payment plan
• They have larger down payments at the time of new business
• Different coverage options
• Less optional/additional coverages available to be added to the policy

If you do get a non-standard car insurance policy it would be in your best interest to not do anything to add to your number of accidents or violations or do anything to decrease your credit score. If you do get worse in the car insurance company’s eyes they will DNR (Do Not Renew) your policy and you will end up in the assigned risk pool.  The assigned risk pool is where the government forces insurance companies to take on a certain number of clients that are considered uninsurable. The rates in assigned risk are astronomical and will make you miss the rates you were paying in non-standard car insurance.

Comprehensive coverage is that confusing coverage that usually covers everything else that collision coverage doesn’t.

Comprehensive coverage is also know as “other than collision” coverage for a reason, it covers all of those “other” covered losses that cause damage to your car that are not collisions. For it to be covered under your collision coverage you have to actually collide with something, comprehensive covers things that happen to your vehicle like:

• Hitting an animal
• Hail damage
• Civil disturbances
• Theft of the vehicle (not of the contents, this is covered under your home policy)
• Your car catching on fire
• Vandalism
• Falling Objects
• Rocks falling from another vehicle while you are both driving
• Windshield damage
• Sandstorm damage

This list, of course, is just a small example of this different things that are covered under your comprehensive coverage on your car insurance policy. What comprehensive does not cover are things like normal wear and tear to your vehicle, maintenance issues or mechanical problems. If your car breaks down, your insurance company will not cover that.

Your insurance adjuster will usually tell you what your damages will fall under and hearing that your damages fall under comprehensive coverage is a good thing, as most car insurance companies don’t rate comprehensive claims as high as collision claims. In fact, some comprehensive claims aren’t even counted against you, at all.

As always, contact your car insurance agent if you have any questions about if a particular type of damage would fall under your collision or comprehensive coverage.

Comprehensive car insurance coverage

From our friends at Allstate.

Fantastic Infographic from The Hartford a couple of years ago that really helps explain the affect a traffic violation has on your car insurance premium.

Image from The Hartford.