
Vehicle Insurance Should Be About Risk
It is always painful when insurance rates change, especially for young drivers.
But insurance should be about the driver not the vehicle. As such, it is likely correct that young drivers without experience are going to be higher risk on the road.
Recent articles about teens having to pay $6,000 per year for insurance is a hard pill to swallow, but no different to other parts of the world where learning to drive is expensive.
There is confusion over comments that the “insurance is worth more than my car and that is just not right.”
That is exactly right because it is not about your car. When you have an accident with a brand new Ferrari or any late model vehicle, who pays the tab?
I don’t want to.
As such, I rarely have coverage on my vehicle, just the Third Party legal requirement. Several years ago, a deer hit my car at 110 km-h. The front end was severely damaged and if I had insurance, it would most certainly have been written off.
If I had gone to a body shop, it would likely have been a $15,000 repair bill. But to do it personally cost me some time and a few thousand dollars. This is exactly why we are in the situation we are in.
ICBC has set themselves up for challenges with a monopoly. I personally they pay more than they should for repairs and windshields. That is why I am asked if I have windshield coverage when I go to a glass shop, so that when I say no, they give me the affordable price.
Secondly, ICBC has no interest in advanced driver training. Presumably they have not connected the dots by seeing risks lower as drivers gain more skills and knowledge.
This is from personal experience where I have spoken to ICBC about allowing students of advanced driver training courses to benefit from a small discount on their insurance.
ICBC’s answer:
"We don’t do those kinds of things, we are not interested.”
In a nutshell, there you have it. Insurance is all about risk — theirs, not ours.
Until we have competition in the insurance market in the province we will never know if we are paying through the nose or getting a wonderful socialist benefit from our government.
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.