The Lemon Fool

Hello Lemonfools - long time no post....

DAK a good way of insuring Son 1 (aged 22) and Son 2 (aged 17) on their mother's car whilst they are learning to drive. The blessed Aviva want about £800 for one son, and refuse to insure the under 21 year old. Whilst I know the cost of insuring the pair of them will be steep when they've passed, I always thought it was relatively cheap to insure whilst they were learning (and someone else was in the car with them)

Any suggestions?
jb

Calling Didds...... (The house expert on these matters, it seems)

What's the car?

BJ

Its a Dacia Sondero. £230 for me and Mrs jb to drive it, over £1000 to add Son 1 on a prov licence....

I daresay there are specialist insurers who operate in this sort of territory. It's been a long time since I negotiated cover for my two daughters, so 'm well out of date, but I imagine that it's only the actors who've changed over the years, not the basic plot.

Get thee to a proper insurance broker, somebody who can argue your case and hopefully get the insurers competing for your business. It's what we always do for our business insurance needs.

BJ

jockblue wrote:Its a Dacia Sondero. £230 for me and Mrs jb to drive it, over £1000 to add Son 1 on a prov licence....

I would phone around and I am pretty sure that some will insure the sons for much less than the numbers quoted if you accept the 'black box' which monitors speed and so on. At least that was the experience of my daughter with the two grandchildren of much the same age, younger in fact because they both passed their test before they were 18.

Dod

With my own children I found it was relatively cheap to insure them while they were learning to drive but the rates went up massively once they had passed their tests. I was with LVE at the time.

John

try this site
https://www.bymiles.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance

In that situation a few years back. Used Top-up policy which stands alone but piggybacks onto the existing drivers insurance. The existing driver policy is protected from claims should the learner have an accident. The link below explains, but other insurers do them. https://www.collingwood.co.uk/learner-driver-insurance/

airbus330 wrote:Used Top-up policy which stands alone but piggybacks onto the existing drivers insurance. The existing driver policy is protected from claims should the learner have an accident. The link below explains, but other insurers do them.

Thanks, you've just solved a mystery. The other week, I was shopping for some short-term comprehensive cover that would allow me to drive my daughter's Group 32 car for a couple of journeys. (My original query on this forum was at viewtopic.php?f=58&t=34217 .)

What I found was that the going rate for 24 hours was around £25, but it dropped as low as £8 a day if I could give them the name of my daughter's insurance company. For practical reasons I couldn't do that, because she was away at the time, so I paid the £25, but now I have an explanation for the price differential.

Somehow it doesn't quite stack up that the car owner's insurance wouldn't be hurt at all by a claim if the learner (or borrower) should have an accident. (Because dammit, the additional risk to the insurer has to be compensated somehow!) But the next time I'm looking for short-term cover, I might want to investigate that possibility again. Thanks again!

Would I use a top-up policy to cover somebody who wanted to test-drive a car that I was selling? Nope, because I wouldn't know anything about the stranger. But would I have used it to cover my nephew, who overturned his granny's car within half a mile of leaving his house? Probably - he's a nice sensible kid - or so I'd have thought......

BJ

bungeejumper wrote:Calling Didds...... (The house expert on these matters, it seems)

What's the car?

BJ

bless ya!

I sympathise with the OP. However our "kids" had their own cars to insure under their own names - for various reasons not least being gaining NPD as early as possible, and those cars were small, underpowered etc. the most amazing was a Daewoo Matiz 800cc engine that uincredibly for a 17 year old was under £500 a year!

Otherwise my only advice is shop around. The insurance industry is a rule unto itself... Our 25 year old son we cannot get onto out VWT5 campervan insurance as he is "too young" despite him driving substantially larger vans/small rigid lorries for years for work.

Thanks all - a few alternatives to chase down. Someone else has mentioned Marmalade.com as a possibility - they seem to specialise in learner driver insurance.

bungeejumper wrote:
Somehow it doesn't quite stack up that the car owner's insurance wouldn't be hurt at all by a claim if the learner (or borrower) should have an accident. (Because dammit, the additional risk to the insurer has to be compensated somehow!) But the next time I'm looking for short-term cover, I might want to investigate that possibility again. Thanks again!



BJ

I think the answer to this is in 2 parts. The Learner top up policy stands alone and carries the learner drivers name and the specific car, any claim is made only on that policy. One of the terms of the policy is that an active standard car policy is in force. Without one, the top up policy is void. Even if the underlying policy holder is in the car when an accident occurs, they were not the driver, so the underlying policy need not be informed of the accident.
Secondly, because the Top up policy holder can only drive the car when accompanied by an experienced (there is a definition for this) co-driver, the loss adjusters believe, correctly, that the chances of there being an accident is low.
This is how an insurer explained it to me, but what they couldn't answer is the liability issue if the co-driver either actively encouraged or allowed irresponsible driving. This was an issue for us as my qualified older child sometimes went out with the Learner younger one for practice. Thankfully they were sensible, or if they were not never told me!