The World-Wide Policy of Auto Insurance

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So you live in a big city and walk everywhere you go.  You literally put about 60 miles per year on your car, but your rates are 50% higher than your lead-footed, rather-drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road friend who never got over Nascar’s rejection.

Why are his rates lower than yours even though he has enough tickets to equal the number of dollar bills you use to pay for your car insurance premium each month? It’s because he lives in the country, and some number crunching car insurance guy in some dimly lit office somewhere figured that statistically your buddy has a lower chance of getting into a wreck and costing the company money.

Now that doesn’t seem fair does it?  This pricing conspiracy goes even farther than that.  When you dreamed about growing up and settling down in a home of your own, you probably never spent any time at all dwelling on the cost of car insurance.  You are older and wiser now, and living in, say, Louisiana, will cost the average driver over $2,500 just for car insurance.  How do you think the schmuck living in La. feels when he finds out his neighbor across the boarder in Arkansas pays nearly $900 less?  Adding insult to injury, Texans and Missippians also pay less, by over $1,100 annually!

If you’re curious to find out how much you could save by just pulling up stakes and moving, click the graphic to the left and find out.  From the top paying state, Louisiana, to the cheapest auto insurance costs in Maine, there is a difference of $1,600.

Well, don’t blame the American Capitalist society scum and auto insurance corporate greed for the seeming fleecing of certain regions.  Globally speaking, car insurance companies change THEIR premium rates at the odometer’s flipping of a mile the world over.  In Ireland, which is a tiny island smaller than many western US states, the premiums can take a leap over a thousand pounds per year.

Globally speaking, location is not the only mitigating factor insurance brokers use to determine policy costs. Car insurance companies also take a close look at drivers themselves.  It is not surprising that an individual’s driving record can send costs rising or falling, but in India, the type of car you drive is also a factor.

Never before has the meaning of the phrase ‘what kind of car do you drive?‘ had the potential to bypass your pride and hit you where it really counts: your pocket book.

There are, of course, other unusual qualifiers like age, gender (yes, auto insurers are not above the stereo type of female drivers, but in this case girls actually post the smaller risk, so women on the whole pay less), location, make, and model of your car.  To find out which countries charge for what with a world-wide overview of car insurance facts, check the graphic above.

The United States’ auto insurance industry is not unaffected. Most of the seemingly strange factors thrown into the premium equation around the world are represented by some mandatory question on your insurance forms.  It is a seemingly inescapable fact, or is it?  Notice Germany somehow has managed to take location out of the equation as the average cost of insurance in Deutschland only varies by 200 deutschmarks. Hmmm….

There is something you can do now to toss a certain amount of the random statistics out of your personal auto insurance premium.  Get an OBDII usage based insurance policy.  As shown in the infographic, there are some clear benefits to this particular kind of big brother device.