Car insurance rate raise

Reader question:

How much is a normal car insurance rate raise after an at fault accident?

Mark

Thanks for your question, Mark.

Most companies will relate the amount of your car insurance rate increase to the amount that they had to pay out on your claim. For some companies, this will only be for the liability claim, for others it will include your comprehensive and collision claims. Normally, if they have to pay over around seven hundred dollars, then you will a car insurance rate raise of ten percent. The more they pay out, though, the higher your rates will go. Some states have a limit.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Car insurance accident forgiveness

Reader question:

Will my car insurance rates automatically go up after I get into my first at fault car insurance accident?

Natalie

Thank you for asking, Natalie.

This depends on what kind of company you get your high performance car insurance coverage with, actually. Most companies are somehwhat lenient when it comes to someone’s first at fault car insurance accident, and they will forgive this first accident. If your car insurance company has accident forgiveness, then you will not see a rise in rates, you won’t change in risk, nor will you lose any good driver discounts. Some companies want to cheat you into paying for what other companies offer free by charging for accident forgiveness. Avoid these companies.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Totaled car insurance coverage

Reader question:

If I get into an accident and total my car, where does my car insurance company get the totaled car insurance coverage numbers from?

Melanie

Thanks for asking, Melanie.

There are several sources from which a car insurance company can figure the totaled car insurance coverage. However, it will all come down to what your car is worth minus the depreciation. You can find out what your car is worth now after depreciation by looking in a guide such as Kelley’s Blue Book, which is what car insurance companies normally go by.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Car insurance vehicle value

Reader question:

I have a question. I have a classic muscle car, and if it were to get totaled, how would I find out what the car insurance vehicle value for it is?

Randy

Thank you for asking, Randy.

Dealing with classic cars, muscle or not, is much different than is dealing with regular car insurance. If you want to protect your assets, then you should get insured through a classic car insurance company. This will cost more, but it will be better in the long run. At a classic car insurance company, the amount that you will be paid should you total your car is decided before hand, not at the time of the accident. You consult with your car insurance agent and you come to an agreed cash value for your car insurance vehicle value.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Car insurance settlement

Reader question:

How much money do yo get whenever your car is totaled and you submit a claim for a car insurance settlement?

Annie

Excellent question, Annie.

What you get for the car that you get the car insurance settlement for is called the actual cash value. This means what the car is worth at the time it was totaled, after you account for depreciation and so on. In some cases, you have a car on which you owe more money than you would receive from the settlement, perhaps because it is relatively new and is still in that stage where it is depreciating very rapidly. Called an upside down car loan, this can be easily solved by thinking ahead and getting gap insurance coverage for your car.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Mandatory car insurance coverage

In every state except for the states of Wisconsin and New Hampshire, you are required by law to have car insurance for your high performance vehicle or muscle car. Each state deals with these laws differently, both between how many types of insurance they require you to have and the way that they punish you if you don’t have the insurance required. In all states where insurance is required for any driver, you have to carry a car insurance card with you any time that you are driving. That way, when you get pulled over by a police officer you will be able to avoid getting a ticket for lack of insurance which you would then have to go and fight in a court, even if you really did have insurance at the time and just didn’t have the card with you.

In some states, if you are caught driving without insurance, then your high performance vehicle can be impounded. These states are

• Florida
• Louisiana
• New Jersey

It costs a lot of money to get your car back after it is impounded, and you only have a certain amount of time to do so. In those among other states, you might also have to pay the penalty of driving without insurance by paying high, costly fines, going to jail for a week or so, or even having your license suspended along with your registration. If your license gets suspended, then that starts you on the road towards high insurance costs for years to come, since in most cases you will then have to do SR-22 filing on your auto insurance policy, and combining that with having a high performance car is very pricey.

In Louisiana it was testified that most people who have their cars impounded for driving without proper car insurance coverage are not able to get their vehicles back–at all. Sixty percent of the cars that get impounded stay there. Mostly this is not for lack of trying, but simply because it costs too much and people can not afford to get their cars back.

Many states are trying to find a balance between making sure that their laws are stringent enough that people are not going to break them as often, but at the same time making sure they are not too bad, because if they are then the local governments are less likely to try to enforce these laws.

In most of the states in this country, the states put together a bunch of different types of penalties for people who fail to purchase the mandatory insurance coverage. The most common combination is to suspend the license, the registration, and to confiscate the driver’s license plates. There are even a few states, most of them the same ones that impound cars for those driving without insurance, that have check points that people go through on the road where they are required to provide their insurance card when asked. These are good at making people more aware of laws and of setting examples of those who do not have the proper insurance coverage.

Car insurance accident parts

Auto crash parts are what the outer areas of a high performance car are called. These include things like the doors, body, and so on. They’re called that because they’re more likely than anything else to be affected, crunched up, and the like when you get into a car insurance accident. These parts for most of the history of cars could only be replaced by parts that were made by the manufacturers, called OEM parts or original equipment manufacturer parts. However, in recent years generic parts, or aftermarket parts, have also been made, and as a result the really expensive price of the OEM parts has gone down around thirty percent. Lots of car insurance companies started using these until a recent lawsuit against State Farm for the use of aftermarket parts. Since then, car insurance companies try not to use them.

The main part of the debate is coming from whether or not the parts that come from the aftermarket part suppliers are just as safe as the parts that come from the original equipment manufacturers. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety would like to state that most of these aftermarket parts are exactly as safe as the original equipment manufacturer parts, with no difference. The only part that doesn’t fall into that category are the hoods. The IIHS has conducted plenty of crash tests with aftermarket versus OEM parts, and that is how they have determined the safety of these parts. Now that they have these results, there are still many who are doubtful.

So do you have the right to choose whether you want generic or OEM parts when your car is getting repaired? It all depends on the company that you are with. Some companies make it a practice to use only original equipment manufacturer parts, but other companies will go with generic parts unless you say otherwise. With some of these companies, if you don’t want them to use the generic parts, then you will need to pay the difference between generic and original equipment manufacturer parts. If you are willing to take this cost, then you can do whatever you want. However, if you want to be certain that you will get only OEM parts for no extra charge, then you should go with companies like State Farm who have had the problems of being sued over the usage of aftermarket parts instead of OEM.

The debate that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety brings up is a pretty good one. What a bunch of people fail to realize is that most of the time, the original equipment manufacturer parts are made in the very same factories and by the same people as the generic parts are. The materials that are used are often of lower quality, but according to crash tests, despite this most of these materials have still managed to stand up to crashes and car accident collisions just as well as have the parts from the manufacturers.

Car insurance theft

Reader question:

How else can I keep someone from stealing my high performance car so that I don’t have to get a rise in comprehensive car insurance rates?

Sally

That’s a great question, Sally.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau has this great, detailed database that contains all kinds of information on vehicles, such as license plate numbers, vehicle identification numbers, and so on and so on. Car insurance companies have access to these databases and are able to perform searches based on car information that they are given. The fantastic thing about it is that these searched work even when the information given is not complete. For example, in 1993 there was a bomb that went off in the World Trade Center garage by Al Qaeda, and the vehicle that carried the bomb was found through the National Insurance Crime Bureau by the reconstruction of part of its vehicle identification number.

A couple of decades ago, groups in states started to take matters concerning car insurance theft into their own hands. They did this by forming groups that would lobby with the states and raise money so that legislation would be passed to help stop auto thefts in their state. As of today, there are several states where these efforts have worked, and they are

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Florida
• Illinois
• Maryland
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• New York
• Texas
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Virginia

These states now have ATPAs, which stands for Automobile Theft Prevention Authorities. These groups get their funding from small jumps up in the fees required when you get a driver’s license or when you pay your car insurance premium. For example, in Florida the cost is about a dollar per car insurance premium to fund the Autommobile Theft Prevention Authorities of that state. These groups have seen a lot of success, and since they started more than three thousand thieves and people who were involved with illegal stolen automobiles have been arrested and convicted, more than forty million dollars has been gotten back in stolen property, and the states have rewarded people who call their theft prevention hotlines to report chop shops and car theft with over two million dollars.

Another way that these groups try to help diminish the incident of car insurance theft other than by having the hot lines is that they provide stickers that people can put on their high performance vehicles that send an alert out to police stating that if they are out with that car after a certain time, then the officer would be able to pull them over to check. So, if you never leave the house after ten at night, then you could get a sticker saying so, and if a police officer saw your car wandering around at midnight, they would be suspicious and pull you over. This might sound silly as the thief could simply take the sticker off, but the advantage comes from the fact that most people do not know about these. Of course, there is also a downside to that.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Comprehensive car insurance coverage

Reader question:

How do I save money on my comprehensive auto insurance coverage and stop high performance vehicle thieves in their tracks?

Michael

Thank you for asking, Michael.

I try to keep up on the news that comes out concerning cars and car insurance, and there’s actually a lot of pretty cool technology that is not only very nifty from a geek’s stand point, but also goes a long way towards helping protect vehicles from theft and these things can often be used to get a good discount car insurance rate from your car insurance company. In some states, it’s even required that you get a better rate with these additions.

High performance car thieves are pretty geeky these days, too, and as they figure out new ways to steal our cars, we have to figure out new ways to protect our cars from them. One interesting technique is something that is done in the factory. The manufacturer of your car squirts a bunch of micro dots onto your car in the back, and these things basically serve as identifiers for your car. Police also now have a new technology that allows them to read license plates at rapid speed, about a thousand per minute. Then the license plates of cars that have been stolen can be processed and identified like that.

Another great way to stop high performance car thieves is some cooperation between car insurance companies and the NICB to report suspect VINs and a practice called vehicle cloning. Vehicle cloning happens when someone takes a vehicle identification number from one car and then puts it on a car that has been stolen so that the stolen car can pass as legal. When a suspicious VIN shows up, it is reported to the NICB. They have a huge database of VINs that can be matched. Vehicle cloning has big costs, at millions of dollars every year in car insurance losses.

Then there are auto recovery systems. If you live in Massechusetts, then you can benefit from a huge thirty percent discount if you have one of these. They are often called LoJacks, and bascially what they are is equipment that is attached to your car that works as a tracking device. It helps police to find out where your vehicle is. It also does the double duty of not just allowing them to get at your own stolen car, but allowing them to locate car theft rings and chop shops that are operating illegally using stolen cars.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Wildlife car insurance accident

Don’t want to see your high performance muscle car get damaged by a deer? Then you should take the advice of the state insurance commissioner in West Virginia and take extra care with your driving now that it is fall time, because in this period of the year car insurance accidents related to wildlife are on the rise and people are more likely to hit large animals like deers who come out and play when the weather is nice. The reason these animals come out during this time is largely due to the fact that the last months of the year constitute hunting season, so they are driven out by the fear of hunters. It is also mating season, another reason why they are more likely to cross public roads.

According to a study that the department of insurance in West Virginia did, a good five percent of the claims in their state among the biggest three car insurance companies in the last year had to do with accidents involving a deer. That’s a whole twenty one thousand claims that were made for wildlife accidents in West Virginia. Makes you think twice about Bambi, doesn’t it?

And these car insurance accidents involving the deer of the state of West Virginia aren’t cheap either. Each car insurance accident costs about two thousand dollars for damages, which comes out to a total of around forty million dollars every year, just from wildlife accidents. Sure, West Virginia’s wildlife is great, states the commissioner, but for a lot of drivers those pretty doe eyes can be dangerous when they run out in front of your car in the middle of the night.

The worst part of it is that if you spot a deer on the road, it usually isn’t alone. Deers go around in groups, not big ones, but groups all the same, so if you come across a deer there are probably more around. This can cause more severe accidents from deer running out into the road many at a time.

If you want to avoid getting into a wildlife car insurance accident in your high performance car, then there are a few precautions that you need to take.

• Wear your seat belt. You should be doing this anyway, but tighten it up. Even if you’re just running to the store real quick to get some milk and it isn’t very far away, these deer are every where. And most car insurance accidents happen within five miles of your home.
• Keep an eye out for deer crossing signs. Deers aren’t going to follow the signs like they’re the law, but these signs are a good indicator of where the deers tend to be, so if you see one pay extra attention to the side of the road and don’t drive so fast.
• Avoid driving at night, and when you do it, be careful about it. They don’t come out more often at night, but it is harder to get visibility, especially in the more rural parts of West Virginia. If you’re driving even in the dusk, keep your lights on and go slow.

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