High performance car insurance accident
Reader question:
As the owner of a high performance vehicle, am I more likely to get into a car insurance accident?
Craig
Thank you for your question, Craig.
The truth is that the high rates imposed on the owners of high performance vehicles often do not depend on the safety of the vehicle itself at all. I have seen people take in muscle cars with the highest safety rating possible and still get higher car insurance rates than they did with their Volvo. The reason lies not in the vehicle’s safety, but in its inherent potential for causing at fault car insurance accidents.
- What kind of potential is that?
Well, high performance vehicles go faster, handle more sharply, and have other features that make them susceptible to distraction and car insurance accidents. So the high rates that you get often depend on the perceived irresponsible relationship between the car and the driver. You see what I mean? Here’s how the regularity of car insurance accidents breaks down depending on what kind of car you’re driving, though.
- Sports utility vehicle.
SUVs are big hitters when it comes to people dying in a car insurance accident involving a rollover. From about a hundred thousand cars, eight of those cars will be SUVs who have lost people to a rollover crash. For smaller cars like high performance cars, the number is much smaller, at only three for every one hundred thousand. There have been more safety features added to SUVs in the past few years, and their fatality rate has actually dropped by two percent since 2001, but they still cause a lot of damage.
- Motorcycles.
Over the past ten years, fatalities involving high performance motorcycle riders have more than doubled–they have gone up by a hundred and twenty five percent. Around five thousand riders of motorcycles die every year in a car insurance accident, for a total of eleven percent of all traffic accident deaths. This is true even though only two percent of the vehicles on the road are bikes. If you are on a motorcycle, you are thirty four times more likely to suffer death or a very bad injury than someone who is riding in another type of vehicle.
- Big trucks.
Big trucks not only take a lot of damage, but they hand it out as well. In the last year, one eighth of all car insurance accidents that had fatalities were caused by someone driving a big truck. Even though only three percent of the vehicles on the road are trucks, they were responsible for eight percent of all the car insurance accident deaths.
Looking at this information gives you an idea of how car insurance companies decide what to charge you for your car insurance premium. Big trucks and SUVs are often more damaging and more dangerous, and motorcycles are extremely dangerous for the driver, but high performance vehicles are still rated in a very high risk group despite the fact that are in the group of cars that gets into the least amount of crashes. It’s all about the relationship.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.
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