Cheap Insurance If You ‘Drive Like A Girl’ Explains Graham Hill
Sunday, 9. March 2014
I don’t know if you have seen the advertising offering lower ‘drive like a girl’ car insurance but it hasn’t half caused a stir. You know that the EU told the insurance companies to equalise the cost of insurance between men and women, which they did, but argued that insurance was a risk assessed product.
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And statistically young men between 17 and 25 were a much greater insurance risk than girls of the same age. So why charge them both the same for insurance? The counter argument was that you could keep breaking down statistics saying that girls in the north of England were more likely to have an accident than those in the south or that girls born in January were least likely to have an accident so their insurance should be cheaper and so on.
In fact why not just charge everyone a flat figure of £350 per annum and be done with it. That might sound far fetched but fleets have operated that way for years. The insurer would be told that the company had 400 company cars and they charged a flat fee of a fixed sum for all the cars and drivers. If claims went up then the flat rate insurance premium went up also. Not rocket science.
But now, in order to fly in the face of the EU, and insurance company called Drive Like A Girl is offering cheap insurance not just to girls but lads also between the ages of 17 and 25 – provided they ‘drive like a girl’. Cars are fitted with a black box which assesses your driving style and from this information the insurer can assess whether you should be paying more or less premium.
The company argues that black box stats show that young men are 60% more likely to drive at night than women, are 49% more likely to speed and trigger twice as many aggressive braking alerts. So if young men drive in the same way as women they will receive the same insurance costs.
The same rules apply to women, if they drive in the same way they will achieve maximum discount. They are treading a fine line in my opinion but their low rates are achieving a lot of business. By Graham Hill
