Friday, 8. July 2011
The Graham Hill Gadget of the Week is in fact a liquid. It’s that time of year when driving more than half a mile will make it virtually impossible to see out of the windscreen as a result of bugs being splattered on the windscreen, made worse of course by the fact that you know if you splash your windscreen with windscreen wash and pass the wipers over the Read more »
Saturday, 11. June 2011
I’ve warned about this before but if you are an employer and you have staff who drive their own vehicles on company business you have a responsibility to ensure that the employee is properly insured. Research by Trimble MRM found that more than half of those driving, what are termed, ‘grey fleet’ cars, are not properly insured. This leaves the Read more »
Tuesday, 24. May 2011
The net is closing in on those that don’t insure their cars. The new rules that have just come into force enables the DVLA to clamp your car and even scrap it if you have no insurance on it. The new rules, entitled Continuous Insurance Enforcement extends the powers of the DVLA beyond issuing driving licences and vehicle registration documents to Read more »
Sunday, 20. March 2011
Image via Wikipedia
If you are a woman driver expect your insurance premium to increase thanks to our Government. No I don’t mean the Cameron Clegg Coalition I mean our REAL rulers, the EU. The Court of Justice has ruled that charging drivers more because of their gender is wrong and considered discrimination. So charging men more than women was a practice that Read more »
Sunday, 6. March 2011
Image via Wikipedia
Drivers are travelling less miles according to figures issued by the Department for Transport for 2010. Provisional figures show that vehicle use is down by 3.3% since 2007 which means that we drove a massive 8.3 billion miles less last year. From 1993 to 2007 car use continued to rise peaking at 251 billion miles in 2007. However, 2010’s total of 242 billion car miles means that we are back to 2002 levels. If you include in the figures all vehicle types the total is 306.6 billion miles in 2010, also Read more »
Monday, 24. January 2011
If you are a regular reader of my blog and newsletter you will have read my recommendation that if you are applying for insurance online that you change the parameters around when you state whether your car is parked in a garage, on a drive or on the street. We found that many applicants lie about their garage, which is full of kids toys and the freezers, but thinking that a garaged car would save money say that the car is usually in the garage overnight. Or at worst parked on their drive. In Read more »
Thursday, 20. January 2011
Monday 20th December has turned out to be the worst day for insurance call outs this winter. Claims rose by 60% on the day. The treacherous conditions led to 500 separate cases being registered with the AA making it the second busiest day of all time. The busiest was 561 registered last January. On a normal Monday there are 330 calls. According to the AA drivers were slipping and sliding all over the place, running into lampposts, bollards, running up kerbs and colliding with other vehicles. And Read more »
Friday, 26. November 2010
I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that there are ways to get hold of dodgy MOT test certificates although since everything is on central computers now I believed that it wasn’t possible to fiddle certificates any longer. Well to prove me wrong a garage owner has been jailed for 6 months for passing 2,500 vehicles without failing a single one. Video evidence was collected against Noor Hussain for presentation at Preston Crown Court. It showed cars going in and out of the test bay in 7 Read more »
Sunday, 24. October 2010
I was talking to an insurance broker recently and he was explaining that because of the competitive nature of the comparison sites the insurance companies are doing everything to keep premiums as low as possible. One of the tricks they use, I reported a couple of weeks ago, has been to vastly increase charges and fees so that they don’t have to increase premiums, the other is of course to avoid payouts wherever Read more »
Tuesday, 5. October 2010
Now here’s something you probably didn’t know about. We all know that if we are convicted of speeding and receive the automatic points on your licence you must declare that to your insurer immediately and suffer the increase in premium. Some insurers don’t increase the premium if it’s your first speeding fine but others do so check with your insurer. But here’s the thing, what happens if you are caught speeding, but as an alternative to a fine and points on your licence, you are given the Read more »