My husband and I have only one car, which we use both personnally and professionally (we run a business together). Our bonus/malus is 0.51, which in our country means officially 12 years without an at-fault accident. We also never were in any not at fault accidents for the 10 first years.
Since the car is old, we're selling it and buying a new one instead, so I wanted to use the occasion to compare some car insurances instead of just updating our current one.
In the past year, we've been the victim of 2 accidents, for both of we were declared not at fault. There is also no way we could have prevented either accident from happening. The first time, an accident occured in front of us while my husbane was driving. He stopped in time but the driver behind him didn't and hit our car. Even with the momentum from that impact, we still had 50 cm to spare so we didn't hit the car in front of us. Second one, I was stopped at a red light behind 3 other cars, when another driver failed to brake and hit my car.
Now the insurance company tells me that if we hadn't had those two accidents, their premium would have been some 20% cheaper, because of 'statistics'. Their reasoning being that even if you're declared not at fault, your driving style can cause others to hit you. They essentially count 3 non at fault accidents as one at fault one.
While I understand that reasoning form the insurance companies' side (they're calculating risks), it seems odd to me in this case:
1) there were 2 different drivers, so blaming our driving style isn't really pertinent
2) If you look at the details of the accidents, especially the first one cannot be pinned on us in any way. I guess for the second one you could theoretically claim I braked to suddenly or something. Still, ,this goes against the official way of determining who'se at fault (driver behind that needs to keep enough distance to safely stop if something happens).
3) Why have an official bonus/malus system if you're going to bypass it with this trick afterwards?
I've checked with our original insurance company, and it appears they have the same policy, though they seem to allow some leeway in whether or not they decide to punish you or not.
I was wondering if this is the standard practice for car insurance?
Submitted November 12, 2018 at 10:42AM by LionessOfAzzalle https://ift.tt/2T4LB6l
