Should we feel sorry for the car insurance industry?

Mention car insurance to the average motorist and you will get either a snarl of anger, a shrunk of resignation or along diatribe about how disgusting the prices are. But sympathy? No, that would be a short supply; although it could be argued that it would be justified.

The last decade have been the most traumatic ever for the car insurance industry. From getting used to their old traditional methods that they sold their insurance by for several centuries they have had to adapt to the Internet age and all its idiosyncrasies. Some clues about what was going to happen surfaced in America during the early days of the web in the life insurance market; it was noticed that people were searching on a particular website for prices for term life insurance, and what they found was having a profound effect upon their decision about which products to buy. It must've been obvious to many senior insurance executives that the genie was well and truly out of the bottle, and that things would never be the same again.

The majority of us who moved to new insurers buy our insurance online. One of the reasons is because it pays us to do so; not only do we get the chance to shop around for the lowest price but many insurance companies are offering good discounts to people who switch to them from a competitor. This has been one of the factors in their own undoing; they have had to set aside enormous marketing budgets to capture clients, only, in many cases, to see those selfsame clients disappear off to another insurer, picking up another 'new customer' discount, when the next renewal was due.

To add insult to injury, temporary insurance policies were invented a short while ago, and they have become an instant success, taking a great deal of business away from traditional policies. By using temporary car insurance to motorists can decide for themselves when, and when not, they want to have their vehicles covered by insurance, and this has proved very popular particularly with younger people who simply cannot afford to insure themselves for 12 months of the year, and also the more mature people who, having retired and perhaps find themselves in ill health, only require a car on very rare occasions.

Figures are shown the door the last 40 years the numbers of cars on our roads have increased approximately 15 fold; this has created an enormous problem for the country because these cars have to go somewhere and enormous acreages of our towns and countryside have had to be concreted over to make the roads, tunnels, flyovers and bypasses that all this extra traffic requires. In the meanwhile of course petrol has become a very attractive target for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tax; and the cost of motoring is spiralling to level at which few people can view dispassionately. If one day all these increases in costs result in far fewer journeys we may perhaps be able to return some of our countryside to the green and pleasant land it used to be, and cease worshipping our cars which are many people are not so much a means of transport as an ego booster.

Temporary car insurance is good for our environment. We should do all we can to encourage it.

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