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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Funny how UK has laws against "age discrimination" yet nothing stops stupid insurance companies from slapping car insurance premiums 10x as big as normal for people under 25, even if they never had an accident and have multiple categories. It's one of those things which infuriate me the most about living in the UK.

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Those example are really unrelated though. One is a law against unfairly ruling out potential employees, the other is about what to charge a driver who has a statistically higher chance of being in an accident. I agree that the insurance companies should take into account a driver's other assets(?) besides age, but it probably shouldn't be law.

It is quite related. It's double standards. In the first case it's about "let's not discriminate young people, their lack of experience does not really matter!" and in the other "let's discriminate against young people, because they are statistically more likely to cause an accident". Well, would it not be also "statistically more likely" that a person with less experience will be not as good at a job as a person with more experience?? Only very recently it has been made against the law to discriminate against males when it comes to car insurance - even thought it is statistically proven that men cause more accidents than women. Yet this is against the law, and age discrimination isn't. If that's not double standards, then I don't know what is.

I was helping a friend move, unfortunately couldn't get insurance on the rental car without a huge excess due to being narrowly under 25. She had no issues. I've had a licence and been accident-free for 7 years longer... I had to physically grab the steering wheel 4 times in the 500 mile journey to prevent us crashing.

Statistically, someone in her age category is significantly less likely to require the insurance than someone in yours. Car rental shops don't want to do big background checks on every single customer every day, so their economic incentive is to have an easy over-under.

It seems like you two are outliers. That's what the insurance is for.

No, I wholeheartedly disagree. There's nothing wrong with being over or under 25 - it's the UK insurance system that is broken. I come from a country where you buy insurance per car,not per person. So you buy a single insurance which is determined by the age and power of the car, and anyone with a valid licence can drive it. The amount you are insured against is the same as in the UK, so why is it that if I wanted to insure myself on a 1.2 Corsa I would have to pay above 2000 pounds/year, a car which I could get fully comp+assistance for myself in my country for 300 quid per year? If I wanted to get insurance just for myself(not shared) on my dad's 4.4L V8 Land Rover, I would pay 800 quid for full comp. In the UK insuring the same car would cost me in excess of 6 thousand pounds. I have had my driver's licence for 4 years and never had an accident, driven probably more than 150k+ miles now yet my insurance is an order of magnitude higher because some idiots want to street race without insurance? Talk about fairness.

> The amount you are insured against is the same as in the UK...

What is the cost if you seriously injure someone (lifetime disablement) in the two countries? That is the biggest risk the insurer is worried about. AFAIK in the UK the liability of the insurance company is unlimited.

That isn't to say that the UK system is fine. The high cost of insurance for young drivers makes driving uninsured attractive with various risks that come with that.

Personal injury - the same, unlimited. Damage to private property - up to 5 million euros. Both countries are within the EU and you can drive between them using the same insurance, so I think it has to be the same by law. So I could in theory bring my dad's Land Rover on my own 800 quid insurance and drive it in the UK even if insuring it there would cost me a few thousand pounds, and I would have the same kind of coverage, or even better.

In the absence of any readily apparent data I'd posit length of holding a licence is most likely a better marker than age on the probability of an insurance claim. Considering the proof of age is via the driving licence which also has this information (as well as a record of any penalty points) this would surely make more sense to use and involve no increase in background checks.

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