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Comment by walshemj | Hacker News Reader

Strange normally insurance is tied to the person in the UK

I know, it was really strange to me when I moved to UK - what do you mean, I can't just let someone else drive my car? I have to add them to my insurance? Why?

I mean, I understand how it works now, but to me it still seems like an excuse to extract a lot more money from British drivers.

I'm not sure about that. The flip side of that is that my standard insurance insures me on my car, but I'm also insured to drive someone else's car too without further premiums required.

So an experienced driver is subsidizing young drivers

Well.....that's not quite true - British insurance usually covers you for driving other cars, but only gives you 3rd party insurance....so I would never risk driving someone's car unless it was some really old beater not worth much.

It seems reasonable to me. The risk is primarily determined by the ability of the driver, and can be gauged by their claim history and factors like age.

E.g. a 65 year old female driver with no claims and a low insurance premium. If she arbitrarily allows her 18 year old male neighbour to drive her car, the insurer would be exposed to a high risk. The only way to offset that would be to raise premiums for everyone.

How does that system account for the risk level being so much more dependent on the driver than on the car?

I does not. In fact, it explicitly assumes that the risk depends only on the car - insurance on a 500bhp car will be a lot greater than the one on a 100bhp car, even if the owner of both is a 50 year old lady with a perfect driving history. As I said - the law guarantees that the insurance cannot differentiate between drivers, so letting your 18 year old son drive your 500bhp range rover has no impact on your premium.

Tbf - it self regulates to some extent. My dad wouldn't let me drive his car, because he knew that if I crashed it he would lose all of his discounts and pay a lot more. So even though I technically could drive his car and be insured, he wouldn't let me as that was a financial risk to him.

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