Car Insurance - who needs it?
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Everyone!! that’s who! I have a tale to tell that highlights the need for everyone who owns a car to have at least third party property cover, and with pay-by-the-month being offered by most car insurers on comprehensive cover it makes sense to have the best cover you can afford.
We have two friends, husband and wife. The husband works full-time and the wife does part-time work as well as looking after their three kids. Up until they decided to rent for a while and enjoy life a bit they were paying off their own home and had enough money left over to put in a swimming pool. They both had nice cars, he had a AU series 2 Falcon and she scooted around in a almost-new Daihatsu Sirion.
For some reason we got to talking about car insurance of all things and the husband piped up and said that his car was un-insured. The wife’s car had comprehensive insurance on it but nothing on the Falcon. I asked him how much he paid for the car when he bought it - $27000. Both my wife and I had trouble getting our heads around what we had just heard. Here were two people that were doing o.k. in life, they had a good income obviously, they had nice cars and no insurance on the one worth the most money! The husband said that he ‘just hadn’t thought about it’.
We went on with the usual ‘what if someone steals it and what if you hit someone’ line and it must have worked because the wife was on the phone fifteen minutes later organising comprehensive insurance for the Falcon. Just as well, two days later he had an accident, not his fault but the driver that was at fault had no insurance.
It was during the move to the rental house that it happened. Nice big 7×5 trailer in tow, doing 60km/hr and a guy decided to pull out of a service station and straight into the Falcon. There was nothing he could do, the weight of the trailer increased the braking distance and it was a two-way road so there was nowhere to go, even if he did have good reflexes. The result - crumpled L/H guard, bonnet, front bar lying on the bitumen, steering rack snapped at the L/H rack end, both L/H wheels stuffed from hitting the gutter ( nice alloys fitted 4 weeks earlier ), damaged A/C condensor and coolant flowing freely from a split radiator tank.
Now to the moral of the story ( so to speak, I sound like an old man! ), had he not been insured he would have been up for the cost of two tows, one for the car and one for the hire trailer and as the other driver was not insured who knows when he would have got the $5500 needed for the repairs. Luckily he was covered and the insurance company took care of everything and had the car back to him 8 days later and other than paying the years premium ( which he hadn’t paid yet, he only had a cover note ) he was not out of pocket. I pity the other guy though, the insurance company will no doubt chase him until all of the $5500 is paid back. So for a reasonably small investment, the peace of mind has got to be worth it!
Take care and be safe on the roads.
Craig
