The recession has helped make car insurance more competitive

By John Grant

For many people and many organisations the last couple of years have not been the easiest of times. There have been plenty of losers from the recession, but there are some winners as well.

One group doing well are car insurers, who have benefited from the fact that there has been less vehicle traffic on the roads and therefore fewer accidents.

Commercial vehicle insurers are still collecting premiums when trucks and other commercial vehicles are off the road, and the insurance risk is significantly lower.

Motor loss ratios for many insurers have improved and combine this with relatively few weather related claims, the financial implications have has been a pretty positive for many insurance companies.

On the downside many insurers have seen a steady increasing loss ratio on domestic House and Contents insurance and this has resulted in a number of companies making premium and excess tweaks to address these declines.

If you buy car insurance, you should be seeing the benefit.

Insurers are competing vigorously for market share and this is keeping premium rates down and in some cases even reductions in prices have been seen.

There is also more transparency now on rates with comparison data like ours available that highlight the winners and losers in regard to competiveness.

It does pay to shop around and look at what is available and to test out just how good the current pricing is on your car insurance.

The differences for the same car can be several hundred dollars from one insurer to another.

When doing the comparison it also pays to check policy conditions as not all policies are the same. A company offering a market value policy is likely to payout less for the car if it is lost than one with "agreed value".

A lifetime no-claims-bonus -  now available from many insurers - could end up saving you thousands. You can check this on our comparison pages here.