Fiat's new lease deal for the 500 is young at heart

FIAT is pitching a new lease deal on its 500 to teenage motorists who would otherwise struggle with the cost of insuring their first car.

The company’s i-DEAL scheme, agreed jointly between the Italian manufacturer and Carrot, an insurance firm, allows drivers as young as 18 to drive a brand new 500 fitted with a telematics system which encourages them to drive more safely.

The three year deal costs £239 a month to take part in. While it’s not the cheapest way to get motoring at the age of 18 – there are of course, telematic monitoring systems which can already be fitted to secondhand cars – it’s ideal for parents who want their offspring to start their motoring career in a safe, hassle-free way.

Karl Howkins, Commercial Director for FIAT Chrysler UK, said: “This all-inclusive insurance package deal will make the dream of driving a brand new FIAT 500 a reality for many young drivers who would otherwise be forced to drive an older and potentially less reliable and safe vehicle.”

To find out more go to the new website covering the Fiat 500 insurance deal.

Farewell, Ford Mondeo

FORGET oil, diamonds or the mysterious underground gas that's been getting you so fracking angry lately. I reckon the world’s most valuable commodity is attention.

Studies have shown that while attention occurs naturally in all human brains – even the ones of reality TV stars – it runs out completely if you try to mine it for more than about 45 minutes or so. Once that’s gone, all you’re left with a dangerous void of mentally planning your next holiday, pondering the plot of Sherlock and wondering whether you really did lock your front door when you left the house this morning.

Even a few seconds of not having an abundant supply of attention at your disposal can cause all sorts of problems. I know this, because that’s roughly how long it took for another driver to write my FordMondeo off beyond repair.

Regular readers might recall how proud I was to finally depart the 1990s and plump my posterior onto the leather lined throne of something modern for a change. The 2.0 litre Ghia X might have been 12 years old but it came stashed with an armada of gizmos so extensive it’d make viewers of The Gadget Show proud. Electric seats and an electric sunroof. Cruise control and a six CD autochanger. It had all of these things, and just about everything else besides.

Yet none of these gadgets could have prevented its fate on that dark evening in deepest Peterborough, as I gradually drew to a stop on the approach to a roundabout somewhere near the A1. The only clue I had that a rather rushed sales manager was about to indulge in a spot of creative parking – as in parking his company 3-Series half a foot into the Mondeo’s rear bumper – was the fleeting glimpse of a set of headlights in the rear view mirror, racing towards me through the darkness.

It is, to my mind, the worst kind of collision you can be involved in; the sort which you can do absolutely nothing about, other than watch it happen. You can be the best driver in the world (which, incidentally, I’m definitely not) and it still isn’t going to stop an errant Audi ploughing into your pride and joy. 

For the sake of driving too fast, too close and not nearly attentively enough, you end up causing weeks of headaches for people you’ve never met. In fact, having a car written off through no fault of my own is getting off lucky; what would have happened if Beemer Boy had been doing the full 70mph he was legally entitled to on that stretch of road?

So the Mondeo is gone. Luckily, I’m not.

Meanwhile in Russia sets a dangerous UK precedent

HOPE you’ve enjoyed a pleasant week’s motoring, bereft of bumps and scratches. Meanwhile, in Russia, footage of a fishtailing Lada has been uploaded to YouTube for your evening entertainment.

You can’t have failed to notice the sheer quantity of clips being uploaded to YouTube of Russians crashing things, badly filmed by dashcams of family saloons slogging their way through a snowdrift somewhere in Siberia. This compelling concoction of spins, rolls and crashes – think of it as sort of You’ve Been Framed meets Police Camera Action, with added Moscowprofanity – has proven so popular that petrolheads over here now happily use #meanwhileinrussia as a hashtag on Twitter.

If you don’t know what a hashtag is, get your children to fire up YouTube and enjoy someone else’s motoring misfortune to while away a few idle minutes. It is weirdly compelling for the same reason that you’ll always slow down on the motorway to gawp at a car crash.

Yet what worries me isn’t these clips’ weirdly addictive edge. It’s that the things which make them possible – those crude, dashboard-mounted cameras – are becoming increasingly fashionable over here too.

Already I know of one court case which involved a lorry driver whose dashboard camera proved an unfortunate meeting between his cab and motorcyclist wasn’t his fault. As a result of this and the increasing appetite for the insurance companies to have our every movement monitored – black boxes, anyone – dashboard camera sales are booming in the UK. You might even get one under the tree this Christmas.

While the idea behind them has an appeal – film your drive to work, so you can prove it was the prat in the Audi A3 who drove into your front bumper at 40mph – I can’t help but wonder if we’re unintentionally creating Channel Four’s next comedy series for them, free of charge.

At the moment at least, there’s precious little to prevent these clips escaping into cyberspace, where spotty teenagers will be able to compile them into amusing ten minute videos, which will amuse office workers in Moscow endlessly. The clips will be just as morbidly compelling, but with fewer errant Ladas involved. Being involved in a crash, for whatever reason, is frightening enough, but knowing it’ll sit on YouTube for the rest of eternity or be forever repeated on Britain’s Best Car Crashes is something else altogether.

Meanwhile in Russia, for now, has a certain crude ring to it, but Meanwhile in Formby is a scarier prospect altogether.

New classic car insurance proposals are a step in the right direction

CLASSIC car connoisseurs of the younger variety are being promised some good news by a company specialising in insurance cover for their prized machines.

Footman James announced at the Classic Industry Forum, held this week at the Heritage Motor Centre in Gaydon, that it's come up with a new set of terms and conditions for enthusiasts aged between 17 and 23, which aim to make the dream of owning and running a classic car more accessible to genuine petrolheads.

Andy Fairchild, the company's managing director, said: "We have been working hard with our insurance partners to establish a range of criteria that will assist us identify the true classic enthusiast.  Young drivers who purchase classic vehicles as a means of obtaining cheaper insurance are not, in our opinion, true classic enthusiasts and a risk that insurers will not take on – a decision that we fully support."

"One of the ways of establishing true enthusiasts, in our opinion, is down to whether they are members of a car club.  We have, therefore, selected this as the primary qualifying criteria for the product and as a result, the product will initially be available to members of pre-selected clubs only."

As someone who's struggled with classic car policies before, and known of a case where a young enthusiast's quote for a classic Mini shot up from £600 to an eyewatering four grand overnight due to a company's change of underwriter, I'm supportive of any efforts to make classic cars more accessible to a new generation of genuine enthusiasts, rather than just cost-cutting youngsters who see classics as a way of cutting corners on their car insurance.

So, what's at stake for young enthusiasts? For the new terms and conditions, which come into effect next month, the company say enthusiasts must meet the following criteria:

•     The owner must be a member of one of the pre-selected clubs

•     The car must have been manufactured in or before 1985

•     The owner must have use of or own a second vehicle for everyday use.

•     The owner must limit their mileage to 3000 or 5000 miles per year.

•     The owner must have a maximum of one non-fault claim or minor conviction.

•     The car must be parked off the road or garaged

Which seems fair enough (although how that'll help one girl I know, who owns a 1972 Mini as her only car but who otherwise meets all of Footman's criteria, I've no idea), particularly as it'd stop the scourge of "crash-for-cash" one insurance expert told me about - teenagers buying a classic car on the cheap, crashing it deliberately and then hammering the insurance companies for the resultant compensation. Classic car insurance, logically, should be for classic car enthusiasts - people who cherish their old cars, no matter how old the owners themselves are.

However, the acid test will be whether what Footman - and, no doubt, other classic insurers when they inevitably follow suit - are proposing actually translates into cheaper and more accessible cover for genuine classic car fans who are being hammered through no real fault of their own.

Classic cars are a passion which we twentysomethings are happy to pay out for, but not when it's over the odds.

Are you a young classic car owner who's struggling to get cover? Let us know what you think of the proposals by sending an email to david.simister@hotmail.co.uk or by leaving a comment below...

My classic car insurance nightmare

ALL I got from the world of car insurance was the ambient noise of a call centre. That and a helping of Fleetwood Mac after being put on hold again.

I've written before about the mental mindfield that is insuring your motor. I moaned about how a company refused to accept two claim-free policies held consecutively over 24 months as being a legit two years' no claims. I've pondered why it is premiums only ever seem to go up, and I've reported that even the Government have probed the murky workings of this strange industry.

So I wasn't surprised when I discovered the renewal quote for the classic car policy covering my MGB GT had gone up. Again.

Even though I'd been tootling to and from car shows for the best part of two years without so much as a scratch the cost of a year's cover had gone up by £30 from last year, which was itself £30 more than the year before that. I know full well that classic policies don't accrue a No Claims Bonus in the same way as your run-of-the-mill policy would - that's part of the reason why it's so much cheaper - and £200 a year's hardly a deal breaker, but in the interests of getting even a slightly better deal I thought I'd do a bit of shopping around.

First call was to my insurer's chief rival, who said they were sure they'd be able to find me a better deal and immediately fired off the questionnaire you always get when phoning for cover. A quick blast of Fleetwood Mac after being put on hold later and they had the answer; it was £150 dearer. Not surprisingly, I politely declined.

But here's the interesting bit - rather than sound apologetic and let me get on with my Saturday afternoon, they put me through to another insurance company, who gave me the standard insurance questionnaire a second time, and when they couldn't find me a quote, they put me through to another insurance company. It was like a bizarre game of Pass The Parcel, where someone racking up a huge phone bill has to be passed around before the music - Fleetwood Mac, which seems to be the soft rock band of choice for people putting you on hold - stopped playing.

After 35 minutes on the phone, I was getting just a little bit annoyed. So you can imagine how I felt when insurance salesman number four offered me "a competitive quote" of just £520. I'll say that again - a "competitive" quote of just £320 more than I'd started with. I was furious, particularly when I pointed to him out my renewal quote was less than half the price of what he was offering.

"Is it really?," he replied sarcastically.

Don't get me wrong. I've nothing against the principle of car insurance - it's a legal requirement and you can, after all, never be too careful - but the way the industry operates makes little to no sense. These are the same people who refused to acknowledge my better half's six years of faultless driving because it wasn't British enough, and the same ones who upped the price of covering a mate's souped-up Mini from £600 to an eye-watering four grand because they'd changed their underwriter. They're the same people who once asked another pal for £8,500 to insure a Ford Capri worth less than £500 when he bought it, so it shouldn't really surprise me that, in their eyes at least, a £520 quote is "competitive" to someone who's been offered exactly the same thing for £200.

I couldn't help but conclude the UK's car insurance industry isn't a group of people or companies but just a single mysterious machine, bereft of common sense. It made no difference to them that I'm a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, have four years of No Claims Bonus on my everyday motor and only ever use the MGB for smoking to shows and back. As far as they were concerned I was a journalist (one of the highest risk professions there is), a twentysomething (one of the most dangerous ages to be) and a male (which used to mean I was the most dangerous gender, until a European court ruling forced them to think otherwise).

It finally came to a head last night, when yet another insurance company rang me up, didn't even give me enough time to tell them I was in work and would they mind calling me later on, and immediately put me on hold for another helping of Fleetwood Mac's finest.

I hung up.

Incidentally I'm a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac - Rumours is one of my favourite albums. I just resent the car insurance world using Don't Stop and Dreams as their phone holding tunes of choice...

Owning a Jaguar XJR is a stupid idea, no matter how cheap the insurance

THE woman from Confused sounded a bit, well, confused. When would I be interested in taking up insurance on a supercharged V8 Jaguar?

It's very nearly November, which in the Life On Cars household means enduring the expensive ordeal of insuring both a £300 Rover and a Mazda MX-5 at roughly the same time. With each year of driving around and not claiming for the cost of a crumpled heap of metal in a hedge my insurance has got a little bit cheaper, but I'm still paying more the cost of a year's insurance for the ancient Rover than the cost of the car itself.
Slightly depressed by that realisation, I turned to that opium of car enthusiasts, eBay, and immediately came up with a far more suitable banger. All 3.2 litres of a Jaguar XJ8, and mine for £750. I very nearly headed for the Buy It Now button, but then I clocked the wheelarch rot and a service history with more gaps than a jeans shop. So I moved on to the next offering.

Big mistake - I'd found a tidy T-reg Jaguar XJR, which back in the day would have set golfers back a cool £51,000 but was here, in the great Arthur Daley forecourt of cyberspace, for £1,750. True, it had 124,000 miles on the clock but it looked to be in good nick, and the thought of having 370bhp at my leather-lined, wood-trimmed disposal seemed tempting enough to look past the prospect of getting less than 20 to the gallon. It is, Jag people will know, a fabulous car; refined and graceful enough to wear the Big Cat badge with pride, but blessed with a 4.0 litre V8, beefy alloy wheels and sports trim and suspension for added zestfulness. Petrolhead heaven, basically.

Drunk with delight, I idiotically went to an insurance comparision website to find out how much it'd cost a twentysomething male working in journalism - which in insurance terms is about as dangerous a profession as they come - to make sure it was beyond my aspirations of automotive avarice. It wasn't. Someone as hamfisted as me could insure Coventry's finest, fully comp, for a shade over a grand, which unlike the Rover is less than the car itself cost.

I woke up the following morning and knocked the idea on the head, having realised in the cold light of day that having a supercharged Jag outside the house would be a stupid, expensive idea.

The only problem is, the insurance companies keep ringing me up now and suggesting otherwise!

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article included a picture of the special edition XJR 100 rather than the standard XJR. This has since been amended.

More training for young drivers is a good idea, but then so is cheaper insurance

WORDSWORTH might have written things differently if he were reincarnated as 17-year-old in 2012, trying to get fully comp on a secondhand Fiesta. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very expensive.

Impoverished young poets need not worry though, for help is at hand. That august body, the Association of British Insurers, has come up with some new suggestions to stop 17-25 year olds, who make up an eighth of Britain's motorists but of a third of those killed in car crashes. They're also, by and large, the most likely drivers to be a bit skint and yet the ones who get hammered the most by the singing man from the Go Compare ads.

In a nutshell, the ABI would like to ban intensive learner driving courses, insist that all youngsters spend at least a year at driving school, with the option to start at 16-and-a-bit, and that for the first six months they aren't allowed to take their mates out with them. Oh, and the amount of alcohol they'll be allowed to have their system will be absolutely none. Zilch. Not a drop.

Having vivid memories of being driven by a tailgating teenager in a cream-crackered Peugeot 206 down the M6 on a snowy day one winter, I can completely understand why the ABI are so keen on bringing in measures which effectively protect younger drivers from themselves. I'm old and wise enough to understand the benefits of things like defensive driving, but I'm still young enough to recall some of the extortionate figures insurance companies asked me when I tried to get a quote for a Mini 1000 which could barely crack seventy.

I reckon it's got to work both ways. Sure, I'm all for 17-year-olds learning more about their driving - in fact, chuck in a few Scandinavian-style lessons about car control while we're at it - but those who pass what'd be a far harder test should be rewarded with realistic premiums they can actually afford. To be fair to the ABI, they say they'd like to reward younger drivers with lower premiums, but really they should be actively encouraging it rather than passively saying how nice it'd be. Carrot, stick, and all that.

It'd be good to see new drivers spending the money they're spending now on ballooning car insurance on, say, decent tyres. The line "I understeered lonely as a cloud" doesn't really have a ring to it...

It's official. Car insurance is a rip off

AN MP and Life On Cars reader described excessive industry charges for car insurance as ‘dispicable and absolutely criminal'.

Southport MP John Pugh said he was calling for residents who'd been hit hard by excessively quotes and premiums to get in touch with him after he was shocked by the findings of a survey by the Office of Fair Trading found that insurers and garages were working to drive up prices and that the cost of getting cover had gone up in some cases by as much as 40%.

Mr Pugh said this week: “This sort of behaviour is despicable at the best of times, but in a recession when people are struggling to make ends meet, it’s absolutely criminal. "I've heard tales of courtesy cars being provided for a man who broke both legs in an accident and people who have been out of the country on holiday because it pays insurers to do a deal on with hire firms. There is clearly something rotten in the state of the car insurance market. The ordinary motorist is picking up the tab and it is about time action was taken.

"I would therefore like to ask Southport residents to send me their car insurance ”horror stories“ to submit as evidence to the Competition Commission. This is a great opportunity to clean up the car insurance market, and the more damning the weight of evidence the better."

Mr Pugh also cited the example of one of his constituents being charged £26,000 to insure a secondhand Citroen Saxo, despite the car itself being worth £1,000. The commission, led by Merseyside MP Louise Ellman, said that following the results of the OFT investigation that she was now looking forward to the Competition Commission working to reform the car insurance industry, and said evidence suggested that insurers, claims management firms, solicitors were exploiting motorists and inflating premiums.

"We found evidence to support the view that various features of the private motor insurance market prevent, restrict or distort adequate competition in ways that do not deliver a fair deal to motorists. The OFT’s provisional decision to refer the highly dysfunctional UK market in private motor insurance and related goods or services to the Competition Commission for full investigation is a major step forward.

"Like the OFT, we found evidence to support the view that various features of the private motor insurance market prevent, restrict or distort adequate competition in ways that do not deliver a fair deal to motorists. I will propose to the Transport Committee that we participate in the consultation announced today to make the strongest possible case for the referral. I now expect car insurers and the other firms involved to co-operate fully with all stages of this process."

If you live in the Southport area, MP John Pugh would like to hear your car insurance horror stories. Share them with us by sending an email to david.simister@champnews.com or leave a comment below, and we'll pass on any correspondence to John Pugh MP. Please include your contact details.

A FEW tips on how to avoid getting stung by excessive car insurance quotes:

 • Shop around and don't go for the first quote you find. With plenty of price comparision websites offering quotes from a wide variety of insurers, you can avoid paying over the odds.

 • Sharpen up your skills. Motoring organisations like the Institute of Advanced Motorists often offer their own insurance schemes for those who pass safer driving courses, meaning you'll not only be less likely to have an accident but quids in too.

 • Swallow your pride and avoid sporty, high-powered cars if you're keen to save on insurance costs. In the 1980s there was a long-running joke that GTI stood for Guaranteed Theft Item, but it had its basis in truth. Lots of people like hot hatches, sports cars and off-roaders... including car thieves.

 • Consider whether you really need to claim. If your car's only lightly damaged, there's a chance the rise in your premium if you claim will actually be more than the cost of getting it repaired at your expense.

 • Tell your insurer too much rather than too little - they're often able to offer you discounts on things by offering you specialised policies, such as if you own more than one car. Oh, and don't lie - insurers will often refuse to stump up if they find any discrepancies.

 • If you're smitten with an older model consider a classic car policy, which have more stringent limits on mileage but can save you money compared to more conventional insurance.

 • Don't insure it in your sister's or your girlfriend's name. Not only is this technically fraud but the savings women have been getting over men are set to outlawed later this year anyway, after an EU judge argued that female quotes being cheaper than male ones was a form of gender discrimination.

 • Don't pay monthly unless you have to. It might seem more manageable but in most cases it'll actually cost you more, so you might as well stump up and pay it off it one go.

 • Be alarmed - not with the cost of car insurance, but in terms of how secure your motor is. Fitting a device like a Tracker or beefing up your car security might be pricey, but often insurers will offer you cheaper insurance as a result.

 • Don't be a journalist. Reporters, and other professions like estate agents, sales reps, and entertainers are all considered more likely to claim, and have to pay more as a result.

Why using ANPR to catch out insurance cheats at petrol stations will never work

CONFESSION time, then, chaps and chapettes. Who out of this week's readers is driving around without their car insurance being up to scratch?

Apparently, just under 10% of the region's motorists are driving around without bothering with the pesky business of paying for cover, which means statistically at least one of you hasn't gone got any. After all, insurance is unbelievably expensive these days. It's also almost completely unfathomable and sold to you by an opera tenor who unites people from all walks of life because they all, without exception, would love nothing more than to have him removed from our TV screens for good.

Car insurance is confusing and expensive and as a result loads of you just can't be bothered with it. Even the Government, as I've mentioned previously, realise it.

Yet Whitehall's latest idea to crack down on the uninsured drivers - which I'm absolutely not one of, by the way - isn't going to work because while it's good in principle, it's got more holes than one of Jamie Oliver's colanders. As a bit of a self-confessed Dragons' Den addict, I just know that if it was some young business boffin's invention it'd be shot to pieces with just a handful of snide remarks from Duncan Bannatyne and a bad joke from Peter Jones. However, it's the Government who are suggesting it, so I will at least try to take it seriously.

In essence, they're on about fitting ANPR cameras, which can recognise car numberplates, to every petrol station in the country in a bid to spot uninsured cars as they pull in to fill up. The technology, which already works a treat on police cars, will then automatically tell the petrol pumps not to give the offending driver any fuel. And presumably give Plod a bell at the same time.

It's a great idea in principle but - Bannatyne mode activated - it will be horrendously expensive in practice, and it'd have to fitted to each and every one of Britain's 8,000 or so filling stations across the land. It'd also encourage even more crooks to clone car numberplates, siphoning would shoot up, and I can just see the court case where the one law-abiding driver, who the cameras clock by mistake, successfully sues for defamation after the system insinuates he's an insurance cheat.

It is, for all those reasons and a couple of others I can't squeeze into one Life On Cars column, a badly-thought out waste of what is basically YOUR money.

I'm out.