2023 has proven to be an expensive year for motorists with car insurance prices experiencing a rapid climb. This can be explained by many different factors all pushing up the price of premiums but essentially the main reason car insurance has gone up is the increased number of payouts made by UK insurers in the first quarter of 2023.

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) have stated that insurance payouts have risen 14% in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the previous year. This in combination with increased potholes, longer repair times due to various logistics disruptions and instabilities, the cost of living crisis and continued inflationary pressures, have all contributed to making the average car insurance quote more expensive.

That is why it is more important than ever to do a car insurance comparison with as many providers as possible before committing to a policy or simply letting your policy renew.

If you just take out a third-party or third-party, fire and theft insurance policy, you will usually only be covered to drive your own vehicle. Some fully comprehensive car insurance policies will still provide the main driver on that policy with third-party cover to drive someone else’s car, however, most insurers in the UK have removed this from their comprehensive policies as a standard.

‘Driving other cars‘ or DOC insurance can still be purchased from many insurers as an add-on for an additional fee when it isn’t included as standard.

While it’s true that there’s “no such thing as a free lunch”, some companies do offer motorists free car insurance as an incentive when they make a larger purchase. The most common scenario is a car dealership offering drivers free car insurance for 12 months when they buy a brand-new car. While this type of incentive is sure to be attractive to many motorists, it isn’t always a good idea to search down these offers or use them as the deciding factor when you’re buying a car. It’s important to make sure you’re not paying over the odds for the vehicle (or buying a vehicle you don’t really want) in order to secure the free car insurance offer. After all, the cost of that insurance policy will almost certainly have been built into the cost of the car in some way, so you might be getting very cheap car insurance but it isn’t entirely free even though the real cost might not be obvious.

Fully comprehensive car insurance offers drivers more protection than lower levels of coverage, which means there are more types of incidents where your insurer might have to pay out. In some cases this is reflected in higher premiums for comprehensive insurance policies. However, some insurers do take into account the fact that riskier drivers often search for less comprehensive cover because they assume it will be cheaper, which could mean there is an increased risk of an insurance claim on some third-party or TPFT policies even though the insurer is covering fewer types of incidents on those policies. In practice, that means fully-comp can potentially be more expensive, less expensive or the same price as lower levels of cover, which is why it’s a good idea to compare quotes for fully-comp even if you’re thinking of taking out less coverage.

When you’re starting to search for a new car insurance policy there are a number of things you can do that will increase your likelihood of finding the cheapest car insurance. First and foremost, you should use an unbiased price comparison platform like Quotezone.co.uk before you accept a renewal quote from your existing provider. That way you’ll be able to compare quotes from a wide range of providers in a matter of minutes. There are some very cheap car insurance options out there on the market, so comparing as many insurers as possible is your best bet.

Some insurance providers may be willing to offer motorists a discount on their car insurance if they have a dashcam installed in their vehicle because dashcams can offer providers valuable evidence about exactly what happened in the event of an accident. This video footage could potentially help to prove that the provider’s own policyholder wasn’t at fault, and can also help to reduce the risk of ‘crash for cash’ insurance claims.