Car story
My car had its MOT last week.
It’s six years old with 77,000 miles on the clock and the only things needed to pass the test were a new offside rear tyre plus a new wiper blade for the rear window. (Apparently they do a smear test and the old wiper failed the inspection.)
It was all done in less than two hours and while I waited I wandered around the adjacent car showroom. The last time I was here, twelve months ago, almost every car on display was electric. This time I counted 15 vehicles and only one was an EV.
Also, every car in the showroom was either black or grey, and the cheapest model was almost £52,000, with several in excess of £100k. The most expensive car, a whopper of an SUV, had an on the road price of £136k.
Apart from tycoons, Premiership footballers and gangsters, how many people are spending six figures on a car? A tiny minority, I would guess, so why is the dealership pandering to them rather than the likes of me?
I couldn’t see a single diesel vehicle in the showroom either. Apparently they are no longer in vogue and manufacturers are increasingly ditching them from the range. One BMW model I quite like is now only available as a petrol or electric vehicle, which is annoying because diesels are still good value if, like me, you drive long distances multiple times each year. (There’s nothing better than filling the tank and seeing the onboard computer calculate the fuel range to be 700 miles or more. Compare that to an EV or even a car with a petrol engine.)
Meanwhile my annual car insurance has just been renewed and, remarkably, the cost has dropped by 40 per cent. Not sure why but at least it’s no longer four figures, which I’m pleased about. I could perhaps have got an even better deal elsewhere but I’m happy for my insurance to be renewed automatically, if only to avoid a repeat of the rather embarrassing incident that happened 13 or 14 years ago.
I was driving out of Cambridge when a police car pulled in front of me, lights flashing, forcing me to stop by the roadside. One of two traffic officers then got out and signalled to me to wind down the window. I can’t remember the exact conversation but he asked me about my car insurance. This was about six weeks after I assumed my insurance had been renewed automatically, but according to the police officer I was driving without insurance.
It turned out that some speed cameras don’t just monitor a car’s speed. If a police car is sitting nearby, the camera can send a signal, alerting officers to the fact that a passing car (or driver) may not be insured. Who knew?!
Anyway, when the police officer said I wasn’t insured it took a moment for the penny to drop. I then realised what must have happened and explained the situation. I then asked if I could call my insurance broker to renew it there and then. I knew I would still get penalty points, and possibly a fine, but I thought that if I renewed my insurance, by the roadside, I might at least be allowed to drive my car home.
No such luck. Instead I had to sit in the back of the police car for 30 minutes while they arranged for a recovery truck to take my car away, which seemed a bit unnecessary. Only when the truck arrived did they let me go, and thankfully - because our old office in Cambridge was only half a mile away - I was able to walk back and ring my wife who came and picked me up.
Thereafter it took two weeks to get the car back, plus several hundred pounds to get it released from the pound where it had been taken. Oh, and I also got the first and only points I have ever had on my licence, albeit three rather than the six I initially feared.
Shockingly, though, when I called my insurance broker to explain what had happened, I was quoted over £3,000 to renew, four times as much as I had been quoted eight weeks earlier! (To this day I remember exactly where I was when a sympathetic call centre operator gave me that jaw-dropping news.)
Clearly, they no longer wanted my business. Instead, I got a far more reasonable quote through AA Insurance, and I’ve been with them ever since. AA Insurance is a brokerage so the actual insurance company can change every year (and I don’t have to accept their quote), but it gives me the one thing I need for peace of mind - automatic renewal.
In hindsight I’m quite grateful that the police stopped me when they did because I genuinely didn’t know I wasn’t insured. In fact, I might have driven for many more months without insurance and goodness knows what would happened had I been involved in an accident in that time. All in all, it could have been far, far worse.
