I planned to test drive a private sale car and 'phoned my insurance company (Direct Line) to extend my cover for the day. I know that I have 3rd party cover for a car not owned by me but I'm not driving somebody else's car with only third-party cover!
DL: "Is the car already insured by the owner?"
Me: "I assume so - I haven't seen his insurance certificate if that's what you want to know"
DL: "We can't extend your policy to cover this car as it's against the law for a car to be covered by more than one insurance policy - if you want to drive this car you'll need to get added as a named driver on the owner's policy...."
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Surely not! Of course I didn't bother. Why should a private owner add (at the risk of his NCB) a potential purchaser to his insurance.
This sounds like a load of codswallop to me. Thoughts?
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Sounds like DL don't want the risk but prefer excuses to giving the customer hard truths. The can't insure the same car on two policies is odd. Garage loaned me a courtesy Picasso the other week, insured on their policy but with an eye watering £1k excess. So put it on my policy as temp additional vehicle, insured under two policies but presumably the industry has some sort of protocol to sort out who pays if it goes t*ts up.
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As a rule you can't have one car covered on two policies. Trade policies may have an exemption, but private ones don't.
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It's about time insurance industry woke up to this problem and included a clause that covered the owner for this.
A simple "sellers test drive" that would include a period of up to half an hour drive by a third party for the purposes of assessing the vehicle for purchase, whilst accompanied by the owner, would solve this regular problem.
Even if the insurer asked for the name of the potential buyer before the test drive took place and simply amended their records each time, this would make life so much easier.
As a bonus, NCD impact could be temporarily suspended whilst a test drive took place under these terms, however we can't expect everything now can we?
Hugo
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>>This sounds like a load of codswallop to me.
Pretty much.
Its not against the law. Its not against the law to insure it twice for the same drivers. There is even a principle how the primary insurance is determined and how claims are divided up.
It is, however, a total pain in the butt to administer.
It allows for too much potential abuse and I can quite understand why the insurance companies don't want to touch it.
As far as the insurers are concerned, they have solved the situation since you have third party cover allowing you to legally drive the car.
Finally there is the issue of insurable interest. If you test drove a car and wrote it off, who do they pay ? They can't pay him, its your insurance. They can't pay you, its not your car - bearing in mind that we are talking of the accidental damage portion here, not the third party damage portion. How do they know that there are not two insurers paying for the claim ? All much too much hard work for the benefit involved and I can't say I blame them - I wouldn't do it..
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I had this problem myself a couple of years ago when I was in the process of buying a car privately, and it was also, interestingly enough, with Direct Line, too.
When I originally telephoned them and asked if it was possible to obtain a one day insurance to road test a car that I was intending to purchase privately, I was assured that this was quite OK, even when I pointed out that the car was, more than likely, already insured by it's owner. "No, that's not a problem I was told, it will still be quite OK" They even gave me a figure for how much one day's insurance was going to cost me, I think it was an extension to my then current policy.
However, a couple of week later when I had found a car to view with a view to purchase, I again contacted Direct Line and was given a totally different answer! It was basically on the lines of "No, we cannot do this because you can't insure the same vehicle twice!" No amount of my explanation that I wasn't actually fully insured to drive the intended vehicle, or about what I'd been told be another of their operators a few weeks before cut any ice, I'm afraid. So, at the end of the day, I had to just make do with being driven by the owner. They did say that I could ask to be added to the owners insurance and then be covered by that, but I'm afraid that isn't really a very practical thing to do, is it?!
This subject has come up in the Backroom before, and someone also claimed to have successfully done what I was seeking to do. I believe it was with Direct Line as well!!! If you do a Forum Search you might manage to find the relevant posts.
So, it would seem that insurance companies just can't make their minds up about this, and even their own staff don't know what is permitted and what isn't.
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A problem this as I would not buy any vehicle without first driving it myself. The seller could be masking all sorts of problems with hid driving style.
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\"Nothing less than 8 cylinders will do\"
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Slightly off the subject, but I have two policies (cos I have two cars) which let me drive other cars not owned by me, 3rd party. Both state that they only cover risks not insured by another policy - which presents an interesting circular argument in that if they both cover me, then (for each policy) the risk is covered by another policy, and so they _don't_ cover me. Because one doesn't cover me, the other does. Or does it?
In the unlikely event of a loss (I don't drive other cars much, but occasionally) do you know how I should (by rights) resolve this? (In practice I think I'd just claim off the one with the least NCB to lose...)
Ta,
Mark
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There is always a decision about which is the primary insurance. This is not the decision of the policyholder. This could be because the cover was more specific, or because it was taken out first, or a number of other things.
Where it is not clear, then normally the policies share the burden in proportion to the applicable premium.
In your case, with two policies with two DOC extensions, correctly a claim would fall in the last category and the policies would share the claim proportional to the premiums - and both policies would lose NCD. Nice.
I say "normally" and "in theory" because often they don't ask, although you should volunteer the information, and often a fraudulent answer could be given to the question "is this incident covered by any other insurance?".
Eventually the joint databases will resolve this, but not yet.
This is not simply a motor insurance issue. It crops up most frequently with Buildings, Contents and Liability insurances.
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