If you’re looking for insurance for your second or third car, no doubt you will have come across the concept of multi car insurance. These types of policy can be tailored to people with several vehicles, one or more drivers who own vehicles registered at the same address, or persons who own multiple cars at different locations. Insurance companies who offer multi car insurance claim to be able to offer large discounts to their customers, which often increase the greater the number of cars that are added to the policy. This is possible because by taking on several cars on a single policy, the insurers are simultaneously getting more business while actually cutting down on their own administration costs.
The concept is not a new one. Insurance companies have offered second car discounts for ages and fleet insurance for commercial vehicles has been around for a very long time, but until recently these discounts have been available only to single drivers looking to insure multiple vehicles. Multi car insurance changes this however, allowing multiple drivers car insurance on several cars, as long as all the cars are registered at the same address. In this way, we could view multi car insurance as fleet insurance for the home.
Regardless of whether you are a single driver with multiple cars, or several drivers living at the same address, your priority is obviously to get the best deal. Multi car insurance may well be able to save you money compared with insuring your cars individually, but it is important to proceed carefully before signing up to any given policy. For example, most advertisements for multi car insurance will make claims of savings of 10% for a second car on a policy and even as much as 25% when insuring more than 5 cars.
However, the discounts these figures represent may only be in comparison with cost of insuring each of your cars separately with that particular insurer. In fact, neither of the two best known companies that offer multi car insurance – Direct Line and Admiral – partner themselves with online price comparison sites, so to get a complete picture of the market you need to do a little more research.
The best way to go about securing the cheapest insurance for your cars would be to use car insurance comparison sites to your advantage. Use several major comparison sites (gocompare and moneysupermarket compare about 2/3 of all UK insurers) to find the cheapest individual policies for each of your drivers. Now go to a multi car insurance provider’s website and check your best individual quotes against the multi car policies on offer.
By checking for the best individual policy prices before hand, using a car insurance comparison site, you can approach a multi car insurance policy with the full knowledge of what it would cost you as a group, and thereby see which is going to save you the most money. It is also worth looking at the flexibility of each option – for instance, whether adding another car/driver at a later date would be cheaper with multi car insurance policy.
It is important to look at all the details on any insurance policy before signing up, so if your struggling, why not check out our simple guide: 5 points to consider before buying multi car insurance
