In the following week before I was due to pick up my new Minor, I had to deal with anyone's least favourite part of car ownership; the insurance. Being only 20 years old at the time and not having any no-claims bonus also made it that much more difficult. If you're American, you may wonder why, even at this age, it would be at all expensive to get insurance on a car with a 1.1 litre engine made 45 years ago. After all, there are plenty of people my age in the states rolling around in fully insured V8 Mustangs. The short explanation is that the car insurance companies in this country completely take the piss, partly due to an inflated and misguided prejudice that pervades this country that younger drivers are the rolling apocalypse of Britain's roads, and partly due to the government, who make it compulsory to have car insurance, whilst at the same time failing to provide adequate regulation to prevent car insurance prices from rocketing through the roof with year after year of arbitrary premium hikes.
However, there are a couple of ways to beat the system, if you're clever. I don't mean using price comparison websites, although that does help. The first way to try and get prices down, if you're a young driver, is be a named driver on a car owned by your parents. In a lot of cases this can cut your bill in half. This is what my parents did for me with "my" Suzuki Swift. The other way to beat the system is to buy a classic car. Because classic cars have been out of production for many many years, they are, in most cases, no longer subject to the same area of the car market that deals with cars made in recent years; ie, their age-depreciation has bottomed out. This means that they are seen by insurance companies as much lower risks, for reasons too numerous to go into here, but it works.
The main advantage to insuring classic cars is that you can have classic car insurance (yeah). This is not only much cheaper than standard insurance, but often comes with extra benefits. I first tried getting insurance through comparethemarket.com, which is a price comparison website famous for advertising itself using bizarre CG meerkats. The cheapest price I could get was £920 for third party, fire and theft cover. I didn't think it was too bad, considering I had no no-claims bonus, had held my license for only two years, and had never held my own car insurance policy before. However, it just wasn't cheap enough. My dad had told me that he would continue to pay my car insurance for me, as long as it was as cheap or cheaper than it had been for the Swift. As a named driver on my mum's policy on the Swift, it was only £750. That meant £170 of it would have to come out of my pocket. Not the end of the world but not ideal.
So I investigated classic car insurance. Whilst poking around on the Morris Minor Owner's Club (MMOC) website, I saw that they had a special insurance agreement with a company called Footman James, and members of the club are entitled to discounted rates. I figured I wasn't going to get much better than that, so I signed up. It's £25 a year for an adult, by the way. Once I had a membership number, I phoned up Footman James and negotiated some insurance. I got quoted £517 third party, and £817 fully comprehensive. Both policies included breakdown cover and lots of other goodies, including insurance abroad for up to 35 days a year. I told my dad about this and he said he would pay the full £817, considering that he would not have to pay £100 road tax on the Minor, thus saving £33 overall in the end.
So, with my insurance sorted, I just had to put down my cash and collect the keys.
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