Instant Car Insurance UK - A Review

Instant car insurance - how to proceed

First among potential choices for the majority of UK car insurance consumers is a price comparison site when it comes to renewing their cover online. There is nothing more instant or powerful if you want to find low cost cover easily. Indeed, given the widespread use of price comparison sites, they have become synonomous with instant car insurance quotes for most people in this country.

Of course, direct car insurance providers can also provide instant car insurance quotes and cover. It is, afterall, to them that price comparison sites refer you to complete your low cost car insurance purchase. You can go direct yourself, cutting out the 'intermediary'.

The question therefore arises as to which of these routes to instant car insurance is best - the direct route, where you go straight to an insurance provider without using a price comparison system; or the indirect route, where you use a one-form-checks-all approach as provided by a price comparison site.

For some this is a no-brainer. If you can get the cheapest deals easily through a price comparison site, why deploy a less effective approach to cost-cutting such as checking only one, or perhaps two, direct car insurance providers?

And, if your only focus is to save money - putting aside that this is a misguided approach for the reasons we'll look at in a moment - then yes, by all means use a price comparison site. In the narrow sense of their ability to find the cheapest deal, there is no better route to cover.

However, the wider context of car insurance pricing needs to be considered. If you pay little, you get little. You can expect a high excess and very limited cover. In short, anticipate paying much more out of your own pocket if you do have an accident. In fact, this poses the question as to whether the cheapest car insurance - perhaps of 1000s - merits consideration at all.

If it is accepted that some filtering is requried - that is, only better quality policies are allowed through for further consideration - how to easily use a price comparison site to do this, if at all, becomes problematic.

If we look at what you get if you go direct to a top car insurance company, the picture is actually better than many appreciate. Firstly, you build in quality automatically. The big insurers tend to offer good cover as standard. Secondly, like for like, you also have good price comtrol. Most big providers offer a price guarantee but because they watch competitors' pricing closely, it is usually already built in.

Taking account of the above, it's hard not to reach the view that going direct has much to recommend it. And that's why we suggest that as the best route to instant car insurance, if you're looking for what's best in an accident, surely the only sensible starting point for the purchase of instant car insurance.

To compare car insurance online from leading providers, you may want to look here first of all. More..