Monday, May 25, 2009

Online Quotes For Car Insurance - Where To Get Auto Insurance Quotes Online

By Matt Hellstrom

The car insurance business has been forever changed by the Internet. In fact, the business today bears little resemblance to what it was before the Information Age first dawned in 1992. Before the World Wide Web took over, most people settled in with one company and stuck with them for home and auto insurance. Not so today. The churn numbers due to being able to get auto insurance quotes online continue to diverge from home - auto combos with the same company.

Many accuse the insurance industry with a litany of failures in responding to customer needs. Loyalty bonuses, common in many businesses, simply are not out there in the car and home insurance field, and they should be. The problem of insurance skimmers, that is, companies that specialize in low rates for older drivers, continues to give actuarial statisticians fits. Given this failing, many insurance companies find themselves needing to adjust to the new mode of delivering auto insurance quotes online.

The inevitable result of this type of reaction to the rate-squeeze caused by the proliferation of auto insurance quotes online has been a polarization of risk classes. Minimal risk classes - married male drivers age 50 and older, and female drivers age 40 and up - have had their car insurance rates remain steady or drop over the past decade, while rates in the high-risk young male class have skyrocketed. In consequence, the number of young men driving with no insurance or liability only has also increased.

But higher rates for young drivers aside, shopping for car insurance online is an eye-opening experience. Before the internet, consumers had to spend hours going through the phone book, punching their way through a voice menu only to wind up most times leaving their name and number on some agent or broker's answering machine. And of course there was the time spent handling the call backs, keeping track of the quotes, doing call backs, and on and on and on.

A recent survey by a well known business school asked 400 online insurance shoppers why they chose to look for car insurance online. The number one response was that they wanted a quote and that was it. Car insurance websites know this and make it as fast and easy to use as possible.

When you are at an online car insurance site, a dialog box will ask you all the right questions - the questions you didn't know you should have been asking. Typically these include; number of years driving, make and model of car, place of residence, whether or not the vehicle is used to commute to work, moving violations within the past X-amount of years, etc.

Perhaps one of the most attractive and informative features of otaining an auto insurance quote online besides shopping for car insurance is when you decide to shop for a new car. Many sites that offer online auto insurance quotes have a feature where people can find out the different rates per vehicle. When evaluating comparable models that vary greatly in dealer invoice prices, the car insurance cost can be a deal breaker or maker.

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