Male motorists all over the country are probably feeling slightly smug this week, as the European Court of Justice has decreed that disparity in the price of car insurance premiums is unfair.
The fact that women pay less for their car insurance than their hairier equivalents is one of those things that has just become accepted in recent times and we’ve had companies like Diamond and Sheila’s Wheels doing good business out of this anomaly.
Car insurance equality
We all know, traditionally, why this has been the case.
Statistically speaking, men have more road accidents than women. That cannot be denied. When things do go wrong, the crashes in which women are involved tend to be low-speed knocks and parking misjudgments. When men have a crash, they tend to do it in style.
However the ECJ evidently thinks that that is no reason to apply broad-brush differentiation between male and female drivers. Now, a driver’s sex should not be the most prominent criterion when insurers are assessing who is more likely to be knocking on their door to tell them they’ve just decimated a small village.
Usually the focal point for grumbling and muttering, the Court has endeared itself to millions of male motorists by paving the way for their premiums to come down, on the basis that to discriminate on the grounds of sex is fundamentally wrong.
One wonders whether this means that male drivers will notice a decrease in premiums, or whether the insurance companies will make themselves even less popular than they currently are and merely charge everyone the same premium across the board.
Insurers have bemoaned that they are not making any money, what with personal injury claimsallegedly hanging them out to dry (although their frequency has only increased in line with the numbers of cars on the road) and the rise of ‘crash for cash’ schemes.
The latter involves a corrupt group of individuals all working in league with each other to make money from insurers by causing deliberate car crashes and then milking the system for every penny it’s worth.
These delightful, upstanding members of society tend to drive slowly until their unsuspecting victim, wondering what’s going on, zooms up to the back of their vehicle and then proceeds to slam into the back of it. How did that happen? Well, it goes something like this:
Scammer disconnects brake lights, stands on brake pedal, causes accident, claims for vehicle damage, personal injury (verified by crooked doctor) and fraudulently pockets lots of money, passing the cost on to insurance company’s customers.
If women want equality, they have to take the rough with the smooth. Equality across the board. Unless, we are smart and sensible enough to realise men and women are actually different and better and worse at different things, now there’s a thought!
