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Realtors have this saying that the value of a property is down to location, location, location. It’s pretty much the same when it comes to vehicles. If you like those small red things without anti-roll bars that feature in movies like Gone in Sixty Seconds, it’s going to cost you a small fortune to put its wheels on the road. But if you are content to putter along at a steady speed in an family saloon, your premium rates just got highly affordable. The make and model is everything. However, even within the powered, underpowered range, there’s a more important issue. When it comes to designing the modern vehicle, it’s rather more than a simple box on wheels. There’s an increasing amount of engineering to make you safer. By “you”, we don’t just mean the driver. In days gone by, the passengers were just collateral damage in the war zone. Now, there’s a real investment in keeping everyone inside the vehicle as safe as possible.

So, welcome to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) which earns its keep by running crash tests and doing all the other things to discover just how safe the vehicles are that we drive every day. The good news for you is a simple truth. People in vehicles that do well in the cash tests are far less likely to die in an real-world accident. This is not just about airbags although they are useful added protection. This is about the physical structure of the cage which holds us. There must be a balance between rigid bones and areas designed to crumple to absorb the impact. In this remember that there are passengers in the back seats to think about. Ironically, the federal statistics do forget this, largely calculating fatality and injury statistics on drivers and front-seat passengers only, i.e. they tend to assume front- rather than side-impact collisions. This is flat wrong. In 2009, 27% of rear passenger deaths occurred in side-impact crashes.

So, insurers look at the IIHS crash test results with great interest and set their premium rates accordingly. The safer the vehicle, the less likely it is there will be big claims for personal injuries or deaths arising from collisions. This means the rates can be lower. But if your sporty open-topped speedster rolls over, you could lose your head and present everyone with a big money claim to fight over. In this case, cheap car insurance really is about using your head (and that’s not just to make your mark on the road). You have to do your research and buy the vehicle with the safest crash test results. Of course not everyone can afford to go out and buy new. That’s the good things about the IIHS. They have the results going back years so you can always find the safest vehicle in your price bracket. Then it’s just a matter of running the search engine to get as many quotes as possible. The trick is to find the cheap car insurance for the car you are willing to be seen driving. Ego gives way to practicality and gives you affordable insurance

If everything was left to common sense, the whole business of writing insurance would be easy. All you would need is an assessment of the individual’s driving ability. Good drivers have fewer accidents so pay less. Bad drivers are responsible for claims. That’s bad for business so they pay more. Except they had to take this simple idea and make it all complicated. Now, every last fact in every accident that’s reported, is collected by the insurers and analyzed. If you sat in front of a computer in an insurer’s main office, you could do a search and find out how many Chevrolet Tahoes have been involved in an accident on a straight dry road when all the driver had to do was brake to avoid the collision. In fact, it’s remarkable what you can find out when you add in time of day, weather, and any other variables you care to pick. Literally, there are statistics on everything. So, if you asked the computer whether it was Professor Plumb in the library with the candlestick, there would be an answer. Equally, if you put a driver of any age, race, religion and gender into any make and model of vehicle in a particular part of the country, with an estimate of the annual mileage, you will see the probability of an accident. The computer models are that precise.

So perhaps it might come as a surprise that one of the factors now considered by the insurance companies is your credit score. This ranks them alongside banks and loan companies, landlords and anyone interested in whether you are likely to pay them. It also matches the interest of potential employers who look at job applicants to see whether they manage their money well. The theory seems to be that people with bad credit scores are more likely to be unreliable employees – perhaps when they are short of money, they are supposed to be more likely to steal? Anyway, insurers also think that a poor credit score means you are more likely to make a claim. This is wrapped up with the ZIP-code weighting. Poor people live in the type of neighborhood where vehicles are vandalized or stolen. They stage accidents to make fake claims. All the usual stereotyping that works so unfairly.

But once you know insurers are going to check your score, you need to take action. A recent survey found there were mistakes in the credit records of 80% of adult Americans. Most of the mistakes were not serious, but enough reduced the credit scores. Remember there are three major companies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, so you need to check all three. This is absolutely free. The Fair Credit Reporting Act gives you the right to one free copy of your history every year, and the right to have any mistakes corrected. Once you are sure everything is correct, you can get the auto insurance quote knowing they will be based on the right information. If you have found major errors in you credit history, contact your current insurer without waiting for a auto insurance quote. Most companies correct the premiums immediately.

In Europe there are a lot of safety options for cars that feature both standard and additional equipment. But it’s not the same in the US. What are the reasons for that? Some insurance specialists think that it’s the lack of tort reform that puts auto insurance in the US into such a situation.

But what is a tort reform in the first place and what it has to do with auto insurance? Tort reform is a general term that refers to a change in the US civil justice framework that is required to provide a limitation of tort litigation and damage. If the reform will be applied then the negative effects litigation has on the economy will be significantly reduced.

In order to make the significance of this reform a bit clearer, here’s an example. There are a lot of advanced technologies available for installing into your vehicle. Things like side curtain airbags, special glass, obstacle detection systems, rear camera system, advanced seat belts and numerous other features are very common in the European market and often come as a standard setting for new vehicle. But even if this equipment is made in the US, it is still exported since it’s not that simple to introduce these features into American cars. But why is that so, you might ask? Well, it may come as a surprise for you put if studying the question in details it turns out that our own court system and litigious society are the main reasons for these technologies to have a hard time penetrating the domestic market.

The thing is that installing these add-ons into a typical car automatically gives a possibility for litigation, so it’s much simple for the auto dealers and auto insurance providers to neglect these features than try to seek regulations in the legislation. That is why the tort reform is required to modify the legal system itself, and this will allow for new technologies to be introduced to the market faster and much easier than now. Who will want to provide coverage for such an auto when the customer can sue the company for not providing a regulatory base and failing to cover such equipment to the right extent? Of course, no-one.

The U.S. Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 may be a good step towards an overall tort reform since it transferred class-action lawsuits from the jurisdiction of state courts, which eliminates a large part of state litigation. There are two major points that tort reform advocates see in this Act:

1. Lowers the risk of an out-of-state defendant to face excessive verdicts, and reduces the amount of settlements that can be otherwise exceeded by local venues.

2. Introduces new procedures for reviewing coupon settlements, reducing attorney’s fees that can be often labeled as “excessive”.

This Act thus significantly lowers the litigation amounts and can ultimately lead to a decrease in auto insurance rates. Nevertheless, there’s a need in a real tort reform for the auto insurance industry to work more effectively and allow new technologies to be introduced without the risk of court trials from unhappy customers.

Auto insurance abuse and fraud has become quite a problem in the past few years as there was a rise in fraud reports and diversification of schemes used to affect fraud victims. It has come to the point where many drivers feel that the auto insurance quotes and rates they get are too high because of the abundance of fraudulent claims filed to insurance providers. In fact, each claim filed by using an abuse or fraudulent scheme ultimately leads to the overall increase in rates for all consumers, who even didn’t face fraud on their own.

In order to minimize the risk of auto insurance fraud and abuse, and protect lawful car owners from becoming victims of illegal schemes, insurance providers and experts recommend following these five helpful tips that will protect you paying for an abusive claim:

1. Contact your insurance provider as soon as possible when ending up in an accident. You may want to call your insurance representative before calling the police, in order to provide all the information regarding the accident. You will be informed about the right repair shops, legal advisors and rental car services to use. Quite often these third party representatives make part of fraudulent schemes.

2. Only use repair shops preferred by your insurance provider or you are common with. In many cases fraud schemes involve certain repair shops that charge higher rates for making a standard repair and abusing your insurance claim.

3. Be cautious about the towing companies that arrive to the site of the accident. You may end up dealing with a towing company that receives referral fees for directing customers to specific repair shops or other services that will charge you more than your insurance company’s preferred providers.

4. In case you’re injured during the accident and have to use medical services, keep track of all the treatments, prescriptions and doctors you receive care from in order to compare the records with your insurance provider later. Sometimes inaccuracies in these records can be a sign of insurance fraud that will ultimately reflect in your insurance rates.

5. Never sign blank documents or any contracts or forms without reading them first a towing truck driver, repair shop worker, legal advisor or medical care provider will give you. In many cases fraudulent contracts are offered for signing during stress that the victim goes through after and accident. And later you may be legally obliged to pay for things you didn’t expect.

Always make sure to get auto insurance quotes from a company willing to fight and investigate fraudulent acts or insurance abuse. It’s a matter of customer support, and if your provider doesn’t want to deal with things like that, obliging you to pay higher premiums regardless whether you were a victim of a fraud scheme or not, you definitely don’t want to insure your auto with such a provider. So get your auto insurance quotes from an insurer that you can really trust. Otherwise you may end up paying more money and being a victim of insurance abuse someone makes money from.

It’s titles to articles that really get people annoyed. It would probably be OK to say Mercedes-Benz make better cars than BMW. Somehow, it’s acceptable to compare the strengths and weaknesses of brands. But once we get into the area of individual skills, passions are involved. There would be hours of argument on whether Dario Franchitti is a better driver than A.J. Foyt. Most adults know how to drive and, as fans of Indy heroes, they will appreciate an everyday skill raised to the highest level. All this is safe territory. No one feels threatened by talk of the best, particularly when one is now retired. But start talking about whether you or your partner is the better driver, and egos are on the line – tempers are likely to get frayed very quickly. We are all proud of what we do. That’s a part of what gives us the confidence to keep doing it. Accusing A of not being as good a driver as B is entering a potential war zone.

Yet, if you go to the people who collect evidence about traffic accidents – that’s a range of people from the ambulances that carry drivers to hospitals, to the police and courts who decide whether anyone should go to jail, to the insurers who have to pick up some of the bills – they will all tell you the same story. Ambulances carry fewer women drivers. They are less likely to be injured because they drive more slowly than men. Women are less likely to break the law than men and so pick up fewer tickets and rarely commit offenses serious enough to justify jail time. Insurers prefer women drivers because they are rarely in serious accidents as drivers. They are injured seriously as often as men because, in most cases, they are being driven by men who ignore the basics of safe driving.

The result of this statistical reality is that insurance companies offer lower premium rates to women and that more women drivers qualify for discounts than their male equivalents. So, on both counts, women usually pay less than men for driving the same makes and models of vehicles. This is rubbing salt in the wounds. Men usually argue that all drivers should be treated as a single group. This would mean everyone pays the same premium to drive and so force all the good drivers to subsidize all the bad. Not surprisingly, there are more good drivers than bad and they have voices. They can and do complain if they are victimized by insurance companies in this way. Indeed, many insurers offer women-only policies. The cheapest rates are for women in the 50s. So when you are collecting those vital auto insurance quotes, look around the field as a whole. Get quotes from insurers who mix the sexes. Just because a women-only specialist may give a good rate this year, does not mean the competition will not match prices. But also get auto insurance quotes from the specialists as well. That way, you guarantee finding the cheapest coverage.