Car insurance explained

CarsVansandBikes.com explains everything to help you understand all aspects of Car Insurance.

After purchasing your car the next most expensive part of owning a car is what you pay for car insurance.

The two most impactful elements of the car insurance premium are your age and the insurance group your car is in.

In short the higher the group the higher the cost. CarsVansandBikes provides two helpful additions across its platform:

• All CarsVansandBikes.com show their insurance group within the Running Costs section associated with each car advert
• You can also find a link to our insurance partner, Confused.com, where you can obtain an actual insurance quote prior to buying your next car.

Car insurance groups

Car insurance group are determined by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) together with Thatcham. Within the cost section of any car listed for sale on CarsVansandBikescom you will see the Group in this format 11E.

The group is split into two elements:

• A numerical value from 21 − 50. Its been like this since 2016, before that from 1970 it ranged from 1 − 20. The new range of 30 groups starts at 21 so as not to confuse the previous ratings. This value provided by the ABI is their assessment of how easily and cheaply any damage to your car can be repaired and with the latest range of 30 groups allows an improved definition of differentials in size and performance of vehicles.

Car insurance security ratings

• The second element is the alpha value that is provided by Thatcham. Thatcham considers each car and provides an security assessment

The letters which accompany the numeric ratings value follow this scale:

E - Your vehicle exceeds the security criteria for the group and therefore has had its rating upgraded. For example, a group 22 car that features outstanding levels of security will be upgraded to 21E.

A - Your car has an acceptable level of security features. P - This means "provisional" or yet to be rated due to insufficient data − perhaps the car is a new model and hasn"t been tested enough.

D - This means insufficient security requirements that don"t meet the accepted standard. Therefore a group 22 car would be downgraded to 23D.

U - Where the level of security for the model concerned is regarded as Unacceptable. Individual insurers may insist on the security being upgraded before providing cover.

G - This states that your car is an import, or that it doesn"t meet insurance group criteria for cars created for the UK market. This system is created to distinguish between thousands of makes and models of cars on UK roads without bias in order to calculate their risk level.