Why do my auto insurance rates keep going up?

Every month when you pay bills you probably say some unflattering thing when the auto insurance bill is due. Auto insurance is one of those bills you hate to pay because the benefits from it always seem abstract. It isn’t something that you can pick up and hold. It isn’t something that you can snuggle with at night. It is however one of those things that you need to have and by having good insurance coverage hopefully you will sleep better at night, right, maybe?
So, why is it that no matter what you do your insurance rates keep going up? You haven’t had an accident in over ten years, you stop at all the stop signs, you yield to people crossing the street. You are the type of person that every insurance company should want to insure. Even with your good behavior it doesn’t seem to help.
Let’s look at why. Take a middle aged driver with a clean record. If you are old or young your rates are probably more influenced by your age than anything else, and if you have a ticket or an accident over the last few years that is having a big impact on your insurance rate too.
Mr. Responsible is driving an average mid priced car. When he bought his car wanted the backup camera and he wanted blind spot sensors, heck throw in that adaptive cruise control too, because he’s responsible. Nothing fancy, but he thought those would be nice to have and help him drive safer. When our driver rolled out of the new car lot he was driving a $37,000 car. That’s the cost for an average new car in 2018.
Two things just happened when he started driving this mid priced car. The average for a mid range car has gone up dramatically over the last ten years.  In 2008 the average car cost about $25,000. That’s about a 50 percent increase in the cost of an average car.
The second part is all the added technology going into cars. You would think these added devises would reduce the number of accidents happening, well that hasn’t happened. There are practically the same number of accidents today as there were ten years ago.
A few years back if you bumped someone in the rear maybe they needed to get a few scratches buffed out or maybe they needed the bumper painted. Now, if you hit someone that has a bunch of sensors in the bumper it can cost thousands of dollars to fix.  And, often they need specialists to fix a vehicle. Every time you say specialist, the cost of the repair goes up.
Car manufactures are great at adding all these features because people want them. What they don’t take into consideration is how these new features get fixed after an accident.  These complex set of sensors and cameras are sometimes easy to fix, and sometimes they are very complex to fix. There is no standard in the auto industry on how these items are installed or where they are installed. 
At the end of the day these are two factors influencing rates. You may not be the one buying the new car, but insurance spreads risk across everyone. The more expensive the cars are the more we all pay for insurance. There are other factors as well and we will cover those in a separate article. But, at the end of the day insurance companies are not making more money, They are just collecting more to cover losses they are incurring. Marvel at all those cool infotainment centers with Apple carplay and just understand where your money is going.
If you see your rates go up dramatically you can always call to have your rates re-shopped. Call us today to check your current rates with all of our companies. www.socalinsured.com 951-395-0754