If you’re a young driver in the UK getting car insurance is unfortunately going to be very expensive. The only way to siginificantly bring down the cost is to get a black box insurance policy. In this article i’ve tried to condense everything useful i learned about buying black box car insurance for my teenage son.
Black Box Car Insurance Makes A Big Difference To Cost
A Black Box insurance policy requires a device to be installed in the car to monitor how well the car is being driven. If the car is being driven reasonably well, it can make a big difference to your insurance premium
I focused on four different insurance companies with black boxes for my 18 year old son. The cost of the policy was reduced by anywhere between 20% and 50%.
He ended up going with Admiral black box insurance, which nearly halved the cost of his insurance premium from £3400 to £1800.
Types of Black Box
There are two main types of ‘Black Box’ used by UK car insurance companies for new \ young drivers:
- Professionally installed – An engineer will come out and install a device in your car
- Self install \ Plug-in – The insurance company will post a device that you plug into your car diagnostic port or the 12V cigarette lighter port.
How does a Black Box work
The Black Box measures various factors that are used to determine how well the car is being driven. Exactly what is measured varies between car insurance companies, but typically, the following things are measured:
- Speed: Is the car being driven within the speed limit
- Acceleration: How smoothly or aggressively you accelerate.
- Braking: Sudden or harsh braking.
- Cornering: How sharply you take corners.
- Mileage: Tracks the total distance you drive.
- Time of Driving: Time of day or night you are driving. Some insurance companies don’t permit driving in the middle of the night, e.g. 11:00pm to 5:00am. Other insurance companies allow late night driving, but will record it as a negative.
- Phone use: How much you use your phone when driving
- Location: GPS to track your location.
Cheapest Black Box Insurance Companies
When I was looking for my son’s car insurance policy with a black box four insurance companies kept popping up in comparison websites or as recommendations from online forums as being the cheapest, they were:
Because there are so many factors that affect insurance policies, the four companies listed above might not be the cheapest for everyone, but I think they are a good starting point for most people.
TOP TIP – Filling out insurance forms to get quotes from different companies is a pain in the backside. To make the process a little easier, get a password manager (I recommend BitWarden, it’s free) that can be configured to automatically fill form fields. It will save you a shedload of time.
