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Originally Posted by olddog
Robbin,
Is your purpose of this thread to wake us up, and hopefully reduce the claims? Or is the purpose to look for solutions to the claims problems? Since you are not the insurance company, I doubt you have much influance in the policies, but I may be wrong.
One thought that came to my mind is that driving a car you are not familar with certainly makes handling in adverse conditions harder to do, at least that is my experiance. My policy has a 3000 mile per year maximum. I understand I can purchase more miles/year. I also understand that from the insurance companies perspective, the more miles driven, the more opertunities for an accident. However, one would think that if the "driving school improves skills and therefore reduces accidents" theory is correct then restricting driving experiance (miles/year) would also be counter productive.
Now the driving school makes since to me. I think Cobras are different than a lot of classic cars in that they are the ultamate performance car. Many other classic cars are purely for show, in the owners mind (certainly not all). Those that are extream performance cars are more likely to be originals that are not replaceable. From this I suspect Cobra replica owners are more likely to treat their car as a performance machine than other classic car owners. This differance may mean that what reduces claims in other classic cars may actually increase claims with Cobra owners. So it may be interesting to compare actual miles driven per year (life time total as well) verses claims.
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The purpose was really both. Make people aware of a trend that I see and to find out what can be done to try assist in making sure the program does not go away for Cobras.
Actually you mentioned I probably do not have any influence that is really incorrect. I was able to convince the carrier to reduce rates for modified vehicles (which includes the Cobras). Up until about four years ago we did not write Cobras as the Company took the same approach that Hagerty did. When I asked them why they really did not have an answer and decided to proceed with caution in writing these. With specialty type of insurance such as Collector Car the Companies do listen to the agents that are writing the bulk of the business on these. We write in 40 States ourselves compared to your local agent that probably writes in 1.
So if I understand what you are saying since Cobras are performance vehicles we should expect the owners will possibly be driving these as performance vehicles. As far as the miles going in we can only underwrite what people have had in their past history. We do not write someone that has had more than one at fault accident/speed in the past three years. So all those miles you talk about are taken into consideration at the time we write their insurance. What goes wrong is after that and how the person operates the vehicle when they take ownership. We have Street Rodders that put 2 to 3 times the miles that the Cobra owner does on their car and there were ZERO claims from them in the 10 I mentioned over $10,000 and many of these cars are well in excess of what a typical Cobra costs.
It basically comes down to how someone drives a performance vehicle. If the vehicles are being driven within the speeds allowed by the States there probably will never be a problem.