36 Basildon Extra, June 2012


THE past year has brought some welcome relief from the soaring increases in premiums for com- prehensive cover imposed by insurers in 2010/11. According to the AA British Insurance Premium Index, the average quote showed a7.7 per cent rise in the year to March 31. That's ahead of inflation but


pretty good after the record40.1 per cent annual increase imposed in the year to April 2011. With the average quote for comprehensive cover standing at £1,452, the AA says that while afew insurers areheavily discounting to win new busi- ness, others arecontinuing to increase premiums. Since the start of the year,there


has been an overall 1.1 per cent decline in the cheapest premiums. With personal injury claims soar-


ing, and industry costs rising by around 10 per cent per year,fur- ther steep rises for all motorists are almost inevitable, warns Simon Douglas, director of AA Insurance. Simon said: "My fear is that if


prices do continue to drop, we'll see arepeat of 2009, when


SOUNDS like abunch of fun doesn’tit? Sliding aBMW 3 Series sideways on asnowy test track, jinking through a maze of cones and setting times against the clock on an icy rally circuit does have its appeal. The trouble is we’re300km


Motoring update


industry losses led to premiums suddenly rocketing up following a long period of little movement." For younger drivers thereislittle


prospect of prices falling general- ly.AAInsurance reckons the average young male (aged 17- 22) pays £3,163 for insurance, up 76 per cent since summer 2010. For aman aged 50-59, the com- parable figureis£577. Women in the 17-22 age group pay an aver- age premium of £1,799. This gap between the sexes is expected to


shrink from


December 20, when the contro- versial EU gender directive means insurers can no longer use gender as ameans of calcu- lating insurance premiums. The big hope for motorists lies


in new technology,such as telematics-based policies which gather data from aGPS-linked 'black box' inserted under the dashboard. With the cost of these black boxes covered by annual premi-


north of the Arctic Circle, the snow is coming sideways past us and the only shelter is a flimsy canvas teepee. Tyre testing isn’talways as glam- orous as you’d imagine. Watching the Goodyear engineers rig up aGolf with Racelogic test gear,itwas obvious that when it came to back-to-back objective com- parisons, therewould be no place to hide for apoorly per- forming set of rubber. We’d been furnished with information regarding the superiority of Goodyear’slat- est Ultragrip7 tyre, now it was our turntosee if our own find- ings matched the PR hype. The first test aimed to meas-


urethe tyre’swet braking per- formance. Although many win- ter tyres arebought for their


prowess on snow and ice, it’s alittle known fact that when temperatures drop below 7 degrees Celsius -such as on atypical British winter morning -winter tyres, with com- pounds that don’tstiffen in cold weather,come into their own. The wet braking test involved little morethan accel- erating the Golf to 100km/h and then mashing the brake pedal while keeping the car pointing in astraight line. The Racelogic box would


then use its satellite position- ing to work out the rest. The difficulty came in trying


to get aconsistent reaction time in pulling your foot from the throttle to the brake. Several runs later,Idecided


ums, insurers -and drivers too - can monitor individual driving stan- dards to assess the level of risk moreaccurately than ever before. Mike Brockman, chief executive


of insuretherbox, the company that pioneered telematics-based motor insurance in 2010, said: "Apart from enabling cheaper motor insurance, the main benefit from telematics is that it should improve driving behaviour." If the vehicle sustains asharp impact at any time, this is regis- tered by the insurer and the poli- cyholder is contacted on their mobile automatically,with acall then placed to the emergency services if no reply is received. GPS technology also allows vehicles to be rapidly traced when stolen. Ablack box can also measure


the impact of acollision, which could eventually help to stem the flood of compensation claims for whiplash injuries which arecurrent- ly costing insurers asmall fortune.


through another jinking route. Driving against the clock, it


was apparent that the winter tyres would be massively more efficient than aregular all-sea- son tyreonthis sort of sur- face. In fact, it’sdoubtful nor- mal summer rubber would have even found enough trac- tion on the glazed ice to get rolling. The results of this frigid labour aretyres like the Ultragrip7. Enabling aFord Focus to go whereaLand Cruiser with normal tyres couldn’tget apurchase, these tyres wereput through afinal demonstration by ex-World Rally Championship driver Bruno Thiry. Fitted to an Impreza rally car


that Iprobably didn’thave the metronomic precision of the Goodyear test drivers. The slalom tests werefar


moreentertaining for proper petrolheads, albeit alittle more subjective when it came to evaluating the tyres. Aset of cones was laid out up to a hairpin bend and then back


that would normally run on studded tyres, this looked even morefrightening than a faceful of reindeer,but as Thiry flung the car from bend to bend, hammering between pine trees and getting big air over ahump, it was apparent that we wereonly scratching the surface of what proper winter rubber could do.


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