Our Other Insurances
Breakdown
Breakdown insurance is frequently added to your vehicle insurance, both personal and commercial, to provide cover for you and your vehicle in case you ever experience a breakdown on the road. Whether it’s an engine failure or a flat tyre, you’ll be covered by your breakdown cover for roadside assistance, and you can even finetune your policy to feature things like towing to a local garage from your home if your vehicle experiences a fault before you’ve even started your journey.
Essentially, breakdown cover comes in two varieties – personal cover and vehicle cover. Personal cover will cover you in any vehicle, meaning if you break down in a friend’s vehicle, you can still use your breakdown cover to get you home. Vehicle cover insures that specific vehicle regardless of the driver. Generally, personal cover is the more flexible and fully covered option, but it can be more costly.
GAP
Buying a new car is a wonderful feeling, and most cars nowadays are purchased on some form of finance contract, which means you pay for the car over a period of years. Now, this also means that you don’t fully own the car until this finance contract is paid in full. So what happens if you are involved in an accident which writes the car off, or the car is stolen when there is still finance left on the car? Simply, you are liable to pay for it. So, you’d be without a car and would still be expected to pay the monthly payments towards the car you agreed to purchase.
Of course, your car insurance would pay for the market value of the car, but this is often quite far apart from the cost of the car when you purchased it. For example, if you bought a car two years ago for £18,000, it would be probably worth closer to £9,000 now. GAP (Guaranteed Asset Protection) bridges the gap between the total loss claim that your insurer would payout and the cost of the car at purchase to leave you safe and without any costly assets still to pay for despite not having the asset due to loss or damage.
Excess Protection
When you claim on your insurance, you will have a sum to pay out of your own pocket, which is known as the ‘Excess’. This amount will be agreed upon when you take out your car insurance and will be a combination of ‘Voluntary’ and Compulsory’ excesses. Excess Protection cover allows you to claim back this excess if you claimed for any of the following reasons:
- Accidental damage
- Intentional damage
- Theft or damage caused by attempted theft
- Fire
Essentially, this allows you to claim back your full policy excess on one car, one time per year. This gives you the peace of mind that you can recoup your paid excess for those situations that you have no control over or where the damage is caused by an unidentified person.
Fault Hire Cover
This type of cover protects you against massively inflated excess costs with hire car companies should you find yourself in an accident. This type of cover can be attained either annually or per trip, and it will pay the often-expensive excess waivers for you on rental cars. This allows you to rent cars freely without the worry of being financially damaged by accident, even if it wasn’t your fault.
This covers everything from vehicle damage, misfuelling and damage to bodywork and tyres. The amount of cover per-incident or scenario does change from insurer to insurer, so make sure you read the fine print and explore all of the features of the cover before you purchase.
