It’s that time of year again. Time to renew the car insurance for another year. This year I decided to take a look around at competitors to see what prices they were offering. Not so much that I’m dissatisfied with the service of my current insurance company, but just to see the state/costs of other competitors.

I was more than a bit surprised. Here’s my story.

I’ve always used the internet to get my insurance rather than with a live broker, just because it’s easier and I ‘detest’ some of the hard-sell tactics that some of the brokers/agents use. Not to say they all use these tactics, but some I’ve encountered did. I used various on-line insurance aggregators, and also a few direct company insurance sign-up sites.

My current insurance company, after one incident a little over a year ago which I was not at fault for (but the insurance company had to pay for because the other car turned out to be stolen) actually dropped the cost of my insurance by about $19/year. Pretty outstanding if you ask me.

AIG Insurance Rocks!!

When I filled in the forms on all the other sites, I never found a rate close to the one that I’m getting from AIG. (although I did find ONE little no-name insurance company that beat AIG by $8/year, but didn’t include very much for towing costs. One tow would have cost me more than the difference in prices).

Overall the experience with the web sites was better than I have had in the past. I tried
Esurance.com CarInsurance.com Geico.com and Insweb.com.

Esurance – The cute commercials and the pretty almost-Anime female spokesperson is also found on this easy to use website. The questions were straightforward, and I had a quote in a little under 5 minutes total. Unfortunately, they were about $450/year more than my current AIG insurance.

CarInsurance.com – CarInsuranc.com is an aggregator site (gives you quotes from multiple insurance companies simultaneously). It was also fairly easy to use, maybe marginally more difficult than Esurance. I received quotes back from 4 different insurance companies, all ranging from $400/year more to $750/year more. (Yikes!)

Geico.com – Again, the spokesperson (spokesgekko?) from the commercial is also on the web site. The site is very easy to use, similar to Esurance. Total time was about 10 minutes, maybe I just typed slower here. The quote was $280/year more, an improvement over the others, but still nowhere near what I am already getting from AIG.

Insweb.com – This is another aggregator site, and one that I originally used when I got AIG. Unfortunately, in the last few years, I can’t tell that anything has changed on this site. It only took about 7 minutes to come back with the quotes, but out of the 5 that came back, 4 were requiring I talk to a broker to get the ‘actual’ quotes. If I had wanted to talk to an insurance broker I wouldn’t have used the internet anyway, so this kind of negates the whole reason for going on-line to begin with.

Oddly enough, I did get one quote from an insurance company I had never heard of before that came in UNDER AIG on this site. I was curious enough to look at the coverages and, while they looked good, the towing max payment was only $90. Since most tow trucks won’t even hook up for less than a hundred bucks. I could see the difference in pay going out the window the first time I had to have one of my vehicles moved farther than around the block. That and the no-name status of the company rang a few ‘Danger Will Robinson’ signals.

Overall – I’m pleased to say that the state of the art in on-line insurance quotes is much better than it was a couple of years ago. With the noted exception, every site I went to was able to provide me a quote without having to talk to a broker or agent. The display of coverages and options for selecting different coverages and different amounts was intuitive and easy to use. I doubt that the live agent has to worry too much about being completely replaced by the web, but for people like me who are comfortable with an all-web experience, it’s there for the taking.