I thought that I would share my experience of attempting to add a learner driver to our car insurance policy.
My wife has a 7-year-old Alfa Romeo 147 and I am listed as a named driver on the policy. We have fully comprehensive cover and my wife can drive the car for personal business use.
The increased cost of adding a learner driver to a car insurance policy can be high
Our son is 32 years of age, living at home and has had a provisional driving license for about 15 years but has never, until now, shown any interest in learning to drive. He will often walk 3 miles to work but, more often, we will try to pick him up which can be a “bit of a bind”.
He has decided that he would like to learn to drive and rather than have lessons from a professional driving instructor which can be quite costly I thought that I would teach him – as fathers’ do. However, we needed to add him to the car insurance policy as an additional driver.
I rang the car insurance company and explained the situation and they took some personal details about my son. At the present time we are paying just under £37 per month for car insurance.
I was somewhat surprised to be told that the present underwriter would not even consider adding my son to the policy. However, they had found another underwriter that would provide identical car insurance to what we presently have but to include my son on the policy would increase the car insurance premium to just under £114 per month. That is a three-fold increase!
Yes, of course I had expected the premium to increase but not by that much. He may be a learner driver but he is not 18 years of age – he is a mature adult with no criminal or driving convictions.
Obviously, I will now start to shop around but it does not bold well. In fact, is it better that he pays for driving lessons and then is added to the existing policy that we have once he has passed his test? Perhaps I will get a quote on that basis to see what the difference is.
