When it comes to auto comprehensive insurance policy coverages, the devil is often in the details. While there are many great insurance agents who walk their clients through each and every coverage and offer the buyer of insurance the opportunity to accept or reject a coverage based on the information provided by the agent, there are many other insurance companies that are simply interested in a quick sign-up for the cheapest rate possible.
While the price is obviously vital in shopping for insurance (or anything for that matter), the better question is “what exactly are you being provided for that price?”. As with most things in life, insurance coverages aren’t “apples to apples”.
Since the topic of this blog post is comprehensive insurance, we’ll focus there. We do, however, encourage you to see our other posts on Personal Injury Protection, Uninsured Motorists Coverage, Underinsured Motorists Coverage, and Liability Coverage to get caught up on the vital components of any insurance policy.
Comprehensive Insurance coverage refers to coverage that will assist you with having your vehicle fixed if you’re involved in an accident. This coverage will step in instances such as you being struck by another driver who is at fault, you striking another vehicle, or your car is damaged in a hit-and-run accident, while you’re driving it or while it’s in a parking lot, etc. As far as coverages that assist with the vehicle aspect of your claim, comprehensive is a must, and most dealers will require you to show proof of this coverage if you finance a vehicle from their lot.
Deductibles for comprehensive insurance vary from policy to policy. Generally, it works like this: a policy with a higher deductible is going to cost you less on a month-by-month basis, as you’ll be on the hook for paying the first portion of the claim (usually $1,000). The other reason these policies cost less is that most damage to parked cars is below $1,000, so the insured driver and car are forced to pay the entire claim out of pocket rather than going through insurance, which saves the insurance company money.
Other policies will have lower deductibles (usually between $250 and $500), and these cost more than the aforementioned $1,000 deductible policies. The reason for this is that most damage to vehicles will crest the $500 threshold, so the insurance company ends up paying more claims.
This is all for our brief overview of comprehensive insurance. While comprehensive insurance is important for your vehicle, we always encourage our clients to look even more closely at their uninsured bodily injury coverage and PIP coverage, because when accidents happen you don’t want to be relying on the other vehicle to have adequate (or any) insurance coverage. Uninsured motorists’ bodily injury coverage will step in and assist in the common event of the other driver causing an accident and injury to you without having insurance coverage.
Learn more: https://searsinjurylaw.com/practice-areas/