How to find short term insurance

Why on earth should anyone need to take out temporary, i.e. short term, car insurance? Well, for quite a few reasons really!

Let us imagine that you have friends or relatives who are coming to stay with you for a while, who will be arriving by public transport. As a generous person you will be of course more than happy to allow them to use your car from time to time but what happens if they have an accident; writing off your pride and joy and then being unable to afford a replacement cost could spoil a beautiful friendship, even if we were to ignore the minor fact that driving without insurance is a very serious offence! Not a problem, you may say, your friend/relative is insured to drive any vehicle that he or she does not actually own, provided that the owner gives permission! True, they may well have a policy which includes this facility but it is long odds on that the cover is restricted to third party risks only, or even Road Traffic Act cover; in other words if your driver has an accident an insurance company will probably pay for personal injuries to any third party, may well pay to any damage to vehicles or other property owned by third parties but it is highly unlikely indeed that your car will be covered and so we are back into "ruining a beautiful friendship" territory. What a waste, when fully comprehensive short term insurance for any period from just a day to several months is so easy to arrange over the Internet, and so economical as well!

Click here for UK short term insurance

Another scenario; you may wish to buy a car at auction. Naturally, once you bought it you will wish to drive it away but to do this legally you have to have insurance and it is not unknown for the local police to keep a very careful eye on premises where vehicles are sold at auction in the hope and expectation of a few easy convictions! Not a problem, take your laptop with you to the venue and you will find that most properly run car auctions provide wireless Internet access; once you have bought a vehicle it is a simple matter to go online and arrange a temporary policy so that you can at least drive the vehicle home without committing an offence. It is quite common for car dealers to take out three-day policies because it usually give them sufficient time to drive the vehicle to their premises, prepare it for sale and deliver it to a customer.

A more dubious use of short term insurance is to tax a vehicle; there may be legitimate reasons for doing it in this way instead of buying a full 12 months insurance but there are quite a number of people who drive around quite happily without insurance after having bought the necessary tax disc with a one day policy! What many of these people do not realise is that there exists a central database of car insurance policies and it is becoming more and more common for number plates to be scanned automatically by roadside cameras, and the numberplates checked against this database; where no valid insurance can be found the local police force is alerted and a heavy fine, penalty points, licence suspension or even imprisonment could be the result! Is it really worth it?

Like every tool, short term car insurance can be abused but used properly it can save a great deal of cost and inconvenience to people who need to drive a car for a relatively short length of time.