Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 7 oct 2012:
With the festive season rapidly approaching – and the advent of the new iPhone 5 – anyone transporting electronics needs to check their cover, and soon!
Have you thought about the size of your courier van and exactly how many electronics you can actually fit back there? Well, if you do the maths, you could end up having room for around £50 million worth of high-value electronics such as the already massively popular iPhone 5 alone; if you’re done running about in a panic, you may want to consider checking the level of cover on your commercial van insurance now.
It only took around 24 hours for 2 million individuals to pr-order the new Apple iPhone 5 once it became available to do so. This will inevitably lead to huge demand for the product this Christmas shopping season, which means massive amounts of the electronic device are going to be shipped all across the country to retailers, and that anyone with a courier van could make a killing by shipping all these smartphones – however they could also risk financial ruin if something were happen to their high-value cargo whilst in transit and their van insurance doesn’t cover them against theft or destruction of goods.
There’s around 200 cubic feet on the inside of the average van, which means you could stick nearly 100,000 iPhones in the back, provided you take them out of the packaging. The retail value of these items would be upwards of £50 million, and while there’s no way one single courier would be transporting those many iPhones at once, the point still stands: as electronic devices shrink in size but grow in price, couriers will naturally have higher value cargo whenever they’re transporting the devices, so the need for proper insurance cover has never been more important.
If you think iPhones won’t be stolen, just remember the news out of Japan on the new Apple product’s launch day:
Meanwhile, news reports on the launch day revealed that around 200 iPhone 5 unites were nicked from a shop in Osaka, Japan. The retail value of these stolen phones – just 200 of them – was around £160,000, which is more than enough to cripple your courier business if you can’t cover such a massive outlay of cash without the aid of an ironclad insurance policy.