VAN INSURANCE NEWS ROUNDUP: 7 DAYS ENDING 6 MARCH 2015:
Well here’s something that certainly took long enough: Internet giant Google has finally poked its head into the car and van insurance comparison business.
Using a comparison site to look into getting discount insurance is nothing new here in the UK of course, as you can’t swing a cat without hitting an aggregator site that promises to pull quotes from tens of insurers all at once so you don’t have to do it on your own the old-fashioned way. Apparently though it’s not the same across the pond, as the United States doesn’t really have anything similar for their own personal or commercial van insurance needs. This is likely because each US state, from Alabama to Washington, all have different insurance laws that aren’t interchangeable.
Still, nothing was necessarily preventing a firm from setting up a comparison website on a state-by-state basis, and this is exactly what Google has done. Its new Google Compare service is focused on its home state of California for now, but the firm promises to expand its offerings to additional states down the road; the service works more or less identically to a comparison site here at home, with the added benefit that it’s not actually owned by an insurance company itself.
Honestly if Google wanted to get into the insurance comparison business, it should have started over here in the UK. We could always use more competition, especially considering how rates seem to be heading up once again. Still, it’s nice to think that we were ahead of those bloody colonists for once, though I suppose it was only a matter of time before those enterprising little bastards caught up to us.
Still, we did it first – we can at least rest assured that we have the top spot there. We also don’t have to renew our cover twice a year like most Americans do either – could you believe that most insurance policies in the US need to be renewed every six months? Not only that, but almost all Americans prefer to pay their premiums on instalment instead of all at once – don’t they know that it’s more expensive to do it that way?
Well, they wanted to be their own country. I’m washing my hands of the whole thing.