We provide access to some of
the UK's biggest car insurance companies. These include Direct
Line car insurance that you won't find via any price comparison system
as they don't work with them. Despite this, Direct Line maintains a
sizeable share of the UK car insurance market based on attractive cover
at competitive prices.
In many ways, Direct Line's brave decision to go it alone is a laudable
one as they have chosen to have nothing to do with that erronious view
that car insurance companies can be effectively or sensibly judged on
price alone.
That said, the Virgin Money car insurance product that is banked by RBS
/ Direct Line does appear on price comparison sites; so they
effectively do maintain a relationship with price comparison sites via
this indirect route.
As most people are looking for the best value car insurance
companies, it can make sense to use a price comparison site to find
these. However, you need to use such services sensibly. Blindy buying
the cheapest-priced quote out of all the car insurance
companies presented is easy to do, it can even be tempting, but it's
ultimately an own-goal if you ever need to claim. Policies get to be
cheap by passing on costs to the consumer - that's many hundreds of
pounds in an accident.
We recommend consulting the websites of car insurance
companies directly even when you use a price comparison site to make a
fully informed choice. Central to the utility of the internet is the
ease with which you can do this sort of information gathering; so it is
not a step that you need to neglect or simply omit.
Most in the UK use a price comparison site to compare car
insurance companies online. When used in the above-outlined way, there
is much to recommend this approach, particularly as price comparison
sites are getting better at assisting with comparisons of policy
features as well as prices.
For those that need a better level of cover than the more basic of
policies, however, a lot of checking of individual car
insurance companies needs to occur when you deploy a price comparison
site to find quotes for you, as, if you start at the top and work your
way down their price listings, you will be numerous policies down
before your minimum requirements are met.
If you check the car insurance companies properly before
selecting, this begins to involve quite a lot of work and does, in
fact, make it more realistic to simply go direct to a market-leading
brand where better cover is presented with the standard policy.
Direct Line and M&S car insurance (the latter being the most
popular choice here) are good examples of direct car
insurance companies that typically meet this quality criterion.