Posts tagged volkswagen

Top Ten Cars for Teens – Cheapest Young Driver Insurance

Updated June 2012 with latest prices

And additional cars which cost less to insure if you are a teenager.young driver insurance

There’s no getting away from it. Car insurance for 17 year olds is expensive. The simple fact is, the youngest drivers on our roads are, on the whole more dangerous, owing to their understandable lack of experience behind the wheel.

But if you are a young driver, there are things you can do to help yourself. First off, do an advanced driving course, like PassPlus, Btec level II, IAM, RoSPA or Max Driver. By getting extra skills and experience, you’ll be making yourself a safer driver and young drivers will save much more than the cost of the course on their first insurance premium.
get your teenage car insurance quote!Second, take a limited mileage policy if you can commit to driving less than, say 1500, 3,000 or 5,000 miles a year. This will save you money, and is a more convenient way of getting a discount than installing a “Pay as You Drive” black box into your car, where some insurers will discount for a limited mileage but can stop you driving at particular times of the day!!

Joining an owners club can drop your premium by up to 15%, parking your car in the garage will probably save you more than your dad, and fitting an alarm will bring down the premium too. Also adding a parent onto the policy will further reduce your premium.

So far, so good, but there are some factors you can’t, or are unlikely to change. You can’t make yourself any older, and you probably don’t want to move house just to get cheaper car insurance. So that leaves the car that you choose as the main factor in determining the price you will pay.

So what is the cheapest car to insure. We did some research and the result may surprise you.

The cheapest car to insure, for a teenage driver, is, by a country mile, the classic VW Beetle. Other classics have also done well, with the Ford Anglia coming in 3rd  and the Citroen 2CV6 coming 4th, but it’s not just a list of bangers with respectable modern motors like the Vauxhall Corsa, Peugeot 106 and the quirky Vauxhall Agila all doing very well.

Of course, not all classic beetles are all that old – production continued in Mexico and Brazil right up to 2003, and some enthusiasts import these to the UK enjoying the classic Beetle styling and air-cooled power, with a few (slightly) more modern creature comforts. Check out mexibugs, for more details.

And you know where to come for classic beetle insurance!
And for young driver insurance too!

Here is the list of cars, you’ll notice that almost all of them are low powered 1 litre engines – if you go for a more powerful car too soon, your premium will accelerate faster than your car, for example, if that Renault 5 at number nine were the turbo version, the premium for a bloke would be £4,000, so watch out. All the quotes below are for Third Party Fire & Theft Cover for a 17 year old driver living in a moderate-to-low risk area in a white collar occupation and assume the car is valued at less than £5,000.

 

Car model / engine size Male Female
Volkswagen Beetle (old shape, up to 1600cc) 1450 1000
Peu107 1.0 1880 1150
Ford Anglia 1000cc 1890 850
Citroen 2CV6 1950 1000
Vauxhall Agila 1000c 1980 1500
Vauxhall Corsa 1000c 1980 1500
Hyundai Amica 1000c 2030 1530
Hyundai Atoz 1000c 2030 1530
Fiat 126 0652cc 2030 950
Austi Mini 1000cc 2150 1150
Citroen C1 1000cc 2170 1200
Renault Clio 1149cc 2220 1630
Daewoo Matiz 1000cc 2200 1680
Peugeot 106 1000cc 2250 1700
Fiat uno 1000cc 2250 1500
Fiat Panda 1000cc 2250 1700
Volkswagen Fox 1200cc 2280 1290
Suzuki Alto 1000cc 2350 1770
Volkswagen Lupo 1000cc 2350 1550
Seat Ibiza 1000cc 2350 1680
Daihatsu Cuore 1000cc 2600 1640
Toyota Aygo 1000cc 2600 1120

VW fanpages from HIC

Our colleagues at HIC have put together some squidoo lenses which have something for any Vee Dub fan who decides to check them out. For aircooled fans there are lenses on VW Beetle, VW Camper & Bus & VW Karmann Ghia, while watercooled VW fans are catered for with lenses on VW Golf & Golf GTi, VW Corrado and VW Scirocco stuff, with Polo, Passat, Bora and Lupo lenses in the pipeline.

Check out the Herts blog as well, for the pics and news from their visits to VW shows over the past few weeks.

Robo VW Passat struts its stuff

robot volkswagen passat
Obviously Herbie, the possessed Beetle, hasn’t put Volkswagen of the idea of giving their cars a mind of their own. Yesterday a highly modified VW Passat went on show at the Science Museum. The advanced teutonic driving wizardry is part of the Team LUX entry into the DARPA Urban Challenge, a competition run by the US military with the aim of finding a car capable of driving itself through urban environments. Then they’ll presumably build themselves an army of robotic tanks like something out of Robocop.

The LUX Passat cost a whopping £1m to put together, which is expensive, even for a VW, but the money will have been well spent if their technology is used for any commercial or military applications, and, who knows, perhaps your car will be driving itself within a few years.

Team Lux say:

Team-LUX has chosen a production car for the DARPA Urban Challenge – a VW Passat 2.0 TDI built in 2006. The autonomous control equipment is fully integrated into the vehicle. This makes the Team-LUX the first ever to enter the DARPA Challenge with a car that looks exactly like a standard road model, mostly without visible extensions such as sensors, antennas or processing systems.

The vehicle is equipped with three Ibeo laser sensors or “intelligent eyes”: two at the front of the vehicle and the third in the rear, giving the car 360° vision. No other sensors of any type are required!

We’re not sure whether we could find an underwriter to accept a robot as a named driver, but we reckon it’s got to be a pretty good risk. It will, presumably, need to pass a driving test before we have to worry about that, though.

Cars are definitely getting more and more advanced, but, thankfully, there’s nothing quite like the Dancing / Ice Skating Citroen Robots just yet.