Car insurance when you’re 17

Cars are each assigned to one of 50 car insurance groups based on their power, security, safety and value.

The higher you go up through the groups, numerically, the more expensive the vehicle will be to insure. If you want to keep costs down, group-one cars like the Volkswagen Up and Vauxhall Corsa are a good option.

Pay up-front

If you pay for your car insurance in monthly instalments, you pay interest on what is effectively a loan from the insurer. While it’s an outlay, if you pay for your policy upfront there’s no interest to pay, which makes it cheaper.

Telematics insurance, also known as black box insurance, is designed to help drivers with high premiums to bring their costs down by gathering information about how they drive.

It involves fitting a small, GPS, network-enabled device to your vehicle that sends data to your insurer about how you’re driving. Or with some insurers, you use an app on your phone.

The GPS logs your location, mileage covered and the times you drive. An accelerometer records speed, acceleration and deceleration and can tell your insurer how safely or aggressively you’re driving.

The insurer can then use this information to price your premiums in a more tailored way than a standard policy that just uses demographic data and penalises you simply for being 17.

There are some drawbacks to be aware of, however. Some telematics policies impose curfews on policy holders, with penalties for driving outside of sanctioned hours. For example, if you have a job with unsociable working hours you could be penalised for commuting.

And it might not always be cheaper.

It’s important to look at the terms of a telematics policy carefully to understand what is and isn’t allowed before signing up, and how much you’ll be rewarded or penalised for following or breaking the rules.

It’s possible to bring down the cost of cover by adding an older, more experienced driver to your policy and letting them use your vehicle. That said, you need to be careful about how you go about it.

The reason this lowers your premiums is because, in theory, sharing your vehicle with another driver reduces the time it’s available for you to drive, which means your risk of being involved in a claim is reduced.

However, if you will be the vehicle’s main driver then you must be the main driver on the policy, adding the more experienced driver as a named driver.

It may be tempting to add them as the main driver and declare yourself a named driver to take advantage of lower premiums. But this is not only misleading, it is illegal.

You can be convicted for fraud for ‘fronting’ your policy and you may struggle to find an insurer willing to provide you with cover in the future – affordable or otherwise.