Electric Car Insurance, The Hidden Story
Have you ever wondered why insurance companies haven’t done more about electric cars? After all, hybrid drivers have been buying them for some time and the market is set to grow. Why wouldn’t insurance promote EVs and give great prices?
AAA’s Smart EV Fleet. You might not know this but AAA in California has one of the largest electric car, EV fleets with 20 Smart EVs. I set out to go online and find what AAA, as well as State Farms and Geico have to offer in terms of electric car insurance. AAA accompanied me through the inevitable 4 pages of delivering my personal information before I found they didn’t list the Leaf as an EV. The i MiEV wasn’t there for Mitsubishi and Tesla weren’t even listed. Ford’s electric Focus wasn’t listed yet, granted it is only coming out now. As far as State Farm, after 3 pages, I was surprised to see the Fisker Karma, the Tesla Roadster might not be available any longer but the Model S was, as well as the Nissan Leaf. No Mitsubishi i MiEV. Unfortunately the page is Java based and didn’t work on my Firefox and MacBook Air. Finally Geico, after reading I was less then 15 minutes away from a quote, led me through 3 pages showed me the Nissan Leaf. It would have taken at least another 2 pages before finding the rest of the information. It didn’t list Tesla, nor Fisker, nor even the Mitsubishi i MiEV.
Car Insurance Companies Lag In The EV Department. Of all insurances, AAA has a few useful tips and tricks for EV drivers. For instance, its new TripTik Travel Planner is a mobile app, designed for EV drivers that locates more than 2,000 publicly available EV charging stations across the country. While I use ReCarGo and PlugShare, this app includes independent stations as well as those part of a network. ReCarGo gives me the local network infrastructure while PlugShare shows me who is nice enough to share a plug. TripTik could replace the other two. AAA has an incredible advantage over other insurance companies when it comes to EVs. It has an EV recharging truck. It might seem strange the company has such a large EV fleet, an EV charging truck but very little when it comes to quotes for EVs. At the very least, it is ready for the future.
In all fairness, I did the quote search fairly quickly. After all, isn’t that what everyone does? If the average person doesn’t get results within 3 pages, the attention wanes and they go elsewhere. It seems insurance companies could play a decisive role in the adoption of electric cars now that even home charging permits are easy to get, shouldn’t a EV insurance quote also be?
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