Who gets the cheapest car insurance?
You can’t have avoided noticing all the ads for these new black boxes. Low mileage drivers pay the least and get the Nirvana of cheap car insurance. Well, as if you needed an incentive to stay at home with the car in the garage, petrol and diesel prices are due to rise again. So even when the Olympics finish and we recover from the thrill of our great athletes winning all those medals, we might just as well stay on the couch. Before the Olympics, there had been weeks of petrol falls from the peak of 142p per litre in April to the current average of 130p per litre (diesel is averaging 137p). But wholesale prices have been going up and these will be passed on at the pumps.
Did you see the other day that the Bank of England is convinced inflation is not a threat. That’s reassuring, isn’t it! That means there will be no wage increases to cover our driving costs when the price increases trickle through to us. And not just to us, of course. All the goods we queue up to buy in our local shops have come by road, so all the prices will go up when pump prices rise.
Then there’s the slow spread of toll roads to think about. In another triumph for the Coalition, it’s proposing to to start imposing tolls on improved existing roads. Twenty miles of the A14 in Cambridge are now likely to be expensive to drive if current plans go ahead. We’re used to the idea of new capacity in our road system being tolled, but this is another broken promise from the Government. Except this complaint makes us all very old fashioned. By staying home we can really get cheap car insurance . If we insist on using expensive fuel to drive long distances on major trunk roads, we’ve no reason for complaint. If you use public infrastructure, you have to pay for it. The fact we drivers have been paying licence fees with the hope this money was improving our roads is like prehistoric. In our Big Society, everyone stays home and uses Skype to stay in touch.