I read with great interest the letter ''The insured carry an unfair burden" (March 7), by Gari Dombo, regarding uninsured drivers, and would like to add my thoughts from a different perspective.

When I arrived in South Africa from the UK about 10 years ago, I was astounded that car insurance was not compulsory. The law used to be, and I think it still is in the UK, that it is a legal requirement to have basic car insurance. In addition, you could not obtain insurance unless you had an MOT (roadworthy) certificate. An uninsured driver would be subject to a fine, endorsements on the licence, and even a ban.

This raises the question of unroadworthy cars in South Africa. How is it possible to buy a new car and have it for 20 years and only have it legally checked when you sell it? The new owner can then keep the car for another 20 years, and is only required to have it rechecked when it is sold. This is assuming that someone wants to buy a 40-year-old car.

It's amazing to think that a car can be driven for that long and is only required to be checked twice for safety.

Our policy is not preventative. Only after an accident do we find out that the car was unroadworthy. Let's get our priorities right and prevent accidents from happening.

We must not focus only on taxis and buses; all vehicles must be checked for safety at least every three years.

In the UK, after a car is three years old, it is a legal requirement to have it checked every year for the rest of its life. This law ensures that your car is safe.

If it wasn't so serious, you would laugh to think that we must queue pointlessly for hours every five years to renew our driver's licences, and then walk out and get into a death trap. Given the horrendous death toll on our roads, it seems that what needs to be done is a no-brainer. If cars were safer, money from the Road Accident Fund could be used fill in potholes, making our road surfaces safe as well.

As Dombo points out, revenue increases made by mandatory third-party insurance will enable our insurance companies to lower their premiums and increase the benefits to those who do not claim.

At a very basic level, third-party insurance must be made mandatory for all South African drivers. - Barry Gurney, technical operations manager, Delfini Solutions (Pty) Ltd

• Self-serving, cynical sales talk

The article by Gari Dombo refers. I find this kind of sales-talk and attitude from the insurance industry (I am quite sure the industry as a whole shares Dombo's sentiments) rather cynical, to say the least. Firstly, Dombo brands all uninsured drivers as always the guilty party in all accidents. Secondly, he conveniently forgets to mention how insurance companies treat uninsured accident victims brought into their predicament by "insured" careless and negligent drivers.

Some time back, a newspaper carried a "success story" of how a supermarket delivery vehicle veered into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The resulting damage was not accepted as liability by the insurers because the driver had avoided a sudden obstacle on his side and as such was not the cause of the accident. But the insurers eventually agreed to pay the accident victim at least a portion.

I would like to present my own experience. A driver of a delivery vehicle, by not keeping an appropriate following distance and proper look-out in heavy traffic, slams into the vehicle in front, pushes it onto me on my motorcycle in the next lane, tossing me onto a Mercedes-Benz, and then onto a VW Golf. I was injured and my motorcycle was written off. The owners of the delivery vehicle (naturally their insurers) don't accept liability ''because their driver says he's not guilty". They have the accident report, witnesses' reports, and so on. Then: "There is no driver by that name employed by ... owners of the delivery van. " The most stupid and illogical excuses. Sure, I was not insured, just short of retirement. I have battled to get the insurance company to pay for five years. - Günter Wittenburg, Deneysville