WENDY KNOWLER | If you're not the regular driver, make sure you inform your insurance company

Question for car owners who are paying monthly premiums for comprehensive motor insurance: if someone else drives your car, will you be covered if the car is stolen or damaged while they have possession of the car keys?

If you’re named on the policy as the regular driver and someone has an accident while driving your car, the insurer may apply an extra excess, especially in the case of a driver under the age of 25, but they won’t reject the claim. However, they most definitely will if they find out you aren’t actually the regular driver any more, or perhaps never were. In other words, someone else spends more time behind the wheel of your car than you do in an average month.

If that’s what happened since you took out the policy and declared yourself as the regular driver, best you call your broker or insurance company immediately and correct that.

That’s because if you lodge a claim, the insurer will argue the premium was based on the wrong risk — you should have given them the opportunity to do their underwriting on the actual regular driver, not you.

It’s a similar story with your address — you need to tell your insurer if you move, because different areas carry different risks, statistically.

Like many others, Jackie — an SA Defence Force employee — didn’t think to tell her insurer, 1st For Women, when she was deployed to Lusaka, Zambia, five months ago, leaving her 22-year-old daughter to drive her car.

And when that car, a 2018 Toyota Etios, was stolen from church premises recently, the insurer rejected the claim, based on the fact Jackie is no longer the regular driver and the insured address had changed, too.

“They don’t want to pay out because I did not update my details on their system,” Jackie told me.

The reason stated for the claim rejection was: “The details of the regular driver of the insured vehicle were not correctly declared on your policy.”

“Can they really do that?” Jackie asked. “After all, my daughter is listed as one of the people who drive the car.”

Jackie is understandably distraught — the car hasn’t been recovered and she still owes her bank R166,000 in repayments.

Also in that rejection letter, 1st for Women list 11 client obligations, but the regular driver issue is not singled out for specific mention. Why not, I asked the insurer, given that my perception, based on my case studies, is that a great many claims are rejected because of this issue?

I also asked: “Is 1st For Women satisfied that it alerts its policyholders sufficiently with regard to informing the company should the regular driver change?

“Jackie, for one, clearly didn’t understand the significance of the changed risk relating to the regular driver.”

Seugnette van Wyngaard, who heads up 1st for Women, said had the insurer known Jackie’s young daughter had become the regular driver, a higher premium would have been charged — more than 52% higher, in keeping with the increased risk associated with an inexperienced driver. (It’s for this reason that some parents incorrectly and inadvisedly list themselves and not their children as regular drivers of the son’s or daughter's car — the premiums are far lower.)

“Although a small portion of our claims are declined because of ‘regular driver’ and it doesn’t feature on our top five reasons for declining claims, we do educate customers about it at sales stage and in the policy documentation,” Van Wyngaard said.

However, she conceded “more context” could “and should” have been given to Jackie in her rejection letter. “We’ll take this up with our communication team and ensure that going forward, it’s clarified in more detail,” she said.

The devil is in the fine print

If you’re wondering what those top five reasons for declining claims are, so was I. So I asked. More than once. Finally I got an answer. “We’re not comfortable sharing that info.”

What? Clearly it’s in the company’s best interests for people not to know.

Generally, insurers deny claims on the basis of the driver being unlicensed, driving under the influence of alcohol, not having had a tracking device installed, the regular driver issue and using their car for business, instead of solely for personal use.

And getting back to driver issues, as I warned a few months ago, some policies require policyholders to list “nominated drivers” as well as the regular driver, and if someone other than those nominated drivers has some kind of horrible incident while in possession of your car, the claim will be rejected.

Consider for a moment how risky that is, given how commonplace it is to ask a friend to run an errand in your car, if you’ve parked them in, or for a mechanic to take your car for a test drive during a routine service.

The devil is most definitely in the small print of those policies.

Insurance may be a grudge purchase, but it does buy us peace of mind — or so we think. Make sure you’re not unwittingly paying for nothing, as poor Jackie was.

• GET IN TOUCH: You can contact Wendy Knowler for advice with your consumer issues via e-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za or on Twitter: @wendyknowler.

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