Centrist
The Boston Globe reports on a Cambridge mechanic who has installed his car’s steering wheel in the exact center of its dashboard.
I was particularly intrigued by this comment:
When he went to purchase car insurance he was told the premium would be $3,000 because the vehicle was so “unusual.” That was too steep for him, so he decided to keep the car strictly as a piece of spiritual artwork alongside dozens of other sculptures adorning his auto repair shop, Aladdin Auto Service.
How was this $3000 sum dreamed up? Are there actuarial tables for “unusual vehicles” — has someone calculated the average risk entailed by driving, say, a car that converts into a boat? Or is there a standard “nutty artist rate,” like for those goth hearses you sometimes see, or that “pedal car” that was in the news a while back? Come to think of it, I wonder what the insurance premium is for driving a right-side-drive car in the U.S.? Are those less safe because of the awkward fit with our roads, or does the driver increase his vigilance?
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 25th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
What about all the postal delivery trucks that are RH drive?
March 27th, 2009 at 9:55 am
I think perhaps that you’ve answered your own question. There is no such data as to what the insurance would actually cost for that vehicle. If the agent was honest, then he/she would have quoted the “full monty” price in the hopes of making sure that no matter what they would be covered. If the agent wasn’t, then he/she would have picked a price they figured would be too high for the driver to pay to make them go away.