Why didn't we have temporary car insurance 20 years ago?

Why are always so obsessed with our cars? They cost us a fortune to buy, maintain, put petrol in, tax and insure. We have demolished whole swathes of our historic cities in order to put in roads which have instantly become clogged up with nose to tail vehicles pumping out noxious fumes which are making us all impotent and destroying our lungs; but we still love them. And we probably always will.

There are two things which are threatening our love affair with our cars; the first is the price of petrol, the second is the cost of car insurance. Short of invading Arabia, there is little else we can do about the first one although it is quite possible that some time in the not too distant future the popular uprisings there may cause a reduction in the basic price of oil; but then again it may push it even further up. Either way, most of the price that we pay for petrol disappears in tax anyway so how much we get charged by the boys who actually pump it out of the ground will not make great deal of difference either way.

Now where insurance is concerned the whole thing becomes a little more murky. It is very easy to blame insurance companies for profiteering but the majority of them just do not make a profit on their car insurance business. Why? Well for some reason over the last few years we all seem to have been obsessed by 'compensation' and this single factor is costing the insurance industry megabucks. Since they are commercial organisations that need to make a profit, and not charities, the cost of all this has been passed on to people like you and I who are honest and would never dream of trying to pull a fast one on our insurers.

The insurance industry has responded by trying to get more business from us and this is very healthy! A small number of companies have experimented with a new product which is proved really popular with the public, and that is temporary car insurance. A site that sells this (I haven't tried them so I don't know how good they are! is newzoid.com. Another site which seems to concentrate on foreign visitors is www.temporarycarinsurance.ws. Under a temporary car insurance scheme motorists can cover a car for a short period of just a couple of days so, a couple of weeks or even a month, whereas back in the old days of the Stone Age we can only insure cars for a year! Needless to say, we have the Internet to thank for this; if we all had to go to talk to insurance brokers in the way we had to do only a few years ago every time we wanted something a little bit out of the ordinary this product would never have met the light of day, but now that we have chat rooms and forums it has become obvious that the demand is there for insurance on a temporary basis and enterprising managers of insurance companies have heard the call.

The days of having to put up with insurance products which are dictated to us by the insurers, rather than by the consumers, may well be coming to an end, and hopefully short-term/temporary car insurance will prove to be the thin end of the wedge.