Hi

I was checking for car insurance premium at comparis.ch for my car model Grand Cherokee. I found that if I change just one field nationality from India to France then I pay approx. 1000 CHF less (or approx. 50% of what I would pay if the nationality field was set to India). By the way, I hold a swiss driving licence.

Is this normal? anybody in EF fprum have similar experiences?

Ashish

Yes, certain nationalities have fallen into high risk groups. Read recently the highest risk group of drivers are those of former Yugoslav nationality. Just for fun I checked the price on Comparis to insure an 18 year old with a new M3 BMW worth over 100,000.-chf. of Serb and USA citizenship. The Serb had a premium of over 10,000.-chf per year where as the American example would have paid around 5,400.-chf per year on the same car.

The part of the premium (Partial CASCO) that applies to damages / incidents caused by environment / animals / third party related also increases by 2 fold (for my car specs) based on the nationality! This is ridiculous. I asked comparis.ch and the insurance agency directly. Comparis.ch didn't respond and the agency gave me a vague unrelated reply.

In France, where I lived for so many years ... at least in paper, the laws of the land applied uniformly to all the residents in its soil.

Ashish.

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While I admit it's not entirely the same, do you think that bonuses for accident-free drivers and higher rates for those who repeatedly have accidents also is blind trust in statistics?

Isn't the whole game of insurance about discrimination by dividing people up into statistics?

I would guess that this is unlikely to change any time soon; the Swiss government sort of supports it in that drivers licenses from some countries are considered valid (and can thus be exchanged for a Swiss one) whereas licenses from other countries are ignored, forcing people to go through complete drivers examinations and such.

Is that really the case ? Think about what a young driver pays compared to an older person, or what a male pays compared to a female, even with the same track record.

If I am not mistaken the canton you live in also has a bearing. IIRC people with VS plates are most likely to have an RTA in Switzerland.

Also, health insurance is also more expensive in some cantons than others.

Insurance is all about statistics...in some cases that includes the issue of nationalities. Unfortunate? Yes. Discriminatory? Strictly speaking yes. Wrong? No...because that is the nature of insurance. People with a higher likelihood of filing a claim pay more. Fine by me.

My sister spent a year working in India. She was pulled out of traffic once by a police officer for breaking some minor rule, which everybody without exception was breaking, but she was singled out because she was an expat.

When she complained to the police officer that this was discrimination, he agreed, but said that's the way things are and that he was specifically instructed to watch for the expats. When she showed him her residency, proving that she was officially resident in India and employed by an Indian company, the policeman said that in that case she needn't pay the fine.

Which, if you've ever seen a philippino driver's exam, is not all bad.

I was trying very hard to word my post such that there no signs of approval or disapproval of the policy. :-)

To clarify, what I meant was young or old driver in France have same set of rules, irrespective of their nationality.

Once again, my intention was to highlight the difference, which in my personal opinion was unfair practice. I'm not interested in nailing any country or people. I hope one day the new generation of Swiss law makers will make this difference a thing of the past.

Ashish.

Seen the Top Gear Vietnam special?

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Ashish, I was wondering if you got this sorted out?

I was on the phone yesterday with my insurance co. about buying a car and told them that I have a Swiss licence and that I passed my drivers exam in the UK 18 years ago and switched to the Swiss one some 10 years ago.

Today, they received my documents and said that seeing as my nationality is not UK nor Swiss and non-EU, the insurance will cost Fr.600 more. Wtf?

Insurance costs are based on statistics. You'll find that women pay less than men too.

Car insurance is insuring a risk. Having a red passport to insure against dropped my premium.

You want to speak to someone who's done underwriting in insurance and potentially reinsurance to understand your dilemma

I understand that it is all statistics, but do all the companies interpret everything by the book or what? I mean, I learnt how to drive in the UK, passed my test in the UK, but simply because my passport is not a UK passport, I get penalized.

What if the situation is the other way round - say I have a UK passport, but passed my drivers test in a non-EU country. If my driving skill is based on my passport and not where I got my licence, would they charge me less?

I hear you but if you had GB nationality and a licence from some banana republic, you'd be happy right now.

Have you spoken to a person yet? I have a contact at Zurich who will maybe help you around issues like this as he's a human - PM me if interested.

In insurance you're guilty until proven to be innocent. You pay for belonging to a certain group of risk (gender, age, profession, nationality etc....). I find it also disgusting. I know Axa-Winterthur is using nationality to evaluate risk but not all insurances do it. I reduced my premium by changing to Helvetia.

It was funny...a strainer for a helmet, that doesn't even make a decent "brain bucket" as it will all seep out throught the holes.