777 | Date: Thursday, 28 Oct 2010, 12.07 | Message # 1 |
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User ID: 777
Joined: 18 Oct 2010
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| The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute recently released their findings on insurance losses for vehicles built between 2007 and 2009. Overall, sports cars seemed to cost insurance companies less than any other vehicle category, while small cars seemed to be the most costly. Let's get to the drum roll. The top 10 vehicles with the lowest overall insurance losses were: the Chevrolet Corvette and Corvette convertible, Mazda Miata, Volkswagen New Beetle convertible, Saturn Sky, Honda Pilot, Hyundai Veracruz, Honda CR-V, Subaru Outback and Toyota 4Runner. The worst, or those with the highest losses, were a collection of small cars and expensive luxury vehicles: the Mitsubishi Lancer, Cadillac Escalade EXT, Scion tC, Mercedes-Benz CLS, Chevrolet Cobalt coupe, Dodge Charger, Mercedes-Benz S-Class (long wheelbase), Pontiac G5, Chevrolet Cobalt sedan and Kia Spectra. Not one hybrid made the list for top 10 insurance losses in any category. The institutes rate vehicles on a scale where 100 points is considered average. A higher score is equated to a higher insurance loss, and vice versa. The data cover until May of this year, and split the losses into six categories: collision, property damage, comprehensive, personal injury, medical payments and bodily injury. With each category, vehicles are then separated according to their size. When taken at face value, the data don't say much. Just because a specific model has higher insurance claims than another — even when it comes to medical payments — doesn’t mean it's less safe. But scratch the surface and you discover that insurance losses are less about the vehicle and its protection or accident-avoidance capability, and more about the type of driver it attracts. For instance, in the institutes' “Mini” category, all the models included — the Chevrolet Aveo, Hyundai Accent, Kia Rio and Toyota Yaris — scored worse than average in the study, especially in the categories related to injuries. However, this is most likely because they are smaller, cheaper machines favored by relatively new, inexperienced drivers. On the flip side, the Smart fortwo scored substantially better than average numbers in most claim categories, with fewer injury-related and collision payments; undoubtedly, one reason for this is that the fortwo has been attracting an older, more experienced driver.
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