Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Car insurance online

Because, being out of work at present, I’ve been applying for a lot of jobs lately, I’ve had to make mention of the fact that I once worked for State Insurance – back in the days when computers in offices were unheard of. How things have changed. Now you can ring my old insurance company and get insured on the phone. My old bosses would be turning in their graves, I suspect.

Even better is the idea of being able to go online and compare insurance companies. We’ve been able to do it here with banks and mortgages for some time, but I’m not aware that it’s possible in NZ to compare insurance companies with any ease as yet. In the States, however, there’s a crowd called CarInsurance.com who do a car insurance comparison for you. That would be convenient. When I last insured my car I changed insurers, and while it wasn’t hard to do over the phone, I certainly wasn’t able to compare their prices easily either with my previous insurers, or with any others on the market. This idea from CarInsurance.com sounds great, because you can actually receive quotes from many insurance companies – and with the number of insurance companies there must be in the States, this can only be a good thing!

Along with this comparison business there’s an another idea a car insurance company has come up with. Because HD DVD discs have about six times the capacity of the current DVD format, Progressive Direct, a unit of a U.S. auto insurer, has teamed up with Universal Studios Home Entertainment to do something on the HD DVD version of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift that sounds rather fun. You can choose to have a running tally of the vehicle destruction – in insurance cost terms. As the cars smack into one another in Tokyo, a display in a small window keeps track: "Roof repair: $209, taillights: $451, fender: $618.' The calculator is labelled Progressive Direct: Insurance Damage Estimates.

I’m not entirely sure what use you could make of it, except as one of those kind of I’m kind of curious about that sort of things. And whether most people who watch this kind movie would be interested in the cost of what’s happening as opposed to the mayhem, I’m not sure!

Apparently there are plans for incorporating all manner of extras of this kind into the new format DVDs. We wait with bated breath!

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