Have your commercial auto premiums gone up? According to reporting by Trucks.com, commercial auto policy rates increased 5.4 percent in the first quarter of 2017. The post goes on to state a survey by the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers found 87 percent of respondents to its Q1 2017 survey reported a commercial auto policy rate increase with their latest renewal. If you’re among the operators with first-hand experience of this trend in commercial auto insurance, here’s why it’s happening.
Within this reason there is a silver lining for the economy as a whole. Basically, the recovery from the recession has unleashed a great deal of pent-up demand. Consumers are buying more goods, which means more merchandise is being shipped. This in turn means more traffic on the roads, which has lead to a rather significant uptick in accidents. The severity of accidents has also grown, which means even larger payouts for insurance companies. Exacerbating these are sharp increases in medical costs, which cost insurers even more money.
There has been a huge increase in the number of distracted drivers on the road. Modern cars are full of gadgets capable of drawing a driver’s attention away from the act of driving the car. Add to those the almost universal adoption of smartphones with text messaging capability and more and more drivers are looking away “for just a second” to attend to the binging, pinging and buzzing coming from their mobile devices. As an experienced driver, you know all it takes is one second for your life to go from blissfully peaceful to a seemingly never-ending nightmare of litigation when a collision occurs.
Modern cars are bristling with extraordinary new technologies to help drivers operate their vehicles more safely. However, when these items need to be repaired or replaced as the result of an accident, the costs can be quite high. A fender bender in an old school car used to be a simple matter of bodywork and paint. Now it’s bodywork, pint, sensors, cameras, antennas and etc. And, these parts have become increasingly expensive to procure.
The availability of skilled commercial drivers has failed to keep pace with the growth in demand—for a number of reasons. A bustling economy means more goods in transit, which requires more drivers. To keep things moving, a lot of companies are being forced to go with less experienced operators who are essentially learning on the job. When this is factored into all of the foregoing issues, the propensity for loss increases dramatically.
If your commercial auto insurance premiums have gone up, these issues are likely to be among the reasons. With that said, it’s always to your benefit to shop around for new commercial auto insurance quotes. At CoverHound.com you can get this done in one stop. Let the professionals there help you find the coverage your company needs at prices with which you can live. Try it today.
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