Insuring Your Sports Car

For avid car connoisseurs, there are few things more thrilling than driving a high-performance sports car. The lightning-quick acceleration, breakneck top speeds, and eye-catching design of sports cars can make them hard to resist. Regrettably, auto insurers are not quite as enthusiastic about high-performance vehicles. Statistically, sports cars are higher accident risks, which means they will invariably cost more to insure than other vehicles. For this reason, finding an affordable way to insure your sports car can be challenging. In this post, we’ll explain why sports cars are so expensive to insure and what you can do to keep your premiums at a minimum.

Why Sports Cars Have Higher Insurance Costs

Insurers base the premiums for individual vehicles on the claims risk they represent. Sports cars pose a higher claims risk for several reasons that we’ve outlined below.

• Collisions. Obviously, if you drive a 480-horsepower Porsche 911 Turbo, you’re much more likely to speed than if you drive a four-cylinder, 140-horsepower Honda Civic. When you speed, your chances of an accident increase dramatically. This helps explain why, statistically, sports cars tend to be involved in more accidents than other vehicles.
• Theft. High-performance vehicles tend to have higher overall values than other cars as well as more valuable parts. Given that fact, they are usually magnets for theft. More theft claims mean insurers have to raise their rates to compensate for losses.
• Young drivers. If you are under 30 and drive a sports car, you will probably pay some of the highest premiums of all vehicles and drivers. Young drivers have higher premiums because they are more likely to be involved in accidents, and when you combine this risk with that of accident-prone sports cars, you get sky-high insurance rates.

How to Insure a Sports Car Affordably

If you drive a high-performance vehicle, you don’t necessarily have to resign yourself to the fact that you will pay outrageous premiums for as long as you drive the car. Here are some things you can do to make your insurance costs more manageable:

• Don’t modify your vehicle. Enhancing your car’s performance with post-factory modifications will cause your rates to skyrocket. Keep your car as it was when you bought it.
• Lose the PIP coverage. If you carry personal injury protection (PIP) coverage and have decent health insurance, you can probably jettison the PIP coverage. You’ll cut your premiums down substantially by doing so.
• Wait until you’re older. You may have a powerful hankering for a sports car in your twenties, but you won’t be so eager to receive your auto insurance bills if you end up buying one. If you can, wait until you’re 30 or older to buy your sports car so your premiums are not so unreasonable.