Hi, this is Graham Hill and I'm the author of Electric Cars – The Truth Revealed and, as I've mentioned before, you can download a copy of the book by going to grahamhilltraining.com. You can also sign up for the training which will come out later in 2024. By ordering now you can get it at a ridiculously low price. It will be hundreds of pounds when it comes out as a stand-alone product so sign up for it now. I would add that I'm here to help. I'm not here to cause a problem or hinder people. I want to help everybody that I can to transition to electric cars.
If you're about to get yourself an electric car or you're thinking about doing it, then get a copy of the book, because it's going to be hugely beneficial to you, making sure that you insure everything you need to. So in the first podcast we spoke about the necessity to check the car insurance before you even think about buying a car. Make sure that you can afford the insurance premium because we've seen some premiums on electric cars as high as £5,000 a year. So you need to make sure that the premium is affordable before you order or buy the car. Okay, so this next one is about what you need to look out for in the policy to make sure that you've got the proper cover that you need for an electric car. People just assume that things are included in the policy to fully cover you in your new electric car. There are some specific things that you need to cover if you're thinking about getting an electric car. So the first thing is the charger, your home charger. Most people that buy an electric car have a home charger installed either inside their garage or located outside their home if they have off road parking spaces front of the building. You need to make sure that you've got the charger insured. Now some electric cars come with a free charger which you can have installed at your home. That doesn't necessarily mean that when you take out your car insurance it automatically includes the home charger as it was effectively part of the car like free mats. So you want to make sure that you've got it covered. You never know if the kids are going to kick the ball against the charger or you may drop a ladder against it. There's all sorts of accidents that can happen resulting in a claim. You may have bought your car a couple of years ago when the government was giving away charger grants, so you ended up paying about £350 for the charger gut it was just a standard charger. If you replace it now, you must replace it as a minimum with a smart charger which is likely to set you back over £1,000.
In fact I would suggest you go one step further and look into installing a bi-directional charger if you can afford it, because it's worth doing that now – something I'll talk about in a future podcast. So for the moment, if you get that opportunity to install a bi-directional charger and it can charge your current car, albeit not bi-directionally, it means you can move electricity out of your car into the house or onto the grid, using electricity that was charged at cheap rate overnight then use that cheap rate electricity stored in your car’s battery at times when you would normally be using peak rate electricity saving a lot of money. So it's a great idea. And now one or two car manufacturers are already producing electric cars that are capable of bi-directional charging others will follow suit as demand increases. Of the more popular cars, the Nissan Leaf is one that has bi-directional charging.
Once we start getting to the point where all cars have this bi-directional facility, you will benefit from already having the charger installed. Also useful in the event there are power cuts. So if you change your old charger for a smart charger, you've still got an old charger or you're having one installed because you're just buying a new electric car, then you want to make sure that the charger is covered by the insurance. You may find that your car insurance automatically covers the charger. Now, if it does, it will say in the policy or it may be a tick box that you tick to have the home charger covered when taking out your insurance and getting the quote. The cost could be an extra £20 per annum but you need to know what is covered. Is it just accidental damage or does it cover the charger simply not working? Now, if it's not covered by your car insurance and you can't tick a box to have it included in the car insurance, look at your home insurance. Don't assume that it's already covered, because the chances are that if you drop something against it and it breaks and you have to replace it, you may well find when you phone up your home insurance company that they turn around and say something along the lines of, ‘I'm sorry, it's not covered by your domestic insurance because you didn't tell us about it. We would have covered it and it would have cost you 10 pounds or maybe 20 pounds a year but you didn't tell us about it, so we're not covering it and unfortunately we're not going to pay out. So make sure that you've got the charger covered one way or he other.
Next thing to consider is the charging cable. All cars come with a charging cable and you need to make sure that they're covered for accidental damage. I know of people that have run over the cable connector on the floor of the garage which makes the cable unusable. You also want to make sure that you’re covered if the cable gets stolen. There are thieves with insulated snippers that will steal the cable whilst the car is charging and you are having a toilet break or having a coffee break. If the cables can simply be disconnected, i.e. not a fixed connection to a public charger they will steal the lead and sell it on-line. So you need to make sure that you're covered for damage and for theft. Also for third party, because if you've got your cable connected to, say, a roadside charger, and someone comes along and trips over it and injures themselves, there could be a claim against you. So make sure that the insurance covers you for third party claims, because these things are happening. So you need to make sure that you're covered.
Now I'm going to talk about a third thing and this is going to be a bit strange for most people because I'm going to talk about windscreen replacement. Because windscreen replacement is normally covered separately as part of glass cover and normally speaking you pay £70 - £100 excess and you can get the glass windscreen replaced. Now, with electric cars they cost six times as much, according to a company called Total Motion that's investigated all this and they said a normal replacement is, for petrol or diesel cars, around about £400. But it's around about £2,400 to replace an electric car windscreen. Now the reason for this high cost is that some of the screens are made of a different glass because they're better soundproofed as electric cars are so quiet. They've also got internal heating elements in them, so you've got a heated windscreen and you've also got a lot of cameras and sensors and so on that all have to be recalibrated if you replace the windscreen and don't try and get away with just having a repair done.
Generally speaking, if you're leasing the car and the same rules apply if you've got it on a PCP and you're going to send it back at the end of the contract, if you have a chip in the windscreen and you think you’ll just have it repaired because it's free. Don't do that, because if you do that and then you send the car back, they could refer to a term inside the contract that says you must replace the windscreen if there is a chip in the eye line with the eye line normally being the swipe of the windscreen wiper, so if the chip is within this space then you need to replace the windscreen. I was at a conference earlier in 2023, and I was talking to some guys working in the insurance industry and they were saying that the insurance companies are actually thinking of moving windscreen from glass cover into general accident cover, which means that if you make a claim, you're going to have to pay your full excess on the policy, and it could then affect your no claims discount. If you've got no claims bonus protection, you've lost one of your lives. You’ve normally got two lives, so you can make two claims and then you lose your no claims discount after that, but you will have lost one of those no claims protections because you've now made a claim for a replacement windscreen. The reason is the high cost of around £2,400. To put this reasoning into perspective, if you reversed into a lamppost, the chances are that the cost of repair would normally be say £1,500. And you would be expected to pay the excess of £200, £300, £500, whatever you've put in as your excess. You will have to pay that if the windscreen is replaced and it is now considered to be ‘accident damage’. So check your policy to make sure that it's still kept in the area of glass cover so that you're only paying £70 to £100 excess on it, and also that you don't lose your no-claims discount or one of your no claims discount lives if you have no-claims discount protection.
Whilst on the subject of no claims discount protection this is something I always recommend if you have managed to qualify for many years of no-claims discount. It's worth that extra little bit of money. It's not brilliant as the premium can still increase because you've made a claim, but the discount is still retained. Hopefully that makes sense. I'll go through that in a bit more detail in another podcast.
Okay, so those are the three main areas I would say you need to check when you take out your insurance on an electric car as opposed to a petrol or diesel car. Obviously, all the other car and accident related things are the same such as roadside assistance, hire car, accident management etc. so you make sure that all of the areas that you would normally cover in your car insurance policy are included in the electric car insurance policy. Make sure you've got your home charger covered, the cable covered for theft, for damage and also for third-party accident, and also then check the windscreen part of the policy to make sure that it is still part of the glass and not accident damage.
Who’d have thought eh that there is so much to know about insurance? And this is just one out of about 50 different topics and about 250 different questions that people ask in order to feel comfortable to make that transition. Again, these are the sort of things, if you're selling cars or if you're leasing cars you need to tell your customer because you have a duty of care under the consumer duty rules. Now, the rules are not specific and open to interpretation but is it worth taking the risk by not telling the customer. After all you don’t want to be at the wrong end of a court case because as a professional you didn’t give the customer enough information and you should have made him aware of what he needs to cover within his insurance policy. Okay, that'll do for now. I'll see you on the next one.