Many of my friends in the UK have been complaining recently of the cost and difficulty of insuring their 17yr old offspring to drive the family car, with quotes in the two to three thousand pound range being normal.
Luckily for now car insurance woes are a few years off for me (18yr age limit in Spain) but scooter insurance for a 15yr old has similar challenges.
Most companies simply say no, some you can almost hear laughing down the phone, then there are the agents who suggest named riders on parents policies, which currently is not allowed under Spanish rules.
Some of the suggestions made were:
1 Insure the scooter in the name of a parent with the 15yr old as a named rider. This would be OK if the parent was the main user of the vehicle and the 15yr old rode occasionally.
2 Insure in the name of the parent and not list the 15yr old, If the 15yr old has an accident, insist that the cover was for the bike not the rider and the company will pay out anyway. This sounds highly suspect and amazingly was suggested by an insurance agent.
3 Insure the 15yr old as the sole rider and owner of the machine. This is the option that should be taken but is obviously the most expensive and difficult to achieve.
After a few hours of web surfing and phone calls to general companies as well as motorbike and scooter specialists we had a winner in Mapfre who not only where willing to take on a 15yr old with his own policy, with him as the owner/rider, but they also came in at a reasonable amount of €475. Granted this is third party only with the scooter garaged at night but after the first couple of hours we were beginning to think that insurance would be impossible.
Related Articles
- Project 15 Part 1 Introduction
- Project 15 Part 2 Driving Licence
- Project 15 Part 3 The Bike
- Project 15 Part 4 Insurance
Spanish Motorcycle Licence Changes
