1ºAngie Birdie Carbray This is not about not paying claims. Insurers pay if Kias and Hyundais are stolen while insured. This is about not insuring cars with a high likelihood of being stolen. How would you like being a Honda owner and having to pay an extra $200 or $300 more for insurance to pay Kia owners when their car gets stolen especially since Kia KNEW this was a problem years ago and didn't fix it like every other car manufacturer did. Insurers are looking out for the 95% of their policy owners who don't own Kias. Where I live a police chief of a small suburb said his department got 20 stolen car reports last month and 19 we're Kias. That's a problem.
2ºAngie Birdie Carbray Ye that's why I only carry minimums on my truck. No comprehensive coverage, just what the law requires I carry. My insurance bill is something like 20-25 bucks a month.
'course my truck is also 40 years old and I paid $500 for it when I bought it in 2007, so that also helps. Insurance companies see someone insuring something like that and just shrug, go 'meh just give 'em the minimums for the minimum it ain't like they'll be alive enough to claim damage on that thing in a wreck anyway'.
Also, my truck is stickshift, so thieves won't be able to steal it even though it's very very easy to bypass the ignition lock in it. Take all of 30 seconds to get direct access to the actual switch itself, but because that extra pedal's under the dash, it doesn't do the thieves any good. Plus it's also old enough to have a carb, so even if they do manage to figure out that pushing the extra pedal down allows it to crank over, it probably won't start because they won't know the Ways of the Greybeards like I do.
3ºKenny Blankenship Insurance is meant to protect you from getting everything taken from you. If you have minimums of say $20,000 and you badly hurt somebody badly in an accident, do you think they and their lawyer are going to go away? No, they're going to take the insurance money and then make you pay for the rest of their damages from your own assets. They'll take as much of your stuff as possible including your future earnings if necessary. If you want to keep your house, bank accounts and future earnings you should consider getting more insurance not less.
4ºAngie Birdie Carbray You are misunderstanding the story. This is not about insurers not paying claims. In every case of a stolen Kia that was insured the insurer paid the claim. But now that Kias are such a high risk insurers are not insuring them. You do realize that an insurer can't pocket millions when it's not selling insurance, right? The problem now is that insurers could sell Kia owners insurance but the price would be very high, commensurate with the really high risk right now but then people would complain about the price. It's not fair for owners of other cars to have to pay unfairly high prices when Kia deliberately decided to increase their profits by not including a $300 feature included in every other car. Kia's decision to pocket millions and not tell you it didn't include engine immobilizers should be what makes you mad. Insurers had nothing to do with that.