Confused.com > Reviews (32)

I'm a bird, I drive a Lotus and I use it for work. All in all a bit of a recipe for disaster if you're looking for cheap insurance. So when THAT time of year came around and my quote was £1,000 or thereabouts I decided that before signing on the line I'd check out the web. I found Confused.com via Google.

USING THE SITE

When entering the information, I found the screens pretty straightforward, if a little slow. My car came up without any problems as did my address. I work for myself. I therefore had problems with the job page, it didn't really like the concept that I was self employed and kept asking for an employer. My husband, the second driver, is also self employed, which led to a repeat performance and certain amount of cursing.

I always experiment with job titles when I do these forms because often by calling your job a different name you end up in a category which is considered more reliable. I don't mean you lie, but here's an example. One of my friends is a mechanic. The garage is his family business, he is the manager and he employs five staff. He discovered that by calling himself a Manager instead of a Mechanic he could reduce his premium by about 10%. His insurer suggested it and explained that since he is the manager it's not a lie either, it just never occurred to him that it would make any difference. I had encountered the same thing when I worked for an employer since I could put Marketing Manager or Manager, Transport, both of which were true. As far as I can remember Manager, Transport, was a tiny bit cheaper.

As you can imagine, now I'm a sole trader I look at the options even more carefully. Since it's just me, I can be the manager, an executive or the director of my enterprise if I want, so I tend to ask for quotes for all of those things and then I call myself whatever title gives me the cheapest premiums. They definitely need to update a few of the job descriptions on confused.com or make it a bit more flexible but, having said that, the job title doesn't seem to make too much difference to the premium.

I also experimented with my expected business miles - I'm a start up so there could be a significant variation in the mileage I do depending whether or not my business takes off, so I needed quotes which would give me costs for a bad year, a good year and a blummin' good year.

The result, I ended up with about 5 identical profiles, each with a slightly different price. In order to see which one was which I had go to through the information screens all over again or I wouldn't be sure what I'd said to get the cheapest quote..... In the end I had to bin them all and start again... settling for a good year on the business mileage front.

RESULTS

I got my e-mailed quotes within about 10 minutes and discovered that for £675 or therabouts, Diamond Insurance were about £300 cheaper than my current insurer and £50 cheaper than the nearest competing quote. Interstingly enough, Diamond, like Elephant, is a trading name of Admiral.

It would appear that unlike most large multi-nationals Admiral's policy is to allow itself flexibility by splitting itself up into a number of smaller, specialist companies rather than going for the Direct Line style corporate monolith approach.

The result is much more flexibility for Admiral, who are happy to insure my car via Diamond, as opposed to Direct Line, who won't.

Diamond is specifically aimed at women motorists and they were absolutely excellent. I rang the call centre once I'd got a quote number from Confused.com and they went through the details with me, confirmed it was Class 1 business use, I paid by credit card and that was that, all sorted. My proof of no claims bonus was requested when they sent the covernote and they even gave me a pre-paid envelope to send it in.

It's a lot of money, but don't forget, it IS a Lotus, it's not garaged, it's parked on the road each night and I am insuring it for Business use.

I was very impressed and would recommend both Diamond and confused.com to anyone.