Insurance is all about safety. When you insure a particular object, you buy financial security for situations when this object gets damaged or destroyed. And it's logic that if there's a higher risk of damaging this object, you'll have to pay more to the insurance company. That's how car insurance works, and that's exactly the reason why you get different car insurance quotes for different cars. The risk of having a crash or theft is higher with some cars and lower with the others. And what's great about this factor is that it can be effectively controlled with the scope of optimizing your costs and getting more competitive car insurance quotes. There's an easy way to do it.

Security of a vehicle has two main aspects. First of all, it concerns the safety of people inside it, which is assured with different gadgets and features such as belts, air bags, special braking systems and so on. The other aspect of security is the safety of the vehicle in question, which concerns theft probability and other potential damage to the vehicle. This aspect can be improved by installing alarm systems and keeping your car in a secure place such as your garage. All these things look pretty much evident to most drivers, however it's surprising how often they are overlooked by car owners. And that's a huge mistake, because these seemingly minor improvements can result in substantial decrease of car insurance quotes.

Even if your car doesn't have all the necessary features to make it really safe from the insurer's point of view this doesn't mean that it cannot be made this way on your own. Just look at the abundance of various alarm systems, anti-theft devices, additional belts, and safety gadgets sold online or at any specialty shop. Some of them may cost only several dozen dollars but can reduce your insurance costs really effectively. It is important, however, to make sure that the insurer will accept the exact gadgets you want to install, as insurance companies tend to certify only specific gadgets and models when granting security-related discounts.

How much money can you save this way? Well, it usually depends on the particular insurer and the number of improvements you make to your car. If you only install a basic alarm system, it can be a minor discount of several percent. But if you install a whole bundle of safety features and keep your car in the garage instead of the driveway, then your car insurance quotes can drop by up to 20% depending on the company you quote with.

You see the commercials on tv all the time "Cheap car insurance", or "Disappearing deductibles". Even as you are trolling on the internet to find reliable auto insurance quotes there are advertisements flashing in the sidebar for you to compare the rates with the xyz company who promises to get you started for only $20.00 down payment. Stop, don't click, you can't even fill up the tank of rider mower for $20 so don't be expecting great things from the $20 down payment.

Insurance is risk management. You have to have some means to cover any financial burden you could cause another if you caused them personal harm or property damage. Insurance is the legally accepted way to do that. Most folks don't have a bank account just sitting there waiting for the bad day, so we pay a premium and hope we never have to collect. The insurance companies take our premiums, invest them, and make money on it, all the while hoping they never have to pay out. Accidents do happen, and they do pay out; so they collect data to understand who and what is more likely to be a payout situation.

Armed with this data before you go looking for a car, you have a much better assessment of what your auto insurance quotes for the car will be like. You can go to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety website. There you can learn how this nonprofit organizations runs another organization called the Highway Loss Data Institute, which has the job of collecting and review everything about accident statistics regarding the costs of the accident. (To the insurance industry, these numbers represent monetary loss).

You can freely review the data on accident losses. It is grouped by: Two-Door, Four-door, Luxury, Sports, SUV's, Pickups, Station wagons/minivans. Then broken down again where applicable like: micro, mini, small, midsize and large. Then listed by make, It breaks down personal injury, medical payments, property damage and more giving you easy to read ratings like "substantially better than average" and "substantially worse than average". Picking a car in rated substantially better than average will get you auto insurance quotes that are reasonable. Pick a model that you love but it is in the substantially worse than average and it probably doesn't matter how many quotes you compare it will be expensive to insure. After reviewing the data you might just change your mind and find a car that suits your needs better.

If we go back to the 1980's, about half all sixteen-year olds applied for licenses on their birthdays. That reduced to less than 30% in 2010. As you know now getting a license to drive at 16 is no longer the automatic rite of passage it used to be. Ignoring the cost problems, the popularity of the internet and hand-held technology means teens can get together virtually. There's not the same pressure to actually meet each other face to face.

At a national level, there's also a significant reduction in the number of miles we drive. The vehicle miles traveled has been falling over the last ten years. That's a sort of welcome relief for parents as the injury and death statistics for teens in vehicles is alarming. Putting beginners into situations where there's a high element of danger, it's hardly surprising they make mistakes and injure each other.

For calculating the auto insurance rates, every newly licensed driver is given inexperience points. Should they pick up a ticket or make a claim, there's an increasing chance they will be forced out of the voluntary and into the assigned risk market. This will almost certainly occur if they are caught drunk or affected by drugs. The only way to loose these points is to go through years without a claim.

When a teen has a driving license, the parents must decide whether to add the name to their family policy. If there's any chance the inexperienced driver may drive a family vehicle, failure to insure will be counted as a form of fraud and the policy will be cancelled. But if the teen buys a vehicle in his or her name, a separate policy can be issued. Naturally, it will be more expensive than adding the name to the family policy, but it does teach responsibility to a young driver when the auto insurance rates react so precisely to the way the vehicle is driven.