Is it better to get fleet insurance or insure your vehicles separately? Find out here
If your business has a number of vehicles you have two options when it comes to insurance.
Insure each vehicle separately, or insure every vehicle under one policy – known as a fleet insurance policy.
But which one should you get, and are there any advantages to insuring all your vehicles under one policy, rather than having multiple policies for each vehicle?
Why fleet insurance makes more sense for your business
- Less administration
If you insure each vehicle in your business individually, that means each car, van, bike or any other vehicle will all have their own policy start and end date.
If you add more vehicles to your business during the year, this will add more start and expiry dates for you to keep track of.
Not to mention the hassle during the process of completing each individual insurance application.
Eventually keeping track of insurance policy end dates can become an administration nightmare.
And if you miss a renewal and one of your company vehicles is involved in an accident without insurance, it could end up being a very costly mistake.
With a fleet insurance policy, all your vehicles can be covered under one policy, so you only have one renewal date to keep track of.
- Flexible contracts
We’ve already touched on this one a bit.
As your company grows and you add more vehicles to your fleet, without fleet insurance it means organising and paying for more individual insurance policies.
With fleet insurance, you have a single policy for all your vehicles and only one start and end date to keep track of.
And when the time comes to add more vehicles to your fleet, you can simply add them to your existing policy.
- Save on costs
Another benefit of fleet insurance is the significant savings you can make through insurance premium discounts by putting multiple vehicles on a single policy.
If you only insure each vehicle individually, the broker is not really in a position to negotiate a discount because it’s a single vehicle policy.
However, the more vehicles you want to add to the policy, the more likely the Insurance Broker will be able to negotiate a reduced rate.
And the more vehicles you add, the bigger the potential discount and savings.
- Greater flexibility on drivers
If you insure a single vehicle, then you have to designate an individual driver, named drivers or any driver over a certain age – this will ultimately effect the cost of the policy.
This can quickly become inconvenient and a detriment to your business because it severely restricts the way you can use your vehicles and who can drive them.
Under a fleet insurance policy, the vehicles are insured (rather than the individual drivers) which gives you greater flexibility over who can drive which vehicles.
If a driver calls in sick, you can just assign another driver to their vehicle until they’re back.
This is especially useful for companies which don’t assign vehicles to individual drivers and assign driving jobs ad hoc during the day.
- Get the same level of cover as regular vehicle insurance
While offering you greater flexibility around the cost, administration and driver assignments of your company’s vehicles, fleet insurance still offers you the same levels of insurance you would be offered from regular, single vehicle insurance.
Depending on the level of insurance you need you can get a policy from third party, to third party, fire and theft to fully comprehensive.
When wouldn’t a fleet insurance policy be beneficial?
While fleet insurance can be highly beneficial for most businesses, there might be times when it’s better to stick with a single vehicle policy.
Usually the main factor in deciding this is the size of the fleet you want to insure.
The biggest discounts go to larger fleets, so if you only have a small fleet and a few drivers, it might be worth sticking with single vehicle policies until you use more vehicles, or want to insure more than one driver per vehicle.
You might also need to be careful about using fleet insurance if some of your drivers use your commercial vehicles for personal use.
Find the right fleet insurance policy with Rigby Insurance
Our team of business insurance experts have helped hundreds of companies find the best deal on fleet insurance policies for their company.
We’ll work with you to find out whether fleet insurance is right for you, and then help you find the best deal based on what you need and your budget.
Talk to one of our experts today and start saving money on your commercial car insurance.