Lending your car may prove costly

MANY car insurance policies which allow others to drive your car have higher excess costs if the person is young or inexperienced.

Conduite exclusive policies do not allow lending at all but where you are allowed to lend the car and an accident occurs, a franchise prêt du volant (“lending the wheel” excess) is usually applied.

This is a higher-then-usual excess (ie. the part of the expenses that you have to pay before the insurance kicks in), and it may be multiplied several times if the person is a jeune conducteur or conducteur novice.

A conducteur novice is not always literally a young one - by law this is someone who has had a licence for less than three years or has not had insurance in their own name in the last three years.

Details can vary according to contracts eg. the periods can be two years, not three.

Where you regularly lend your car the person should be added to the policy as a conducteur habituel.

In the case of a young person this will involve higher premiums but in the case of an accident the franchise prêt du volant will not be applied.

If you do not, and the young person has an accident and the insurer finds they were using the car regularly, they could consider the contract broken.

If a young person borrows a car to travel to a holiday job, this is “raisons professionnelles” and could affect your insurance.

The extra cost of insuring a habitual novice user is a surprime, which can be up to 100% of the premium in the first year, decreasing in the second and third to 50% and 25%.

These maximums are halved for people who learned to drive using conduite accompagnée (involving lessons plus practice with an adult friend or relative) and are often lower for women.

Some insurers will repay the surprime if there is no accident in two years.

The surprime also applies where a young driver buys insurance for their own car but if they were a habitual user on another person’s contract this should be taken into account to reduce or cancel it.