WHAT ARE CAR INSURANCE GROUPS AND HOW DO THEY AFFECT YOUR INSURANCE?

Car insurance can be one of your biggest costs to running a car, or one of the cheapest depending on many factors. In this article we will go over what can adjust this value.

One of the most important criteria when it comes to this is what insurance group your car has been placed in.

In this article we will cover how the insurance groups differ, what types of cars are in different groups, and what things can affect which group a car gets placed in.

Car insurance groups are used by the car insurance companies to determine how much the car you have should pay when it comes to insurance premiums - in total there are 50 car insurance groups your car can be placed in based on certain criteria of the car.

As a rough rule of thumb, the car is placed in lower down groups - Groups: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc... These tend to be cheaper to pay an insurance premium on, and the higher groups - Groups: 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 and 50, tend to be cars that have a higher premium attached to them.

Apart from buying a car that is placed in a lower band there isn't much you can really do to move down an insurance group. There are things that can move you up to a high group, such as modifying your car's performance metric, adding extras that would increase its value, or making it harder and more expensive to repair, would be good contenders to increasing the insurance group your car gets listed in.

Some things that could help a car move down a group are things that help to exceed the group's standard. So for instance if some extra security feature was added to the car this may help to reduce it down a band. These cars tend to get an extra letter added to the end of the group such as 7E - would be a car that exceeded for example the conditions of group 8, and as a result was put into group 7.

A car is placed into an insurance group based on many factors by members of the Association of British Insurers as well as the Lloyd's Market Association, and is known as the Group Rating Panel. The factors that affect what grade a car will get can include:

Bumper construction
Car's value and worth
Engine & Performance
Estimated costs for replacement parts
Safety features installed
Security features installed
What are the average costs and time to repair it

There are 50 groups in total.

The lowest insurance group a car can be placed in - and thus the cheapest - is insurance group 1.

This is a really low insurance group.

There are 50 insurance groups in total, so group 11 is relatively low.

Letters on an insurance group provide extra information about that car and why it has been classified in the group it has.

The letters you may commonly see are:

This means that the car meets all security requirements of the group it is in - example: 1A.

This means that the car has not satisfied the criteria of the group it should normally be in, and as a result has been moved up and meets all security requirements of the group it is in. An example would be a car that was initially graded to be a category 6 car, not meeting the criteria so has moved up to a 7D as a consequence.

An E in insurance groups, means that the car has exceeded the security requirement for a standard car of this type. Consequently, the group rating has been reduced – so for instance a group 14 car that exceeds the standard is listed as a 13E.

A G letter is assigned to cars that have been imported to symbolise this.

A P is for provisional data about the car and model you have.

This means that there isn't enough statistical data on the model yet to fully assign it another grade. Normally a P can get assigned to new cars while they are completing data in the rating system about that exact car and model.

A U means the car is unacceptable for the current group. This tends to be on cars that are significantly below the criteria for the grade. Consequently, some insurance companies may require the car to be upgraded with the latest security features for this model to be insured for instance.

If you are wondering if electric cars or EV's fall into a separate category, the answer is No, they don't fall into special insurance groups. They are placed into the existing groups 1 - 50 based on their criteria.

However, some electric cars can be placed higher up, due to the cost to repair, and replacing parts. With more parts becoming more frequent, and electric cars taking over a much larger market share than ever before this should see some of these cars move down grades moving forward as a result.

Car insurance isn't fully determined by what insurance group your car and model far in. That said cars in groups 1 - 9 tend to be the cheapest to insure, with cars in 1 having the highest chance of being the cheaper cars. These tend to be cars with small engines, inexpensive to repair, with the latest security features - and not modified to improve their performance metrics.

See our guide below to show cars that fall into this bracket.

What cars tend to fit into each insurance group?

We have put together this handy guide to give you some examples of what cars can tend to fit into the top 10 groups.