jont- wrote:TheInsanity1234 wrote:The dealer also very kindly offered to throw in free rubber mats (incredibly useful in the Yeti) if I purchased the "return to invoice" insurance for £349. The mats were £40, meaning the insurance was only £309 in real terms
I suspect you could find GAP insurance significantly cheaper elsewhere had you shopped around. Dealers love these extras (diamondbrite/supaguard etc paint protection is another common one). £50 if that cost to them, mark it up to a couple of hundred then offer the punter a "discount" on it
Anyway, hope you enjoy your new car. I think until I passed 30 I never really found my insurance getting much cheaper, I just bought faster cars
I have yet to actually purchase the GAP insurance, I decided to leave it until I pick the car up before making my decision.
I've been doing a spot of research today, and found I could get a Return To Invoice policy from Direct Gap (first one in the google results) which is the same as the one offered from the dealer for... Wait for it... £95. That, plus £40 for a set of rubber mats is still much cheaper than £349 plus free rubber mats!
Hell, I could get an even better policy where they'll pay you the difference between the cost of the car at the point of purchase, and the pay out from the insurance policy. Effectively, this means (their example) if I PCP a car with a list value of £20k, and it was a total loss 24 months later, and I still had £10k of finance outstanding, and the insurance company would only pay out £7k, DirectGap would then pay me £13k, meaning I end up settling the outstanding £10k of finance and getting £10k to use towards a replacement car. For a Citigo, the quoted price was £129 for 3 years... Bit of a no brainer, if I'm honest.
However, the policy will either cover the difference between the insurance pay out and the list value of a car with the same specification, OR the difference between the insurance payout and the total outstanding finance, whichever is greater. This does mean I can't go and get the car, then crash it within 3 weeks and get a nice big deposit towards another car, as the outstanding finance would probably be more than the list value of the car at that point in time!
But yeah, I'm surprised I didn't have a go at haggling the dealer down to give me a discount on the list price of the car. Probably just overwhelmed by the excitement of getting my own car