Future generations may well look back on our era and laugh about the way in which we are so obsessed about careering up and down the country in machines weighing anything up to half a ton, learning a scarce natural resource and producing air-pollution which shortens people's lives. Whilst they are at it, they may also roll about laughing about the way in which our insurance industry works!

Here, in the 21st-century, our insurers use exactly the same types of actuarial techniques they used 200 years ago. Forget about the fact that we can now track the driving behaviour of every driver in the world via satellite navigation systems (and please do not talk about privacy concerns, they were all destroyed by Google years ago) and yet people are still bracketed into categories when the risks of them having an accident are calculated. This will change, the only question is when.

All is not lost, and insurance companies are slowly recognising that the times are changing and they need to adapt if they are going to keep on getting our business. New products have been brought out and one of the most exciting is temporary car insurance (see www.newzoid.com), which was introduced as a result of the demand by motorists to have cover for shorter periods than the conventional twelve-month policy. This is proved a real winner for those farsighted companies who have embraced the new technology which allows them to not only give a firm quotation to applicants who simply fill in a form online, not only to issue them with documentation immediately, but to also put in place insurance cover from the moment that an applicant has accepted a quotation, and paid for it.

This differs so much from the old days when we had to talk to a broker, the broker had to approach several insurance companies, we had to be given (usually several days later) a proposal, and then once we had accepted it we had to go back to the broker, sign the proposal forms and hand over a cheque. Needless to say, some of the money which was included in that cheque did not go to the insurance company at all, but to the broker! Times have changed, and because of automation insurance products which once upon a time would have been completely on economic are now available to all.

This temporary car insurance scheme means that you can insure a car, whether it belongs to you are not, for just a day so, week or so or even a month or so! It is a step in the right direction, and hopefully more groundbreaking insurance schemes will be brought out in the near future, in response to the demand of the buying public.

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