Fleet Insurance FAQS

April 28, 2022

Fleet insurance is a simple concept. It’s insurance for a large or small fleet of vehicles that might include cars, vans, trucks, heavy goods vehicles, or a combination of all of these – even forklift trucks if needed. If you run a business, you’ve probably put together the fleet that best suits your purposes.

So, what are the advantages of fleet insurance? Here are some of the most frequently asked questions.

How many vehicles do I need to call it a fleet?

The good news for small businesses is that you don’t need a huge number of vehicles to call it a fleet. In fact, there is no strict definition and, as far as most insurers are concerned, even if you have as few as just three vehicles, you can benefit from fleet insurance. There are even insurers that can arrange fleet cover for just two vehicles.

What is the principal benefit of fleet insurance?

To understand the benefit, it might be helpful to look at the alternative. If you have a fleet of vehicles, each one needs to be insured, of course – that is the law.

If you arrange insurance for each vehicle separately, you’re likely to end up with different annual renewal dates for each individual policy, spread over the course of the year. For fear of missing or forgetting the renewal of the cover for any one of those vehicles, you must spend precious administrative time and effort monitoring the various renewal dates to ensure that all your vehicles stay road legal – with the appropriate motor or van insurance etc.

Arranging a single fleet policy can also offer greater flexibility when it comes to your drivers. Most fleets are arranged to cover ‘any driver’ over a specified age, typically 21, 25 or 30 and so you can save even more time knowing that you don’t need to call your insurer or broker every time somebody leaves or joins your business.

The great advantage of fleet insurance is that you have a single insurance policy that maintains cover for every vehicle in your fleet – a single annual renewal date ensures that all of them remain appropriately insured.

You are saved considerable administrative time and effort because you no longer have to monitor several different deadlines for renewal throughout the year.

Above all, you have the reassurance of knowing that everything is in hand to maintain the vehicle insurance required for every vehicle in your fleet.

Can fleet insurance also help me to save money?

Indeed, it can – and this is a further main benefit you will enjoy with fleet insurance.

Fleet insurance follows one of the basic principles of economics – the more items you buy, typically the cheaper the unit cost of each item.

What this means in the context of vehicle fleet insurance is that cover for multiple vehicles invariably works out cheaper than insuring each one separately – and the larger your fleet, the cheaper the unit price for insuring each vehicle in the fleet.

Even if your fleet is only three or four vehicles, you typically still stand to save money with fleet insurance compared with insuring each vehicle separately.

Can I still choose the level of fleet insurance cover?

Just as usual, you can choose the level of insurance most appropriate to your business needs – fully comprehensive cover, third party, fire, and theft, or just third-party cover (which is the minimum level of cover required by law, of course).

As you’ve probably discovered when insuring other vehicles, basic third-party insurance – surprisingly – does not always offer the cheapest premiums even though the extent of cover is so rudimentary.

So, you might want to give the level of cover careful thought when choosing your vehicle fleet insurance.