Are these insurance quotes reasonable???

As a Berkshire underwriter I can attest that Hot Shot car haulers are a "difficult" class of business. It's not because they may have some personal use also, it's that they "typically" have in-experienced operators, trying to get "driving time" on their new Class A, so they can transition to tractors after 24 or so months of experience. Consequently the real problem with the hot shot auto haulers is lack of experience, with that comes frequency of loss, as well as the un-predictable severity loss.

We've steadily increased our pricing on auto haulers over the last few years, and have now figured out most of the negativity for the auto hauler class is from the hot shots, by and large not from the tractor operators.

 

No... that was a quote.. I dont have my authority yet. But no I wouldnt haul cars if I agreed not to.. That would be dumb.

The agent told me its mostly a 1st year issue with a new authority. She said after the 1st year I could add cars and my price would go up, but it wouldn't be in the 30k range. She also said after the 3rd year I'd see a pretty decent sized drop.

 

That's not a good idea.. you cant assume you are going to make x amount of money. Having a nearly $40k/year insurance payment is suicide.

 

And once your policy is issued and reviewed in the Progressive HO, a good chance you will receive a cancellation notice.

Progressive retail brokers are notorious for writing a policy with Progressive, then once it actually gets to the carrier, they do their due diligence and find out the reality of the operator and send notice.

We see the end result of this daily, when we question why this submission was only with Progressive for 35 - 60 days.

We underwriters really aren't stupid, and we ARE students of the business, and with modern underwriting tools it's better to be forthright up front.....save time and a lot of energy just being honest.

 

Dude, not saying YOU'RE wrong, just saying what the realities are of Progressive retailer brokers binding business that the HO underwriter eventually says no to.

Until recently we Berkshire) also lumped all car carriers into the same bucket, but now are developing separate data bases, and the initial results are indicative of hot shot ops having substantially worse Liability and Phys Dam results, with the 10 car carriers having worse experience on the cargo.

 

My first year as a new carrier I was paying Progressive $6500. Hauling cars is considered high risk and therefore higher premiums. $28k seems ridiculous though. Unless your credit score is crap, you have moving violations on your record I don’t see how they come up with those numbers. I honestly don’t see how anyone can make a living paying those kind of rates.

 

I am I am glad to see your post, someone in the industry validating my suspicions all along. They are the worst of worst IMO.