SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – Paying for gas, registration, and, last but not least, insurance can be expensive for car owners.
“My premium just came due. I pay every six months, and it increased from about $700 every six months to $1,000,” Vanessa Bastien said.
Sometimes those hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for car insurance can be too much.
“Right now, I’m in the middle of shopping for new car insurance,” Bastien said. “It’s a little bit brutal, so I’m currently doing my best to see what other options are out there.”
So, what are those options looking like?
“I will say that auto insurance has risen over the last few years across the country,” Janet Ruiz, Insurance Information Institute, spoke with ABC 10News about rising car insurance.
“That’s due to a few factors that I think we’re all experiencing. One is inflation. Another is due to tariffs on certain types of metals and things that used to repair autos,” Ruiz said.
In mid-February, Experian reported that people spend roughly $3,000 on average for full coverage in California; that is $94 dollars more the national average.
“If we look into most recent the most crash data from Cal Trans, we see that crash rates, normalized by vehicle mileage traveled, have significantly increased in 2023,” Behram Wali, an associate professor at UC San Diego, said.
Wali said another impact of rising rates is a state law that raised the minimum liability limits for drivers at the start of 2025, doubling the injury limit and tripling the property damage limit.
“So this is a major like floor shift which perhaps increased the insurance cost for millions of Californians overnight,” Wali said.
A couple of things that Ruiz told ABC 10News people can do to get a lower price, aside from driving safer and shopping around, are pay a little higher deductible and think about if you still should be having comprehensive and collision coverage if your car isn’t worth a lot.
“Most people, though, about 85 percent, do have comp and collision because they may have an auto loan. And then, we see when there’s fires or flooding, people that have comp are very happy because they can get their car replaced,” Ruiz said.
Ruiz said that people will see some type of leveling off on premiums in the next couple of years as costs for repairs and inflation continue to go down.
