Your Letters
Iretired from work early during lockdown because we are foster carers for ‘the unloved’. Similarly, I have a soft spot for buying, cherishing and driving the unloved. My latest ‘problem child’ is a British Racing Green 2001 Rover 45 Impression Auto – unloved by the public in its day, and it struggled to sell.
Now it faces its biggest Goliath for survival. Before the car can reach paradise (classic car appreciation) it has to pass through the insurance abyss!
My Rover is too young to be insured by any classic insurer that I’ve approached, and too old to be off any insurer’s high risk category. You see one small dent or bump and they know that they would write it off, which is a worst case profit scenario for the premium paid.
So for a £1200 car (I paid this because of the very low miles/fab condition) the insurance quotes make saving the poor little Rover financially unviable.
The car’s only hope is that I preserve, cherish, and love it, regardless of costs (don’t get me started on £330 car tax). Thankfully, it’s this sort of owner that buys and reads CCW. It’s not a hobby you do to make a profit or break even.
The car may not even love me back with reliability! We do it because we care about the car like it’s our child. So in a way we are foster parents of cars abused and unloved by previous owners or stigmatised by insurance companies’ risk rating systems.
❚ Richard Williams, Bolton
You’re absolutely right, Richard. Insurers are increasingly catering for the modern classics market, but everything from Austin Allegros to Jaguar Mk2s went through an era when they weren’t regarded as classics, and depended upon people like you to save them – Ed.