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Review of the insurethebox, Car Insurance:

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Just avoid!

Where to start? Policy was the cheapest one available for my vehicle, one of the only, if not the only, positive(s) of an Insurethebox policy. So I decided to go ahead and buy it, this was the beginning of my many issues and problems. On trying to purchase the policy through the payment system on the website the money was taken, however the transaction did not finalise, meaning I had been charged the full annual premium without recieving any insurance cover. The live chat feature was no help in resolving this issue, meaning I had to wait over the month for the transaction to be cancelled/bounce back. This then meant I had to borrow money from my family to the tune of £1700 (for a 1.4L hatchback, might I add!) in order to then pay for the policy again over the phone. I then had someone come and install the black box, which had to be hardwire installed into/behind the interior fuse box, we’ll come back to why this will present itself as an issue later. However at this point I had had no other issues. In relation to the supposed bonus miles you can earn. They aren’t worth the ink of the T+Cs written for them. I got given a handful of them during the first month of my policy and then nothing since, that’s another 6 months worth of policy where I got no bonus miles. Even though there had been no change in the standard of my driving, it is simply because I was given a negative score for driving at night and the black box not being intelligent enough to realise half an hour stationary with the engine running also qualifies as a ‘break’ for the ‘taking breaks’ score, as it only qualifies a break as stopped with the engine off, with me also receiving a negative score for that as well. This therefore meant that during the just under 8 months I had the policy I only gained 41 bonus miles, out of a possible 700 miles. I also had a number of issues with the policy portal. This ranged from the mileage indicator being incorrect and sporadically resetting to show that I had done no miles and had the full policy allowment remaining. To the portal simply not working, as it is currently, with me both unable to view my policy documents (important since I have just cancelled my policy and need the cancellation documents) and also buy extra miles. This is especially important since I have run out of my allocation and need more but am ironically unable to pay the insurethebox even more money (£50 for an extra 250 miles). This also brings me to the negative point of how exorbitantly expensive additional miles are. This means that any saving you will have made by going for a cheaper black box policy, you will end having to spend on extra miles once you exceed your allocation. This is the main reason I have terminated my policy early as it worked out cheaper to start a new (non-black box) policy, then continually buy more miles, with it currently costing me £100+ a month in additional miles. There was also a good 2 months where the portal didn’t work at all, meaning I had no idea how many miles I was using or had left, making the whole situation of a black box that much more annoying. That brings me to my final point, the one that most took the pis*. When I went to cancel my policy, I was told that I would have to take my car to a garage to have the black box removed. This is a direct contradiction to what I was previously told by another representative that it could be arranged so that the company that installed the box would remove the black box. So there you have blantant lying and/or omission of information so they could avoid extra work. So in short: Positives - Relatively competitive/low price Negatives - Exorbitant cost of excess miles - Glitchy/broken portal - Inability to know how many miles you have used or have left the majority of the time - Inability to purchase needed extra miles - Non-existent bonus miles - Blantant lying on the part of customer service in regards to what they are and aren’t able to do Reviewed on: 19th September 2024

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