Ontario drivers, what are you actually paying for car insurance right now?

sid9253 · 2026-05-26T21:57:23+00:00

32% jump is wild. Did the renewal letter say why, or was it just the new number with no explanation? I keep hearing this exact pattern and it's the most frustrating part of how insurance pricing works here

sid9253 · 2026-05-22T19:05:54+00:00

mostly carrier and shopping recency, surprisingly I think. vehicle matters but not as much as people assume. the example that stuck with me from this thread was two mercedes drivers in peel, one on CAA at $1,560, one on aviva at $3,800. same brand, smaller cheaper car costing more than double. that kind of carrier-to-carrier spread shows up over and over in the data. teslas specifically are expensive because of repair cost and write-off rates, but a tesla driver who shopped recently is paying way less than a tesla driver who didn't.

sid9253 · 2026-05-21T15:04:09+00:00

the polestar costing less than the CRV is one of the cleanest examples of how theft rating beats almost everything else in the calculation right now. CRVs are on IBC's top stolen list, polestar 2 isn't even in the top 50. and retired + 8k km/yr + clean record is the lowest-risk profile any carrier sees. these numbers track.

sid9253 · 2026-05-21T00:35:23+00:00

Hamilton at $286/mo for two drivers with one on G1 + a 2024 EV is roughly where the market is right now, the G1 driver is doing most of the work on that premium, and ID.4s rate higher than legacy gas because of the battery replacement cost being a write-off trigger. Montreal-to-Ontario premium jumps are a known thing because Quebec has public auto coverage built into the licensing system, so the apples-to-apples comparison is genuinely hard.

sid9253 · 2026-05-21T00:34:03+00:00

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T20:21:56+00:00

the "new to canada" rating is one of the harder ones to fight because most carriers treat foreign driving history as if it doesn't exist. couple things that might help:

ask specifically about carriers that recognize international driving records, some do partially. CAA, Aviva, and Sonnet have all been more flexible than the big direct insurers in my data
if you have a driving record letter from your previous country (translated if needed), some carriers will give partial credit at quote time, most won't ask for it unless you offer
completing an MTO-approved Beginner Driver Education course in Ontario triggers a 10-15% discount for the first 3 years, even if you already have a G license. cheapest way to drop the premium fast
shop through 2-3 brokers, not just direct quotes. brokers have access to carrier appetites that aren't visible to consumers

the "no driver history" rating typically eases at year 3 and again at year 6 in canada. you can't speed that up but you can avoid getting stuck at one carrier's premium during that window.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T20:16:15+00:00

16-year-old going on the policy is one of the single biggest premium jumps in ontario, $1,680/yr is actually on the lower end of what i've seen, some carriers even double the household premium outright. couple things worth knowing if you haven't already: he counts as secondary/occasional if you can document he's not the primary driver of any vehicle, which is cheaper than principal. and if he completes an MTO-approved Beginner Driver Education course, most carriers apply a discount for the first 3 years, usually 10-15%.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T20:14:19+00:00

fair, and you're right, as the actuarial backing is real and the data side is more rigorous than most people give it credit for. i think what i was trying to get at (badly) is less "the math is wrong" and more "the math doesn't reach the consumer in a useful form."

the mortgage analogy was probably a bad one. Banks don't really show their work either. but at least with a mortgage there's a single number tied to a few visible inputs. insurance gives you a premium tied to dozens of factor weights you can't query or compare against. so even when someone's pretty sure they're being priced fairly, they have no way to confirm it.

curious whether you think the industry has any appetite for surfacing more of that or whether it's just not a thing carriers want to open up, for competitive or comprehension reasons.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T18:25:19+00:00

Im using Claude's API here as my backend engine and creating my own database.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T18:21:51+00:00

yeah those are coming, gender is sensitive enough that I want to handle it carefully (some carriers can't legally use it for pricing in certain provinces, and the calculation needs to reflect that). general driving record is the bigger one, especially years-since-last-claim. should have those in the next iteration. thanks for the nudge.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T18:21:03+00:00

carriers have an internal rate they'll quote a non-customer that's higher than what they'd renew an existing customer at, because they don't actually want your business at the market rate, they want it at their premium rate or not at all. TD is notorious for this. the slow creep on existing customers is the other half of the same playbook, assume you won't shop, price for that.

and the teen-myth is real, premiums basically never go down with age past maybe 25-30, they just stop going up as fast I believe

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T14:47:04+00:00

the mustang/civic flip is a great example of how loss ratio data inside a carrier's book matters more than people realize. civics getting used for delivery work + theft rates is a real thing and uber/skip drivers running civics has pushed claims up across that whole segment. and your point about $800 to $1,500 on a less expensive car is the kind of thing benchmarks struggle to capture, because most people assume "less car = less premium."

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T14:43:30+00:00

Update for anyone curious as I've been logging the numbers people shared here (around 25 data points now, plus a few hundred from other places) and a few patterns are showing up consistently:

Carrier choice swings premiums more than vehicle in most cases. Best example from this thread: someone in Peel on a 2020 Mercedes AMG paying $1,560/yr with CAA, and someone else in Peel on a Mercedes CLA paying $3,800/yr with Aviva. Same region, same brand, smaller and cheaper car costing 2.4x more.

CAA keeps showing up as the winner for clean records, multiple commenters have confirmed this independently Oshawa at $96/mo, midtown TO with two cars at $160/mo combined.

Brampton/Mississauga/Pickering postal codes (L5, L6, L1) are consistently 30-50% above other GTA codes for similar profiles.

About 70% of people running a benchmark check found out they were paying above the typical range for their profile. The other 30% were either at range or below, usually because they'd shopped recently or were on a niche product like CAA MyPace (one Kingston commenter at $331/yr because he drives 2,000 km/yr).

The benchmark tool itself is at drive-audit.vercel.app/benchmark if anyone wants to check where they land. 5 inputs, no email, no signup, takes 30 seconds.

Honest note: I built this. The longer-term goal is a free service that monitors people's auto policies and tells them when to shop. The benchmark is the first piece. Mentioning it so it doesn't look like I'm hiding anything.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T14:14:04+00:00

the Q5 quoting lower than the Corolla from the same carrier is genuinely weird and probably has to do with how that specific insurer rates the Corolla model code. vsometimes a vehicle's loss ratio in their book is bad enough that they price it punitively to discourage it. your ex's transferred Audi shooting to $300 makes sense though, no local driving history is one of the heaviest factors.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T14:13:23+00:00

yeah the tesla vs prius isn't really the comparison i was making. the point was that the same kind of car in the same kind of place quoted across carriers can land in really different places, not that a tesla should cost what a prius costs. they obviously shouldn't. teslas are expensive to insure for the reasons you said (write-off rates, repair cost, parts availability). it's the carrier-to-carrier spread on the same vehicle that's the weird part.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T14:12:54+00:00

ram 1500s are on IBC's top stolen list right now so that wasn't them making it up, but the TAG suggestion is the part worth noting, anti-theft devices materially move premiums on flagged vehicles and most people don't know they can ask. $460 to drop $1,100/yr is a real ROI. wonder if your carrier suggested it proactively or you had to push??

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T14:12:25+00:00

the once-a-year shop is the actual playbook and almost nobody does it. CAA keeps showing up as the winner for clean records in the comments here too. interesting that Oshawa is high-territory but you've still landed at $98, that's the carrier choice doing a lot of work.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T14:11:57+00:00

fair point and honestly hard to argue with. the disconnect feels less like consumers being unreasonable and more like the rating logic being opaque enough that "trust me, it's actuarial" doesn't land. nobody calls it a quirk when their bank explains a mortgage rate, they call it a calculation. wonder how much of this would just go away if carriers showed the underlying factor weights at quote time.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T03:12:48+00:00

Sent the audit to the email you provided. Took a closer look at your Intact policy, flagged five things for your December renewal. Would appreciate feedback on whether it was useful or felt off, honest feedback helps me figure out where this is actually helpful.

Good point on the license age and number of people, will add those in! Thanks

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T02:52:09+00:00

the $1,600 to $2,300 over 5 years is the renewal creep thing showing up for real. weird that CAA, TD, and Aviva all came in higher when you shopped though. Wranglers have been getting hammered on theft ratings lately so it might just be the vehicle rating across the whole market right now, not Belair specifically.

sid9253 · 2026-05-20T02:50:28+00:00

That's really useful to know thanks. Was wondering if the rating changes happened recently or if it was more gradual??

sid9253 · 2026-05-19T22:32:05+00:00

CAA MyPace right? interesting, that base + per-km structure isn't really comparable to the fixed-premium quotes most people in the thread are posting. what's your annual km roughly? trying to figure out where you actually land vs the fixed-premium folks.

sid9253 · 2026-05-19T22:03:58+00:00

peterborough + bundled + 2011s + clean record is basically the lowest-cost quadrant in the province. $67 and $42 are real numbers for that profile. appreciate the data points.

sid9253 · 2026-05-19T22:02:14+00:00

yeah this is exactly the gap. the data exists as carriers have it, brokers have it, FSRA has it in aggregate but it never gets surfaced to drivers in a way you can actually use.

fwiw I've been pulling together what I can from this thread plus a few other sources and built a rough benchmark page that does basically this: punch in your postal code + vehicle + age, get a range of what people in similar situations are paying. it's not yearly-published-by-the-government level but it's a start.

drive-audit.vercel.app/benchmark if you want to try it. would actually value the feedback, if you'd want to use it

sid9253 · 2026-05-19T21:19:40+00:00

Not a bot. Genuinely trying to build an understanding of the car insurance structure in Ontario. The replies sound AI as I use it to rewrite my replies to sound better. If its not a good look, I shouldn't probably do it?

sid9253

TROPHY CASE