One of the easiest ways to impress your van insurance broker when he’s assessing your application (and trying to wriggle out of passing on discounts) is listing your van’s security equipment. Not just your van, but you (or your drivers’), too. If you tick enough boxes, he’ll be unable to squirm out of offering you the cheapest van insurance within his portfolio.
An example of exactly this scenario – van security in practise, not a broker squirming, although I would have liked to have brought you evidence of that – happened only recently to, cannily enough, a security firm whose driver was van-jacked. It would have been pretty embarrassing if they didn’t have the appropriate security to enable cheap van insurance quotes, really, given that they go by the name of Delta Security. But they did and here’s a little tale of why you should consider extensive protection for your van and drivers such as GPS Tracking.
A Delta Security van driver was tootling along in slow-moving traffic, we’ll call him Roger Hirsch for the sake of the story…and because that was the driver’s name…when he got rammed from behind. Anybody who asks if his name was Roger Ramjet, stop now! No, it was Hirsch, like I said. Anyhoo…
…as you do, Roger weighed anchor and proceeded to check around the back to assess the damage caused by the dink, only to be greeted by two would-be pirates of the motorway. They do exist – read our article “Van insurance threatened by motorway pirates” – I’m not just building up to a Captain Pugwash gag; he wasn’t Roger the Cabin-boy and there will be neither any Seaman Staines nor any Master Bates in this tale, thank you, as urban legend suggests appeared in the BBC seventies show!
So, back to the tale. Roger was grounded by the first van thief whilst the second hopped into the cab that Roger had just vacated; our hero got back to his feet just in time to see his van disappear in the line of traffic that, one can only assume, had picked up pace. That would have been a hoot if the thieves had ‘…tore off at speeds of up to 3mph’, wouldn’t it? Class. But they didn’t and Roger was left all at sea.
Roger immediately dialled HQ, where Dave Mundy, the ops manager, ran to his laptop and booted up the Quartix tracking system at Roger’s behest. Lo and behold, there was Roger’s van, sans Roger, obviously, making its way towards Edmonton. In true American cop adventure stylee, Dave dialled 999 and continued to relay the van’s whereabouts to London Police as they gave hot pursuit of the stolen Transit.
And in true Hollywood fashion, by the time the police located the van, the pirates and, assumedly, a third operative driving the car from which the original two miscreants had pounced, were nowhere to be found. However, they had had the courtesy to lock the van, which was empty and, original dink aside, undamaged.
Dave puts the happy ending down the Quartix tracking system, which, like all good vehicle tracking systems, assists with fuel consumption, avoiding congestion charges and, especially in this instance, vehicle recovery; although the actions of Roger and the police were noted in the prologue, too.
The moral, of course, is, if you want to retain your cheap van insurance even after your van has been stolen by not having to make a claim that could dramatically affect your no claims bonus, you can either hire Roger, following his heroics in the face of real and terrible adversity or fit a vehicle tracking system that will not only get you discounted van insurance but will also give you the satisfaction that the money saved is going into your pocket and not that of the insurance broker.
(Sigh) The End.
