Motor Insurance

What Your Car Insurance Coverage Actually Includes

Every car on a Hong Kong road carries compulsory motor protection by law, and that legal minimum does one job only: it pays the other party when you are at fault. It answers bodily injury to a third party and nothing else. Your own car, your own repair bill and your own medical account all sit outside it.

Most drivers therefore hold something wider. A motor insurance policy written at the middle grade adds fire and theft to the third party protection. At the top grade the policy also pays for damage to the insured car itself, however the accident happened and whoever caused it.

Those three grades are the whole market, and the gap between them is far larger than the gap in what you pay for them. It is the reason we always price more than one before recommending anything.

Where That Car Coverage Stops

Three boundaries catch drivers out here, and none of them is hidden — they are simply in a part of the motor policy nobody reads on the day they buy.

The first is who may drive. A policy naming you and your spouse does not respond when a visiting relative takes the keys, and the named driver clause is checked at claims stage rather than at renewal. The second is territory: a private motor policy written for this city may not follow the car into the mainland, and the crossing permit and the insurance are separate arrangements that people routinely assume are one.

The third is use. A car insured for social and domestic purposes is not insured while being driven for hire or reward, and food or parcel delivery counts. If what the car is doing has changed, the insurance company needs to know before the change, not after a claim.

Insurance Coverage for the Driver, Not Just the Vehicle

A motor insurance policy is written around the car, and that framing quietly shapes what you get. The compulsory layer pays the injured third party. The comprehensive layer pays for the car. Neither is written to pay the person behind the wheel.

In practice the driver is usually the person with the largest exposure. If you are hurt in a collision you caused, the third party protection does nothing for you, and the vehicle damage section pays a repair bill rather than a medical account. The gap is real, and on a schedule it is almost invisible.

Most insurance companies will attach a driver benefit for a modest sum, and some include one by default at a figure so small it would not carry a single night in a private room. It is worth knowing which of those two applies to you before anything happens.

Personal Accident Benefits Inside the Policy

Where a driver benefit is included, read three numbers. The sum payable on death. The scale applied to a permanent injury, which pays a percentage rather than the headline figure. And whether passengers are insured on the same terms as the driver, because on many schedules they are not.

Those numbers are generally low, and deliberately so — this is an add-on to a motor policy rather than a substitute for proper protection. Where a household depends on the earnings of the person who drives, we would normally look at a standalone arrangement instead and leave the motor schedule to do the job it was designed for.

Which of those routes suits you depends on your circumstances, not on a general rule. We look at both before suggesting either.

How Insurance Coverage Levels Differ

There are three grades on the market and every quotation you receive will be one of them. The table sets out what each one does for the other party, what it does for your own car, and what is left for you to carry. The right grade depends on what the car is worth today and on how much of a loss you could absorb without difficulty.

Two things are worth drawing out of that table. The fourth row is the one people misread most often: on the two lower grades, a car damaged by someone else is recovered from that party directly, which means you are waiting on their insurance company and their cooperation rather than on your own. And the deductible in the fifth row is chosen by you at inception — raising it lowers what you pay each year, but it is the figure you will meet on the day, so it should be a number you could write a cheque for without thinking about it.

What Happens After a Collision

Motor claims are decided on what was recorded in the first hour, and almost every dispute we are asked to unpick traces back to that hour rather than to the policy wording.

At the scene, take the other party’s registration, name and contact, photograph both vehicles and the position they came to rest in, and note the time and place. Where anyone is hurt, or the other party leaves, a police report is required and the absence of one will hold the file up for weeks. Then tell the insurance company the same day, even if you have decided not to claim — late notification is a breach in its own right, and it is the reason a surprising number of valid claims are reduced.

What you should not do is agree liability at the scene or accept a cash settlement from the other driver. Both remove the insurance company’s ability to defend you, and both are commonly proposed by the party at fault.

Keeping the Car on the Right Policy

A schedule written when the car was new is rarely the schedule that suits it three years later. The insured value should track what the car is actually worth, because that figure — not what you paid — is what a total loss pays out, and an inflated one simply costs you more each year for nothing.

Two other details are worth a moment each year. The no-claims discount you have built up is portable between insurance companies but has to be evidenced, so keep the letter. And the list of who may drive should reflect who actually drives — a licence held for under two years, or a driver under twenty-five, changes what is applicable and occasionally what is payable.

We review each motor insurance policy at renewal against the information on file and tell you where the car, the driver or the use has moved ahead of the insurance. In most years nothing needs doing.

Motor Cover — Questions We Are Asked

These are the questions that come up most often once a car is actually on the road here. The answers describe how claims generally run in this market; your own schedule is the authority, and where the two disagree the schedule wins.

If your car, your licence or the people driving it have changed since the policy was written, that is usually the thing worth checking first.

If your question is not here, send us your current schedule. We will read it first and tell you what the car, the driver and the use are actually insured for before we suggest anything at all.