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#31
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The Real Bev wrote:
> I doubt if the tow-jockey cares where you bought your membership -- otherwise > you'd play hell getting a tow in an expensive area if you'd bought your > membership in a cheap area. Call me crazy, but I don't quite get why it's worthwhile to buy insurance for this in the first place. At the worst, I can imagine needing a tow perhaps twice a year, and that would be in a bad year. Given that it costs about $125 for a tow, I'm not sure how it's a catastrophe to have to pay for it yourself. More to the point, unless the insurance company is negotiating special rates with tow truck companies (which, I admit, is possible), they are paying the same rates as you and yet making money despite all their overhead. Therefore, on average you should expect to pay less if you simply pay the costs yourself on the rare occasion that it's necessary. To put it another way, the purpose of insurance is not to get free stuff: it never works that way, because the insurance company makes a profit, and you must therefore wind up paying more *on* *average*. The purpose of insurance is instead to protect you from large expenses that could damage your financial stability or at least throw you off. I just don't see how having to pay $125 typically less than once a year can threaten to throw anyone off all that much. All in all, if I had to choose between the two, I'd much rather have insurance for the repairs themselves. You can bet that after you spend that $125 to be towed to a shop, the repair bill is going to come to a lot more than $125 most of the time. Seems to me that's the type of unexpected expense to protect yourself from. Not that I'm aware of a company that offers this type of insurance, but it does seem more desirable. - Logan |
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#32
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Logan Shaw wrote:
> The Real Bev wrote: > >> I doubt if the tow-jockey cares where you bought your membership -- >> otherwise >> you'd play hell getting a tow in an expensive area if you'd bought your >> membership in a cheap area. > > > Call me crazy, but I don't quite get why it's worthwhile to buy > insurance for this in the first place. Because there is a single point of contact. If you were 75 miles from home and your car stopped on the Interstate who would you call? AAA has negotiated contracts and service level agreements with providers and they know exactly who to call. > > At the worst, I can imagine needing a tow perhaps twice a year, and > that would be in a bad year. Given that it costs about $125 for a > tow, I'm not sure how it's a catastrophe to have to pay for it yourself. > It isn't financial. If I compared the difference (from memory) it is probably a wash. > More to the point, unless the insurance company is negotiating special > rates with tow truck companies (which, I admit, is possible), they are > paying the same rates as you and yet making money despite all their > overhead. Therefore, on average you should expect to pay less if you > simply pay the costs yourself on the rare occasion that it's necessary. The service providers work on an negotiated rate schedule which you aren't going to get. > > To put it another way, the purpose of insurance is not to get free > stuff: it never works that way, because the insurance company makes > a profit, and you must therefore wind up paying more *on* *average*. > The purpose of insurance is instead to protect you from large expenses > that could damage your financial stability or at least throw you off. > I just don't see how having to pay $125 typically less than once a > year can threaten to throw anyone off all that much. > > All in all, if I had to choose between the two, I'd much rather have > insurance for the repairs themselves. You can bet that after you > spend that $125 to be towed to a shop, the repair bill is going to > come to a lot more than $125 most of the time. Seems to me that's > the type of unexpected expense to protect yourself from. Not that > I'm aware of a company that offers this type of insurance, but it > does seem more desirable. > > - Logan |
#33
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#34
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Logan Shaw > wrote:
>Call me crazy, but I don't quite get why it's worthwhile to buy >insurance for this in the first place. >At the worst, I can imagine needing a tow perhaps twice a year Yikes, maybe twice a lifetime would be a more reasonable worst-case. How many people here have ever had to be towed? |
#35
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"Steve" > wrote in message ... > Logan Shaw > wrote: >>Call me crazy, but I don't quite get why it's worthwhile to buy >>insurance for this in the first place. >>At the worst, I can imagine needing a tow perhaps twice a year > > Yikes, maybe twice a lifetime would be a more reasonable worst-case. > How many people here have ever had to be towed? > Once in my lifetime. Situation was, I was stopped in traffic (as in, not moving at all). I had cars beside me and a guard rail on the other side. A ford taurus came up fast behind me and didn't stop until it was parked in my back seat. In several decades and millions of miles (literally), I've never had to be towed due to mechanical failure, though. -Dave |
#36
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X-No-Archive: Yes
Steve wrote: > > Logan Shaw > wrote: > >Call me crazy, but I don't quite get why it's worthwhile to buy > >insurance for this in the first place. > >At the worst, I can imagine needing a tow perhaps twice a year > > Yikes, maybe twice a lifetime would be a more reasonable worst-case. > How many people here have ever had to be towed? When you have vintage cars ... often. -- "The web has got me caught. I'd rather have the blues than what I've got." <via Nat King Cole> |
#37
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> Yikes, maybe twice a lifetime would be a more reasonable worst-case.
> How many people here have ever had to be towed? When you drive cars into the ground, it happens more often than you'd think. :-) Let's see -- green car twice, yellow car twice, first white car once, not yet for second white car. First white car got broadsided by a red-light runner so it was being hauled away by the city, green car had a power steering pump failure and another part (can't remember which one) failue, yellow car had a bad alternator and a bad water pump. The green car died with 276,000 miles, the yellow I sold at 250,000, the white was totaled in an accident. -- C |
#38
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" > wrote:
>> Yikes, maybe twice a lifetime would be a more reasonable worst-case. >> How many people here have ever had to be towed? > >When you drive cars into the ground, it happens more often than you'd >think. :-) Let's see -- green car twice, yellow car twice, first white >car once, not yet for second white car. But wouldn't ya think at some point the towing coverage would be cancelled by the insurance company, or AAA would cancel the membership? Hard to imagine they'd go on paying regular towing bills forever without taking some sorta action... |
#39
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Steve > writes:
>But wouldn't ya think at some point the towing coverage would be >cancelled by the insurance company, or AAA would cancel the >membership? Hard to imagine they'd go on paying regular towing bills >forever without taking some sorta action... Most AAA memberships limit the number of tows per year, so it isn't exactly "forever" -- there's a built in limit on the amount that one membership can cost the auto club. Too few people hit that limit for the AAA to worry about it. |
#40
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Steve wrote:
> Logan Shaw > wrote: >>Call me crazy, but I don't quite get why it's worthwhile to buy >>insurance for this in the first place. >>At the worst, I can imagine needing a tow perhaps twice a year > Yikes, maybe twice a lifetime would be a more reasonable worst-case. > How many people here have ever had to be towed? Three times that I can recall. In high school, I had an Olds Cutlass that my parents gave me. It was serviceable, but built in 1980, pretty much the low point of all time for GM. The car had a rotor (in the distributor, that is) had a nasty habit of cracking in two if it got slightly too hot. Pushing the car too hard could cause it to get slightly too hot, where "pushing too hard" meant cruising along the freeway at the same speed as regular traffic. One time I was driving about 50 mph, and the engine just died. Since I was on a busy section of freeway (and did not yet know that was the problem), there was no real way to get the car out of there. Second time, same Olds Cutlass. Had had the engine rebuilt a few years before. Apparently the rebuilder wasn't that hot[1]. One day (on my way to show up for my first day of work at a new job, naturally), the crankshaft just broke in two while I was driving down the highway. (Actually, I had it towed twice: once to the service station, and once from there to the car dealer that got it when I traded it in on something more reliable.) Third time was totally my fault. I knew it was time to replace the timing belt on my Toyota, but I kept putting it off. I really was planning on doing it, but I didn't get around to it until after having to have it towed. Whoops. So, all in all, one of them should have been avoided, and one of them could have been avoided if I'd known more about who not to take the car to, which I didn't. - Logan [1] The day after we took it down to them to have them start work, I was talking to a classmate whose family owned a lawnmower repair business. I told him where we'd chosen to take the car, and he said something like, "You took it to where? You're going to regret that." And he was right. I don't know why I didn't think to ask him where to take it, since he did basically grow up working on small engines... |
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