Recently, many experts say that almost every second motorist drives without third-party insurance. I decided to check if this is the case. And how many drivers actually drive without a policy?
My experiment is very simple, anyone can repeat it. We take several major cities, rewrite the number of cars moving in the stream, that is, they must have an OSAGO policy, then we go to the website of the Russian Union of Motorcycle Insurers (RSA) and check in a convenient online service whether a particular car has a policy. We then normalize the data obtained by the number of cars in the region and get the proportion of those who break the traffic rules and do not buy a policy.
In my small experiment, 1145 cars from Moscow, the Moscow region, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk participated involuntarily. For all these cars I have checked that they have OSAGO. The data reflects a quarter of the fleet in Russia. The results are:
|
City |
No OSAGO (of the number of machines tested) |
Share of the country’s vehicle fleet after rationing |
|
Novosibirsk |
14% |
1.0% |
|
Chelyabinsk |
9% |
0.9% |
|
St. Petersburg + Leningrad region |
3% |
0.6% |
|
Moscow + Moscow region |
9% |
4.6% |
|
Yekaterinburg |
18% |
2.1% |
|
Total |
|
9.2% |
The results are interesting. Yekaterinburg proved to be the record holder for the number of cars without OSAGO, where 18% of registered cars had no policy. And the most disciplined city was St. Petersburg (and the Leningrad region, of course), where only 3% of cars were uninsured. I even double checked – yes this is true. When normalized to the size of the vehicle fleet of a certain region, it appears that 9.2% of the cars are driving without OSAGO. We recently estimated the size of the operated fleet in Russia – this is about 45 million cars, that is, about 4 million cars are running in the country without OSAGO (9.2% of 45 million).
Who verifies the authenticity of the OSAGO policy?
All this is interesting in the context of the fact that soon the absence of OSAGO in a car will be checked not by journalists, but by rather specific law enforcement agencies using cameras to solve violations. It will automatically check what I have checked. The fine for the absence of OSAGO is 800 rubles, it is issued once a day.
Considering how slowly we process data from cameras, the owner of an uninsured car could face a dozen fines before the first one arrives. My recommendation is that if for some reason you are driving without OSAGO, now is the time to get it, as cameras can turn on this type of violation quite unexpectedly.
Soon the absence of OSAGO will be monitored by law enforcement agencies using fixation cameras
How much does OSAGO cost?
But, as it seems to me, the stick must always have a carrot. For two years now I have been seeing an amazing picture: 91% of motorists in December (a survey a year earlier gave the same indicator) pointed to the main problem in OSAGO – this is the so-called “depreciation”. It was introduced as a “social” feature, which allegedly reduced the cost of the policy, but legitimized the underpayment of spare parts costs by up to 50% (and at the beginning of OSAGO it was generally up to 80%!). But it turned out that the savings are extremely insignificant, an average of 1,200 rubles on the policy, and if the driver becomes the culprit of an accident, then a claim from the victim demanding compensation for the difference between the insurance payment and the actual amount of damage is practically guaranteed.
Almost all motorists say that they want to be fully protected so that there are no courts and bailiffs who later debit money – they say, cancel the debit, we will pay this additional 1200 rubles. But things are still there, while there is no movement to let go of the old model.
Meanwhile, the courts are beginning to receive similar claims for compensation for part of the damage already in the tens of thousands, soon the bill will reach hundreds of thousands, and in total we have about two million accidents every year. Do we have enough judges to judge all motorists? Or not?
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