Kathrin gotthold is a law graduate. She completed her traineeship as a business editor in frankfurt am main and then worked for six years at a major daily and weekly newspaper in berlin, where she was responsible for consumer finance. She also gained experience at the magazines "betriebs-berater" and "der steuerberater". In the finanztip editorial department, she is primarily concerned with insurance topics.
- Every year, we conduct two series of tests to find the cheapest car insurance for you.
- In our two test series 2021, two portals and one direct insurer delivered good results – but all also with cutbacks.
- In order to get the right rate, you should always do two queries.
- If you’ve had a claim in the current year and want to switch to a cheaper provider, we have a special recommendation for you.
- Finanztip recommends: first calculate the cheapest car insurance on verivox or check24. Then do the cross-check with huk24.
- Then choose the insurance policy that offers the minimum protection we recommend at the best price.
In this guide
For many drivers, fall is the time of year when they take out new car insurance and save money in the process. Because if you keep your insurance until you’re 30. If you cancel your contract on november, you can switch to a cheaper contract in the new year.
When you can cancel your car insurance?
If your premium has increased, for example because your regional class or the type class of your car has deteriorated, you have 30 days to cancel after receiving the price increase. You are then entitled to special right of termination to. If you want to cancel your insurance at the end of the year (most likely this is your main due date), you should give notice no later than 30 days before the end of the year. November have found a new insurance.
Have the contract confirmed by the new provider before you cancel the old one. We’ve written down the best way to get out of your old contract in our guide to canceling car insurance.
When comparing insurance policies, make sure you have the right coverage. And here’s how a little knowledge can save you a lot of money.
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A single comparison is not enough
Car insurance premiums are calculated on the basis of many personal factors, which are also assessed slightly differently by each insurance company. In principle, it makes more sense to compare car insurance rates on a comparison portal than to knock on insurers’ doors individually for prices and rates.
You can get many different offers at one go via a portal, which can differ considerably in price. You also have the option there to sort and search already for the appropriate fare characteristics.
But now comes the big one: not every comparison portal has all favorable insurances listed. And some insurances you won’t even find on any comparison portal, where you can directly conclude contracts.
To make sure you don’t miss out on the best offers, we’ve looked at how you can find the really cheapest fare. The result: you should always get quotes on a comparison portal first. In our test series in september and october 2021, the portals check24 and verivox the most favorable tariffs. both comparison portals were about the same in our tests (see table for tariff combination).
The best price: comparison portal plus direct insurance
We were able to significantly improve this result in our study by obtaining an offer from a favorable direct insurer in a second step. it is best to do this immediately after the first comparison, then you will have all the documents and information you need at hand. For the second query, we recommend the direct insurer huk24 – the online subsidiary of huk coburg. your offers were often favorable in our test series 2021.
Before that, however – and this you should urgently follow the order – you should at least estimate the order of magnitude for the price of your car insurance at verivox or check24. In our survey, huk24 often had the lowest rates on offer. But if the offers at huk24 were more expensive than those shown on the portals, the price differences were sometimes also drastic.
You can minimize the risk of ending up with a tariff that is too expensive by following our recommendation: first compare on verivox or check24, and then get an offer from huk24.
Large finanztip survey on car insurance
every year, we conduct two series of tests in september and october to find out how to find the cheapest car insurance for you. You can read details of our investigation at the end of the text.
We determine relevant comparison portals on the market by means of a google search with various search terms. From the results found, we filter out the portals that meet the following criteria: they offer their own comparison and broker the contract themselves. in addition, they do not ask for any personal data prior to the comparison result.
Furthermore, these comparison portals must have certain filters with which our minimum criteria can be set. This includes coverage amounts beyond the legal minimum coverage, mallorca policy including, waiver of the plea of gross negligence, marten bites with consequential damages as well as collision with animals of all kinds.
comparison portals and calculators
Two portals, which met our requirements in 2021, we looked at: verivox and check24. out of competition we have also collected prices on the broker tool nafi-auto. Only as a comparative value within our study, because this calculator offers the largest market coverage (although not all providers can be found there anymore), but it is complicated to use and you can’t conclude contracts directly there.
nafi’s comparative calculator is integrated by many brokerage companies. The offer of these portals includes only a part of the providers listed on nafi-auto. However, these tariffs can then be concluded online via the portal. as pure copies of the original calculator, some of the portals do not meet our formal requirements for large, independent comparison calculators. part, your market overview is not big enough for us. 2021 we have included two portals in the nafi copy category: car insurance.De and G&P insurance brokers.
Direct insurer
In addition to our portal queries, we checked prices at huk24. Because this major direct insurers is – as our tests from the past years show – cheap, but has withdrawn from the portals. The application section of huk24 also meets our requirements, such as our minimum criteria for good rates.
Combine comparison portal and huk24
The test series with our 32 sample profiles from september and october 2021 confirm the results of our previous tests: no portal always shows the cheapest rate. Similarly, no direct insurer has only cheap and suitable for everyone offers. You should therefore always combine the advantages of several comparisons.
Favorable prices at huk24 – but not always
As a direct insurer, huk24 is still not represented on comparison portals. In our survey, however, it is regularly very favorable for individual drivers. For this reason, we have also included the rates of huk24 in our analysis.
In our 2021 test, huk24 showed the cheapest rate in 22 of 64 queries. Even if the provider thus relatively often presents a favorable rate, we advise against looking only at a direct insurer. The risk of upward price deviations is just too high for this purpose.
Compared with portals, rates offered by direct insurers also have the disadvantage that weaknesses in individual profiles are not compensated for by offers from other insurers. This effect meant for our overall test series 2021 for huk24: the tariff offered to us was in the worst case around 20 percent more expensive than the lowest price found via a portal. On average, the deviation at huk24 was around 6 percent – and thus at the level of the comparison portals that performed well.
portals also face high price surcharges
Most providers are represented on the verivox and check24 portals, with a large gap between them and other portals. However, the quantity of rates offered is only of use to the customer if there are also many favorable rates among them.
In our two test series in 2021, the tariffs displayed to us on check24 were on average around 6 percent more expensive than the cheapest tariff found for test users. At verivox, it was also around 6 percent.
However, the average deviation is only half the truth. This is because there is a risk of paying high price surcharges for outliers if they are queried on only one portal. Verivox found in 2021 in the worst case a price that was 30 percent more expensive than necessary. With check24 the highest deviation around 27 percent in all price surveys. Both figures are taken from an overall analysis of our two test series in 2021.
Portals and direct insurers: price deviations
From the lowest price
Largest deviation from the lowest price
Source: data query on the portals, finanztip calculations (as of: 8. November 2021)
Verivox or check24?
The results show that verivox provided the most favorable results in the first series of tests 2021. In the past two years, this was also the case. In the second series of tests, check24 came out on top and is thus just ahead in the overall assessment. However, this status is based on the reporting date and the fluctuations show that both comparison portals are roughly on the same level.
We attribute verivox’s lead in the first test on the one hand to the fact that verivox currently lists low-cost providers that do not appear on check24. On the other hand, at check24 the default settings for individual tariff features (especially for coverage amounts and for marten bites with consequential damage) are sometimes higher than we require in order to meet our minimum criteria. For this reason, check24 shows more expensive rates in some places when the query is identical – but they also have somewhat more service.
In the second test, there were inconsistencies in the presentation of prices at verivox. In addition, check24 scored points with exclusive tariffs, which often stood out as being good value for money in the second round of surveys.
Special case – change after damagewe recommend that you go through check24 if you have had a car accident in the current year and then change your car insurance provider.
You must enter your no-claims class (SF class) when querying the comparison portals. If you have had a claim settled by your insurer in the current year, it’s not so easy – because insurers downgrade differently. Each insurance company has its own downgrading tables according to which it proceeds.
With check24, you only need to enter your current SF class and the previous damage. The calculator does the conversion to the new level and thus the correct comparison for you. you don’t need to know where you will be placed by a future insurer – the portal itself accesses the respective rating tables of the insurers.
The comparison calculator at check24 shows the SF class to which a new insurer will assign you after one – and, according to the portal, several – claims. So if you enter a car with damage in the current year in the check24-kfz insurance comparison, the exact downgrading is calculated there in the background for each insurer and rate. You will then receive the correct price based on this comparison.
As soon as you state on check24 that you have had a claim in the current year, check24 asks you on the calculation section (before the results page) for the SF class of the current year and not, as usual, for the next year. The SF class of the current year then forms the basis for the correct, insurance-specific SF class downgrading.
Different with verivox: there, as a customer, you must Future SF class indicate – so estimate or know for yourself. In a direct comparison, however, you may miss the cheapest offer – or even see an offer that is too cheap.
Verivox therefore warns customers who provide information on previous damage that reported damage in the current insurance year can lead to a downgrade with the new insurer and thus to higher premiums. The portal does not offer a technical implementation to directly take into account the future downgrade when calculating the rate.
Our recommendation: always compare twice
If you want to protect yourself from paying unnecessarily much for your car insurance, it’s important to, as many tariffs as possible include in the comparison. We show you how you can do this.
In the finanztip studies of the past few years, we have seen time and again that the risk of high surcharges is reduced if you have compare twice. however, our annual surveys are only random samples. In our recommendation, we therefore also draw on the broader basis of our previous studies. We assume that two broad comparisons reduce the risk of high outliers.
One thing we were able to ascertain again in this year’s series of tests: the average deviation decreases as a result of the combination of two comparisons.
In an overall analysis of both test series, we mostly found the cheapest rate for the combination of check24 and huk24 – the average deviation was then 1.4 percent (maximum outlier: 13.6 percent). With the combination of verivox and huk24, we arrived at an average deviation of 1.9 percent (maximum outlier: also 14.2 percent).
The combination of the two comparison portals verivox and check24 resulted in a deviation of 4.2 percent to the cheapest tariff. In contrast to previous years, we therefore do not recommend this combination at present.
Smaller deviation due to two comparisons
| verivox& huk24 1 |
check24& huk24 1 |
check24& verivox |
| 1,9 % | 1,4 % | 4,2 % |
| 14,2 % | 13,6 % | 27,4 % |
| 43 | 46 | 32 |
1 this combination is part of finanztip’s recommendation to compare twice.
source: data query on the portals, finanztip calculations (as at 8. November 2021)
Here’s how we investigated
car insurance comparison 2021
We have 32 sample profiles compiled according to the following criteria:
- Germany-wide distribution and thus large coverage of regional classes
- Consideration of statistics from the Federal Motor Transport Authority and destatis on the distribution of manufacturers, vehicle age, car classes and age of car owners
- examples of the german actuarial association (DAV), the association of actuaries
We have selected or preset the following in the comparison portals minimum criteria set for the car rates:
- Increased coverage
- Mallorca policy included
- No defense of gross negligence
- coverage of marten bites and their consequential damages
- game damage coverage extended to all animals
you should also set these minimum criteria when comparing to achieve consumer-friendly results.
We have first created a basic population. With the search terms "kfz versicherung", "kfz versicherung vergleich", "autoversicherung", "autoversicherung vergleich" we have the first three to five google pages searched and checked all 40 comparison sites found.
We have eliminated pure clones and comparison sites that did not have enough market coverage. In addition, tariffs had to be lockable on the portal and our minimum criteria had to be bindingly defined in the search mask.
The portals verivox and check24 appeared in google search and also met all requirements. The comparison calculator nafi car is a special case. The portal offers the largest market overview, even if not all insurers are listed there anymore. However, it is primarily aimed at brokers. The consequences: no possibility of conclusion; the price comparison is also complicated due to the comprehensive data query. We ran the results of this calculator, but out of competition.
Copies from the original computer nafi car: nafi’s comparative calculator is integrated by many brokerage companies. the offer of the portals includes only a part of the providers listed on nafi. However, these fares can then be contracted online in this way. In part, the portals, as mere copies of the original calculator, do not meet our formal requirements for large, stand-alone comparative calculators. partly your market overview is not big enough for us. 2021 we have co-investigated two portals in the category nafi copies: car insurance.De and G&P insurance brokers.
We selected these based on market coverage and the number of insurers listed: G&P versicherungsmakler had the most providers included, auto insurance.De again most, which were not listed at G&P insurance brokers. Both comparison calculators make a relatively large number of insurance rates for consumers comparable online and also available for purchase.
However, in our investigation, both the average and the maximum deviation from the lowest price in auto insurance were.De as well as at G&P versicherungsmakler higher than on the major portals check24 and verivox and also higher than on the calculator of nafi itself.
direct provideras in the past years, we have additionally collected prices from the direct provider huk24. this low-cost insurer has a high market share, but is not available on the usual comparison portals. you can therefore not conclude it through any comparison portal. On the other hand, huk24 does not offer the lowest price for all sample profiles. In our two 2021 test series, the outliers at huk24 were less clear-cut than in previous years. The maximum deviation was lower, but the number of higher deviations was slightly higher.
At first we also asked for prices at the allianz-subsidiary allianzdirect. However, the deviations were so high again this year that we did not investigate the insurer further (average over the first ten queries in September: 45.2 percent, maximum 93.7 percent).
to make sure we didn’t overlook any other low-cost provider, we also cross-checked an overall list from the german office of the green card (a facility set up by motor liability insurers in germany) with participants on the comparison portals. In our opinion we have all suppliers recorded can be contracted online are and a high market relevance show.