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If you’re looking for a new pickup truck, how much is it going to cost you in terms of insurance? We compared Canada’s top ten selling pickup trucks for 2020, and found that the Chevy Colorado produced the most affordable premiums, on average 19-24% cheaper than those for the Jeep Gladiator, which had the highest premiums.

Canadians love their pickup trucks. Although more than 80% of Canadians live in cities, the Ford F-Series has been Canada’s best-selling vehicle for more than a decade, and for the last few years, it hasn’t even been close. With the Ram, GMC Sierra and Chevy Silverado also making the top five in terms of annual sales, just those four pickups now account for more than 20% of new vehicle sales across the whole country.

So if you love pickups, and you’re looking for your next new ride, we thought we’d give you some food for thought by running quotes for each of Canada’s top ten selling pickups for 2020.

In order to get quotes that reflect the reality of driving in Ontario, we created four sample drivers that represent different parts of the province, age/gender groups and driving records.

We’ve run other comparisons and found that pickup trucks, in general, are the most affordable vehicles in Canada in terms of insurance premiums. Our general understanding is that vehicles that are heavier and higher off the ground protect their passengers better in an accident. The reality is that insurance companies don’t rely on this kind of speculation, and base their rates on past claims data, and that data mostly favours pickup trucks over cars, passenger vans and SUVs.

The fact that the shortest and lightest trucks on our top ten list produce the best premiums seems to contradict the theory that taller, heavier vehicles are safer for the passengers inside them. This is mitigated by the fact that they are also the least expensive vehicles on the list. But at Mitch, we’re curious, just like you are, and we will do some more digging to try to better understand how the type of car you drive affects how much you pay for insurance.

There’s no sure way to know how much you’re going to pay for insurance just by looking at a particular car or truck and its specifications. We do our best to give you guidelines, but if you’re at the dealership and trying to decide between two or three different models, why not give us a call. Yeah. Right from the dealership. In 5 minutes, we can give you accurate quotes on the any vehicle you’re considering, and help you make a well-informed purchase. No obligation of course, but if you like the quotes, we’d love to have you as part of the Mitch family.

The average annual premium for auto insurance in Toronto is now over $2,000. In order to pay less than $1,200 or $100 a month, you need to have a lot of different factors going for you. First of all, you probably need to live somewhere other than Scarborough. It also helps if you’re over 40, with at least 20 years of driving experience, and a clean record.

Everybody knows that Torontonians pay more for everything. In general, that applies to auto insurance as well. But just in case you thought that everyone in Toronto pays through the nose, we ran quotes for a few folks who still pay less than $100 a month. You need to have a bunch of things going your way, but it is possible. Here are the key factors.

Your age is obviously very important to getting a good price for auto insurance, but we can’t underestimate the importance of how long you’ve been driving. Let’s take the example of Caroline, who is 55 years old, divorced, and living in Etobicoke.

If we assume that Caroline started driving around age 16, when she would have legally been allowed to drive, then her premium today would indeed be under $100 a month ($1,167 a year). But if she didn’t start driving until 10 years later, she’d be paying $1,359 a year, even with almost 30 years’ experience.

When you get to a certain age and a certain level of driving experience, it can even immunize you from the effect of minor tickets on your record. Because Caroline is 55 years old with almost 40 years of driving under her belt, the minor speeding ticket she got in 2020 will only cost her an extra $136 a year. That same ticket would cost Siobhan, our 37-year-old driver we talk about below, an extra $172 a year, and it would cost a 27-year-old driver an extra $249 annually.

It may seem obvious, but if you want to keep your auto insurance rates reasonable in Toronto, it’s imperative that you keep your driving record clean. As you see above, one ticket won’t necessarily kill you. If you get more than one within a three year span though, or God forbid an at-fault accident, then $100 a month will truly be a pipe dream for you.

Certain parts of the city are simply more expensive for insurance. If Caroline, above, lived in Scarborough, she’d be paying $1,570 a year for her auto insurance. That’s an increase of 35% just for a different postal code in the same city. All other factors, including driving record, exactly the same.

This isn’t arbitrary and it’s not a matter of picking on certain neighbourhoods. Insurance companies track claims costs by the postal code of the policyholder, and certain postal codes, such as those in Toronto, are much more likely to have expensive claims.

To some extent, this can be explained by traffic volume (say, when comparing rural postal codes to more urban ones), but within the same city, it usually has more to do with auto theft and organized insurance fraud rings that operate in certain parts of the city, and artificially inflate claims costs, in some cases by faking injuries in minor accidents, and in other cases just faking accidents altogether.

It’s estimated that together insurance fraud and auto theft cost Canadian policyholders more than $2 billion a year, and those added costs are concentrated where the crimes are happening.

That said, we did find someone in Scarborough who is paying less than $100 a month for auto insurance. Edwin is 65, married, and has a clean driving record. He pays just a smidge under $1,200 a year for insurance on his GMC Terrain.

Edwin retired in March, so he got a discount for having a zero km daily commute and only driving his car about 3,000 km a year. Before he retired, he was driving 15 km a day to work and back, and was putting about 15,000 km a year on his Terrain. At that time, he would have been paying $1,451 a year for insurance. He’s saving almost 20%!

Actually, drivers like Edwin, who are either retired or maybe work from home and don’t put a lot of kilometres on their vehicles, can sometimes save a whole lot more with a new product called CAA MyPace. Edwin could be paying as little as $704 a year!

When you sign up for the program, you get a device that you install in your car, and it measures how much you drive. If Edwin kept his driving down to the 3,000 km a year that he estimates he’ll drive in his retirement, he’d pay just over $700 a year. Even if he went over by 1,000 km, he’d still be paying $805 a year. The big drawback of the program is that once you go over 9,000 km for the year, you pay more than you would with a traditional policy.

We all want cheaper insurance, but most of us can’t just decide to move to a better postal code on the spur of the moment. If we’re working full-time and don’t have the option to work from home, reducing the number of kilometres we drive may not be an option either. We also can’t magically decide to be 55 years old if we’re only 35.

Those are the things you can’t do. But here’s what you can do:

Ultimately though, you may not have the option to get a new vehicle, and may just be stuck with the one you’re already driving. Our last sample driver, Siobhan, is in that situation with a 2007 Honda Accord that’s very reliable, and that’s a good thing, because she can’t afford even a used car for at least a few years. She lives in a basement apartment in the beaches with her common-law partner, and to get full coverage on her Accord, it would cost her $1,305 a year. That’s a bit more than she can comfortably afford, so like a lot of drivers with older cars, she’s decided to remove collision and comprehensive coverage, and keep only basic coverage on the car. That saves her about $250, and makes her annual premium $1,062.

There are a lot of ways to reduce your premium, but not all of them make sense. We don’t usually advise our customers to increase deductibles, for example, because if you’re worried about a few hundred dollars a year, then you probably won’t be able to come up with $2,000 to pay the deductible if you get in an accident and need to get your car fixed.

Toronto is an expensive place to live, but our experienced team of brokers can work with you to get the coverage you need, often for less than you expected to pay. Now that we’ve opened our Toronto Office, you can get great advice, lots of insurance options, and surprisingly low prices, from a brokerage that understands how costly city life can be. Call us right now at (289) 593-0275, or let us know when you’re free and we’ll call you.

Statistics suggest that most Canadians are at least thinking about buying an electric vehicle in the near future. The three main obstacles are cost, battery range, and availability of charging stations. If price is your main concern, it’s probably not quite time yet, but we should be there by 2023.

With electric vehicles (EVs) growing in popularity all around the world, Canada hasn’t exactly been leading the way. Whereas EVs now make up more than 11% of total passenger vehicle sales in Europe, for instance, they only account for 3.5% of Canadian sales.

That said, the EV movement in Canada is definitely building momentum, and in fact a recent survey revealed that nearly 70% of people in the market for a new ride in the next five years are planning to go electric.

There are three primary reasons that Canadians cite for NOT buying an EV:

The automotive industry, along with federal and provincial governments, have been working to remove each of these obstacles, and have made significant progress on all fronts.

The most affordable electric vehicles available in Canada right now sell for $40,000 to $45,000. That’s two to three times the cost of the most affordable gasoline cars. When looking at specific vehicles that are available in both electric and gas-powered models (e.g., Kia Soul, Mini Cooper 3DR, Hyundai Kona, BMW 4 Series coupe), electric models can be anywhere from 30% to 120% more expensive to buy.

If cost is a big factor in your buying decisions, double the price is a lot to overcome. However, there are other costs that can level the playing field to some extent.

Let’s start with those that are inherent to electric vehicles. (All of the following figures assume 20,000 km of driving per year):

So if you keep your vehicle for six years (the Canadian average), that means you can save between $10,500 and $13,500 on fuel, maintenance and insurance.

Then there are the government incentives:

Note that most of the rebates don’t apply beyond a certain price range ($45,000 to $60,000).

That means that you can save $5,000 to $13,000 on the purchase of a new EV. Lesser rebates may apply to leasing or buying used EVs. Some provinces have additional rebates for trading in your old gas-guzzler.

In places like Quebec, all these savings and rebates bring the total cost of an EV fairly close to that of a gas-powered vehicle. In Ontario, however, owning an EV is still quite a bit more expensive.

The reality is that the global market for electric cars has not been large enough to this point to create the economies of scale that would make the vehicles cheaper to produce and buy. And it’s not like the car companies have been making millions of dollars in profit either. Most EVs make no profit. Many lose money for the manufacturer.

That tide seems to be turning. The biggest contributor is the cost of the batteries. In 2020, the average cost of EV batteries was only 12% of what it was 10 years earlier ($130 USD/kWh). By 2030, it’s expected to be $58/kWh. Given this and other developments, experts predict that EVs will be profitable in the next few years, and that their prices will be on par with gas-powered vehicles by 2023.

Until the invention of the lithium-ion battery in the 1980s, it was always understood that electric vehicles were for short trips in the city. The typical range for an EV on a single charge was between 30 and 130 km. That made them impractical for many suburban Canadians who might drive 100 km or more a day, commuting to work, running errands, shuttling the kids to soccer, etc. Just the possibility that you might run out of juice in the middle of a busy day was enough to scare people off.

Then you also have to consider what people were used to. Most gas-powered cars can travel between 500 and 1,500 km on a full tank, depending on the driving conditions. A lot of Canadians are used to filling up once a week or less. The notion of having to plug in daily was not very attractive.

The Tesla Roadster was the first electric car to approach a battery range that suburban motorists considered practical. Using a lithium-ion battery, it could travel 320 to 355 km on a single charge. That is certainly enough for a hockey mom or dad not to get nervous. It also had enough speed and power to be legal for highway use.

Tesla took the automotive industry by surprise, and forced the major automakers to step up their game. The EV market has become much more crowded in recent years, and although there are still a few short range EVs on the market that target city dwellers, most of the EVs in the Canadian market now have battery ranges that would not scare off a busy suburbanite.

Here’s a very rough timeline of how EV battery range has evolved over the years:

Today’s EV market is getting more and more crowded, but as you can see, most of the fully electric models available in Canada now have a range over 240 km.

In 2020, Car and Driver magazine compiled results of the 12 EVs they had tested to date (all 2017 to 2019 models), and found that not one actually went as far on a single charge as the manufacturer advertised. The closest was the 2019 Audi e-tron, which made it to 93% of its advertised range. The worst was the 2019 Hyundai Kona Electric, which is supposed to have a range of 415 km, but only made it to 257 (62%).

Of course, there are lots of factors that play into how far an EV will actually travel on a single charge. For one thing, unlike gasoline vehicles, which are much more efficient travelling at higher (highway) speeds, EVs are most efficient at lower speeds. But the most important factor for Canadian drivers to know is that turning on the heat (a necessity in the winter months) can use a lot of battery power and potentially reduce the range of your EV by as much as 35%. This has never been an issue with gas-powered cars.

Note: Air conditioning also affects an EV’s range (reduces range by just under 20%), but the effect is equivalent to that seen in gas-powered vehicles.

The range of EV batteries continues to improve. Tesla has announced a relaunch of its iconic Roadster in 2023, with an expected range around 1,000 km. For the day-to-day purposes of most drivers, a range of 200-300 km is more than comfortable, especially since most EV owners charge nightly at home and public charging infrastructure is also improving.

When we talk about charging infrastructure for EVs, we need to first understand that most EV owners do 80% of their charging at home. Especially with battery ranges increasing, many EV drivers can go weeks or months without needing to use a public charging station.

Still, the anxiety persists, to the point that lack of charging infrastructure is the third most common reason given for not buying an EV. And indeed, a robust network of public charging stations is an important part of becoming an EV culture. If we’re asking Canadians to give up their gas-guzzlers for good, that means relying on EVs not only for daily errands, but also for that family trip to Quebec City, and that convention in Sault Ste. Marie.

A good way to see where we are with charging infrastructure is to compare it to gas stations:

Right now, EV charging infrastructure is not standardized the way that gas stations are. A few things to consider:

Although it definitely seems like fully electric vehicles are the future, many major car manufacturers offer hybrid versions of their most popular vehicles. A hybrid vehicle has a traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) AND an electric motor.

Typically, the car is powered by gasoline at highway speeds, and by the electric motor at lower speeds. You, as the driver, don’t have to switch from one to the other. The car’s onboard computer does it for you. In a non-plug-in hybrid, the battery is recharged while you drive.

Hybrids have been on the market since the turn of the century. Around 2010, carmakers started to offer plug-in hybrids (PHEVs). The difference? Because the PHEV can be pre-charged, it can run exclusively on the electric motor until the battery runs out. Although that range is typically only 25-50 km, that is enough for some city dwellers to run fully electric most of the time.

There are several benefits to buying a hybrid:

Cost:

The environment:

Peace of mind:

As with any emerging technology, some consumers jump on board right away, usually paying a hefty premium, while others wait for that new tech to go mainstream. As we near the end of 2021, the purchase price is still too high to make a purely financial argument to buy an electric vehicle today. But with battery ranges and charging infrastructure growing steadily, and industry analysts predicting price parity with gas vehicles in the next few years, it’s very possible that your next vehicle won’t have a gas tank.

At Mitch, we love technology, and we’re actually quite excited about an all-electric future. But we also know that you need affordable rates and coverage you can count on, no matter what you drive. That’s why we try to break it all down for you here, and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have when you call for a quote. Hit us up, anytime!

¹When you purchase the vehicle outright. Lesser rebates apply when you lease.

Updated Nov 4, 2021

With some Ontarians driving much less than they used to because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are wondering how much the number of kilometres they drive affects their premiums. The answer is, all things considered, not much. The difference in premium between driving 10,000 km a year and 50,000 km a year is between 6 and 19%. On the other hand, if you drive less than 12,000 km a year, you can save as much as 40% with a payment plan called CAA MyPace.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many Ontarians are driving less, and clearly it has led to a reduction in the overall cost of claims for auto insurance companies. In return, most of those companies have reduced their rates, and in some cases, sent rebate cheques to their customers. But on an individual basis, how much difference does it make if you tell your broker you drive 5,000 km a year or 25,000? And what about that “commute” question? Will you pay a lot more if your daily drive is 35 km as opposed to 5 km? Let’s take a look at some quotes to illustrate the differences.

To answer this question, we ran car insurance quotes for 4 different drivers. Based on our sample drivers below, it appears that younger drivers’ premiums are the least affected by the number of kilometres they drive. Which seems pretty fair, given that they tend to pay the highest premiums to begin with.

It also seems that younger drivers’ rates top out around 25,000 or 30,000 km a year, whereas older drivers continue to pay a little more for extra kilometres up to 40,000 or even 50,000 km a year.

For drivers who really only use the car to get groceries once a week, there is an innovative insurance payment plan from CAA Insurance that allows you to really cash in on your low-volume driving. CAA MyPace is a program whereby you install a special device in your vehicle that tracks the number of kilometres you drive, and then charges you based on real data from your own car. The savings are purely up to you, but can be significant:

¹If you drive more than 12,000 km a year, surcharges apply, and the program is actually more expensive than a traditional CAA policy.

As licensed insurance brokers, we are specially trained to tailor our insurance offerings to your needs. We work with 70+ different insurance companies, and based on information that you provide, including how much you drive, we will recommend the insurance option that best suits your particular needs, meaning not just the best price, but a package of coverage that meets your needs…at a really great price. Call us today for a bunch of options, a great deal, and service that can’t be beat.

There are lots of myths out there about what kind of car or truck will cost you more or less to insure. Most Ontarians would assume that a sports car will come with higher premiums, especially a red one. Not necessarily true. We also think that the bigger and more expensive the car, the more we’ll pay for insurance. The fact is that there are some general rules you can follow, but the biggest factor is how likely you are to be injured in an accident, not the value of the car.

Within the current boundaries of the City of Toronto, there are 102 postal code groups (first 3 letters) that identify an area or neighbourhood, and can affect the premium you pay for auto insurance. Of all the postal codes, those in Scarborough are the most expensive, with 16 of the 17 Scarborough postal codes paying more than any other part of the city. Meanwhile 8 of 12 postal code groups in Etobicoke pay the lowest rates in the city.

For as long as there has been car insurance, men have paid higher premiums than women. This is not unfair discrimination. It’s based on hard facts. They also make more claims and more expensive claims.

For parents who have new and learning drivers in the house or maybe even getting their own car to go off to school, it’s good to know how much you can expect to pay for their auto insurance. The short answer is that for a family living in North York, it could cost you as little as $500 to add an 18-year-old child as an occasional driver to your vehicle, or as much as $3,000 or more if you get them their own used vehicle.

If you have teenage children and you’re trying to plan your finances for the next 5 or 10 years, you probably think a lot about how much you’ll have to pay if they choose to go away for school. Another cost that you should consider is what they might pay for transportation as they get their licenses and start driving. Monthly payments, gas and maintenance aside, the cost of auto insurance for a driver under 25 can sometimes be your biggest cost, and certainly worth considering. With this in mind, we’ve created a fictional family living in North York, Ontario, to help illustrate the potential costs you might expect as your kids start driving. Manny (62) and Sandra (56) both have more than 20 years of driving experience, and have no tickets or at-fault claims currently on their records. As such, they pay a combined $2,400 a year to insure a late model Ford F-150 and a slightly older Honda CRV.

Most people know that the best way for new teen drivers to gain experience without paying top dollar for insurance is to add them as occasional drivers to their parents’ policy. If Manny and Sandra had an 18-year-old girl (let’s call her Raine), who just got her full G license, took an approved driver training course and has a clean driving record so far, adding her as an occasional driver to the CRV would only add $496 a year to the cost of their policy. A few other things to consider:

Though the discrepancies between male and female premiums are eye-opening, they are very well founded on real claims statistics going back for decades. The fact is that young male drivers are by far more likely to have a serious collision than their female counterparts. All that aside, the cost of adding a young driver to your policy would be seen by most as reasonable, in that the additional premium for the occasional driver is more or less equal to or less than the premiums for each primary driver.

This is where auto insurance costs can really start getting out of hand, when you have a young, inexperienced driver as the primary driver on their own vehicle. And contrary to what some people think, you can’t just buy a third car and make one of the parents the primary driver of that car. So when Manny and Sandra start looking for a reliable used car for Raine, she has to be listed as the primary driver of that car. Before making a purchase, Sandra calls her broker for some quotes on auto insurance.

Sometimes a kid just needs their own car, say if they’re working full-time and you live in an area where public transportation is unreliable. But the moral of this story is that to keep premiums down, it’s really a good idea to keep kids under 25 as occasional drivers for as long as possible.

The rules that currently exist in Ontario allow young adults to stay under their parents’ policy indefinitely, as long as they continue to live in the same house. But of course at some point, kids want to stand on their own two feet. Well, here’s what would happen if Raine/Blaine wanted insurance on the same 2011 Honda Civic, but were not under their parents’ insurance policy:

These premiums are based on a driver with driver training, no tickets and no accidents. We would include quotes with one or two speeding tickets, but you don’t want to know. At that point, it’s very possible that both Raine and Blaine would be riding the train.

You may have heard that young drivers pay significantly more until they turn 25. It’s true, but the journey from 16 to 25 is not a straight line down. Here’s what Blaine and Raine, assuming they have driver training and keep their records clean, would pay for standalone auto insurance every year until they turn 25:

¹Drivers with a G1 license are not expected to have their own insurance. They are covered under the policy of the experienced driver who accompanies them.

²It’s very rare that a G2 driver would have their own standalone insurance. The premiums shown reflect what these drivers would pay as occasional drivers under a parent’s policy.

³Children can remain as occasional drivers on their parents’ policy even with their G license.

Obviously age 25 is not the end of the journey, but that is the age when premiums start approaching the provincial average. By age 30, Blaine and Raine would both be paying right around $2,000 a year, and it will take until age 55, with clean records, to get their best possible rates, just over $1,200 annually. The above prices are meant to illustrate how premiums come down as drivers age and gain driving experience. They are from M&W’s quoting system, and reflect what people of the stated age would pay today. As such, they do not reflect what a teenager today can expect to pay when they turn 25, for example, because inflation and other factors are likely to drive premiums up between now and then.

The important thing to remember about the rates above is that even though they may seem high, they are based clean driving records, meaning that they could be much higher. But of course they could also be somewhat lower. Here are some things that would help keep anyone’s rates down, but that are especially important for younger drivers who lack driving experience:

The 18 different premiums above come from 4 different insurance companies. It’s worth noting that some insurance companies are more favorable for teen or young drivers. That means that if Raine (or Raine’s parents) stayed with Insurer A because they offered the best price at age 20, they would miss out on the best price at age 21 ($4,071) because that’s from a different insurer. The only way you can make sure you’re always getting the best deal is by calling a licensed insurance brokerage that works with at least a dozen of the top auto insurers in the province. Hey, we just happen to be that brokerage. We’d be happy to get your young driver insured, and keep your costs as low as possible. Give us a call.

If you are considering buying a vehicle on Auto Trader’s list of Canada’s cheapest vehicles, you should know that the lowest-cost vehicles don’t necessarily get you the lowest insurance premiums. Here’s what it would cost 4 Ontario drivers to insure the cars on the list.