Boy racer mentality 'drives up male insurance premiums'
Published On 8 April 2008
A 'boy racer' mentality among young British men is leading to increased insurance premiums, an industry expert has said.Debra Williams, managing director of Confused.com, said that efforts to curb the boy racer attitudes of young men had failed and this meant that they generally have to pay more for their insurance then women.
Ms Williams was commenting after recent research showed that more than twice as many men as women were convicted for driving offences in 2007.
"Men's insurance, especially when they first pass their driving tests, has historically always been higher than that of their female counterparts - a fact which highlights the boy racer mentality which still exists in Britain," she added.
"Although men's premiums obviously decrease with age and experience, they always remain slightly higher than women’s which is unsurprising in the light of the recent research which found that men of all ages are two and a half times more likely to be convicted of a driving offence."
Despite this, Ms Williams stressed that women drivers were not "whiter than white" when it came to driving.
"The problem needs to be tackled generally and across the board, with both men and women being increasingly taken to task for avoidable offences," she concluded.
