Is car insurance a legal necessity? The short answer is yes; you must have car insurance if you wish to drive on the roads legally. However, although there aren’t any exceptions, there are some important points to note about insurance. Read on to find out more.
Why Do I Need Car Insurance?
If you’re wondering why it’s so important to have car insurance, you should think of it as protection for you, your car, and anyone else who happens to be using the road – pedestrian or driver – at the same time as you. Accidents can cost a lot of money to put right, and without insurance, that cost would fall to you.
If the accident is your fault, you would be expected to pay to repair the damage to all the vehicles involved and pay for any medical care resulting from the injuries sustained. Depending on the severity of the accident, it could add up to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Car insurance Montreal means that you don’t personally have to pay for anything; your insurance company will instead.
Even if the accident wasn’t your fault, there are circumstances wherein you would still have to pay for the damage to your own car at the very least – if the other person doesn’t have insurance, for example. Again, when you have insurance, this is not something you have to worry about. Car insurance is something you hope you’ll never have to use, but having it there is great peace of mind and will help hugely should something go wrong.
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What Happens If I Drive With No Insurance?
As we’ve said above, driving without insurance means that you would be liable for the costs if there were an accident, and they could be very high indeed. However, even if there is no accident, you would still be in a lot of trouble if you were discovered to be driving without insurance.
If you are caught driving without insurance, you will be fined, and you might even have your license taken away for a fixed period of time. If there is any damage done, and especially if anyone was injured through an accident you were involved in, you might even have to spend time in jail, and you may never be able to drive again. Plus, the police can take your car and destroy it.
You might think that no one will ever know that you’re driving uninsured, but police road checks are there to discover this information kept in a central database. They are checking for speeding and looking at each car that goes by, and ensuring that it is all in line with the relevant legal requirements.
It’s just not worth it to drive uninsured. Accidents happen all the time, and even if you think you’re a careful driver and therefore don’t need insurance, or that you can rely on other people’s insurance to cover you, what would happen if you had an accident and the other driver was also uninsured? Even if it was not your fault, you would have to pay to repair the damage to your own car, which would easily be more expensive than car insurance ever would be.
