One of the things we get asked all the time at Club meets, shows, on the phone and online is, “What am I not covered for?” Over the next few weeks, we will be compiling a series of short articles to help you understand a bit more about the exclusions in your PDS. Importantly, these articles focus on the major pieces and should not be viewed as a substitute for appropriately looking through your PDS before deciding to take up coverage with Club 4X4.
This time around we will focus on Legal Use of your 4WD. What we talk about in this article can be referenced back to page 16 of our PDS.
The first thing to point out here is that the exclusions are focused on the driver of the fourby, not the owner (if they’re different people at the time). This makes it incredibly important to have complete trust in any person who you authorise to drive your vehicle. Lending it to a mate to go down the shops? Have a club member jumping in to help with a recovery? In all of these instances the person behind the wheel is who will be exposed to these exclusions!
So here’s a few points you should take note of:
- Licensing – whilst most restrictions on younger drivers are around power to weight ratio around the country, it’s still important to make sure that the person driving is authorised to do so. This may also be relevant for some of our customers who may own a truck that does move into a medium rigid classification. This is usually dictated by the GVM of the vehicle (read Unimogs, converted 4X4 Canters and Fuso’s), which will require you to have a different kind of license. Make sure you take the time to understand the limitations in detail.
- Drugs and Alcohol – Driving drunk is pretty well known as a restricting factor around your insurance coverage, but there is an increasing level of vigilance with law enforcement around drug testing. It should be a known fact that any accident involving a collision with a human will result in the driver of the vehicle being taken to hospital for mandatory blood testing. But what if the driver of your rig was tested roadside for drugs? There’s no nice way to say it, but sometimes we don’t know if a person has a drug addiction and put simply the stats are mind-boggling. If someone drove your car and was involved in an incident with an illicit substance in their bloodstream, the damage to your vehicle and other property may not be covered.
- Driving – It’s important to understand that where someone has taken your vehicle without your permission, any damage that is caused in a claimable event is not covered. This of course is not the case if you’ve reported the theft of the vehicle as soon as you’ve become aware of the vehicle being missing. Theft of a vehicle is handled separately and more information can be found in the PDS. Further to this, if the vehicle is being driven with more occupants than it is rated to carry, your coverage will come into question.
- Excluded drivers – This should be pretty clear, but it’s important to understand how it works. We don’t offer what the industry calls a “named driver” policy, but there will be times where we may preclude a specific driver from driving the vehicle. With us, you also have the opportunity to exclude certain age groups from being covered on your policy; this is a great way to reduce your premium and the overwhelming majority of our policyholders take this option up. Any driver exclusions will be noted on your Certificate Of Insurance (COI), which we email or mail to you when you take up or renew your policy. It’s important to review your COI to make sure you understand the driver limitations.
- Leaving the scene of an accident – this is again an illegal act in most states across the country. If you leave the scene of an accident without rendering assistance if required, or swapping details with other involved parties not only will you be up for a fine from the police, you will not be covered for damage sustained to your vehicle and or other’s property. As always, at the scene of an accident make sure you get the other party’s registration number, license details, phone number and address details from their license. It also helps to note who they’re insured with to ensure your claim gets processed as quickly as possible.
The overarching caveat on this is that Club 4X4 does reserve the right to pay a claim should the owner be able to satisfy us that they wouldn’t have known that the driver of the vehicle falls into the above categories. This is just a sensibility clause and can be observed in more detail in the PDS
So there you have, issue one of our series of articles.
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