First steps towards kit car insurance
You’ve put in many hours of work in assembling the kit car of your dreams (or spent hard-earned cash getting someone else to do it) and you’re quite naturally eager to put it on the road and drive it. That’s the time, however, to take a deep breath, step back, and face the small matter of the necessary paperwork that is needed to register, licence and arrange kit car insurance.
A singular vehicle
Your kit car is no ordinary or “standard” car, but a genuinely singular machine – and that’s probably one of the things that attracted you to building a kit car in the first place. The fact that it’s a one-off, however, gives most insurers something of a difficulty – there’s no previously insured “model” that might give the insurer an idea of the risks of covering the vehicle or the level of claims that are likely to be submitted.
For this reason, a number of the major insurance companies simply decline applications for kit car insurance. This means that the most reliable and certain route lies through the specialist kit car insurers, whose products and services are advertised on a number of websites on the internet.
Single Vehicle Approval (SVA) and its alternatives
Even when a specialist insurer has been found, however, cover for the use of the vehicle on public roads might still require certification by the Department of Transport as to the integrity of the parts used. Depending on the origin of those parts, this might be Single Vehicle Approval (SVA), Individual Vehicle Approval (IVA), or Enhanced Single Vehicle Approval (ESVA). This certification is needed to confirm that the kit car you have built is roadworthy and conforms to all the necessary technical requirements for its use on the public highway. The inspections and tests are carried out by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, or VOSA, (an agency of the Department of Transport), which has test centres at various locations around the UK.
Chicken or egg?
Single Vehicle Approval – or one of the alternatives – might be necessary, therefore, in order to register and license your kit car, and even specialist insurers are unlikely to offer full insurance cover until the car is registered and licensed. This creates something of a “Catch 22” situation, therefore, when it comes to actually getting your kit car to the VOSA testing station. You need insurance to drive the vehicle even a short distance to the testing station, yet full cover is simply not available until the car has been granted its Single Vehicle Approval or other certification.
One of the solutions offered by some specialist kit car insurers is to arrange temporary cover specifically for that purpose – in other words, cover that is limited to driving the unregistered and unlicensed kit car to the testing station for the necessary inspection.
Less hassle and inconvenience, however, is probably achieved by transporting the unregistered and unlicensed vehicle to the testing station on a trailer and delaying the exact kit car insurance that you want until after this inspection has been done and the Single Vehicle Approval, Individual Vehicle Approval or Enhanced
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