If you are reading this you are probably already only too aware that car insurance for teenagers and those in their mid-to- early 20s can be very, very dear and to be brutally realistic there is a very good reason for this. Young drivers, particularly male ones, suffer from not only a lack of experience but also, far too often, a lack of judgement allied to a surplus of testosterone. All these mix together to create an accident rate which is many times that of older drivers, and since insurance companies are on this world to make a profit and not to act as a branch of the social services, they charge insurance premiums which are commensurate to the risk that they feel exists.

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So here you are, either a young driver or perhaps the parents of one, facing the necessity of raising the money required to pay for a car insurance policy, without, preferably, putting yourself into Carey Street (for younger readers, that means bankruptcy!). What is the best way to go about it?

One popular route is to name the young person as an additional driver on a policy owned by someone older and more experienced, and this can work quite well provided that the car which is ensured is not father' s late-model Mercedes or Jaguar! If this is the case the additional premium would probably be extremely heavy. It is very often a much cheaper tactic to buy a much older and lower powered vehicle with a good safety record and in a low insurance bracket, and buy a policy far that as well. If a person who is named as the main driver actually drives the vehicle far more than the young person who is named as an additional driver then all is well and good, but if the insurance company discovered that the young person was in fact the principal user of the vehicle, even though he or she was only listed as a named driver, they could refuse to pay out on any claim and the matter could even end up in the hands of the police, since passing off in this way is a criminal offence in the UK. The future also needs to be considered; the young driver, having built up a no claims discount, could eventually see the premiums dropped quite sharply but this may not happen if he or she is only a named driver on someone else's policy.

This is, of course, assuming that no accidents take place! Many people believe that once they have passed their driving test they have had sufficient training to jump into a car and tear off down the motorways at maximum speed, in complete safety and we all know that that is not the case at all. It is an excellent idea for a young inexperienced driver to take a driver improvement course is before becoming too ambitious, and that this could not only lead to a reduction in insurance premiums, not only mean that the chances of damaging a beloved motor car be greatly reduced, but it could also possibly save the life of not only the young driver but other road users as well.

The most important piece of advice however I have saved until last. Different insurance companies have different attitudes towards young drivers and premiums can vary considerably for the same driver in the same vehicle, from company to company and it is not unknown for premiums to differ by hundreds of pounds. Thanks to the Internet it is very easy to search for lots and lots of quotations, and you should get as many of these from as many insurers as possible. You could save yourself a very considerable amount of money, which is well worth doing even at the best of times, and doubly so during a recession as deep as this one is going to be!