Skip to main content

Car Dealers Claim Insurers are Halting Policies Ahead of Hurricane Irma

Florida-area car dealerships are annoyed that insurance companies pulled the plug on policies earlier this week, fearing further hurricane-related payouts as Hurricane Irma approaches the coast. Insurers, including Progressive and Allstate, are reacting to losses incurred in Texas during Hurricane Harvey’s assault last month.

While this is standard practice for some companies, it isn’t a universal trend. State Farm, for example, said it would continue offering coverage until after a national hurricane advisory had been issued. 

“If you take us out of business for a week before a storm even hits and maybe a week after, you can imagine the impact, not just on consumers who are inconvenienced but the state’s economic resources,” Ted Smith, the president of the Florida Automobile Dealers Association, told Bloomberg.

“I’m urging through our public officials that they talk to these insurance companies and make sure they follow the policy of State Farm — wait until there’s imminent danger before you stop writing cars.”

According to capital markets firm FBR & Co., insurance companies may be looking at over $10 billion in claims stemming from Harvey — which was a Category 4 storm at landfall. Irma is now a Category 5 and one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded. Early estimates believe she could be capable of causing $130 billion in damages in the United States.

April Eaton, a spokesperson for Allstate, said the company issued a property and auto moratorium in 23 Florida counties this week. Progressive also verified it had stalled new policies in the state but was less specific on the regions affected.

Barry Frieder, the president of Miami-based car dealership Potamkin Automotive, said insurers stopped writing policies Tuesday. “We’ve kind of been out of business since yesterday,” Frieder explained.

Ideally, Florida dealers aren’t hunting for sales in the final days leading up to Irma’s landfall and are evacuating instead, but it’s easy to sympathize with their plight as the storm looms. Hurricanes can be very bad for business. Harvey reduced the seasonally adjusted rate of U.S. auto sales in August by as much as 400,000 vehicles. Projections before the storm hinted that the industry could have its first monthly sales gain for the year. With Irma expected to further suppress deliveries, the prospect of the auto industry bouncing back in September looks bleak.

This post first appeared on thetruthaboutcars.com

The post Car Dealers Claim Insurers are Halting Policies Ahead of Hurricane Irma appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2eOWtGv
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more