Takes the Mickey when it seems that the fine is only a few hundred Pounds for not having insurance... but the insurance is often 3-4 TIMES as much (assuming you buy it before you've done anything wrong, like drive without insurance).
Openly flouting the rules and driving without insurance (without any seriously believable mittigating circumstances*) should be a driving ban and driving without a license should mean a proper criminal conviction and sentence.
*I recently drove for 10 days without insurance, completely by accident! After I had switched over to Admiral multi-car for a year and then back to a single car, they had shifted my renewal date to the day I added the second car, NOT the day I bought my main car - I should have spotted that, so I'm not blameless, but then they proceeded to misplace three letters in the post (my upcoming renewal notice, my new docs and my notification of failed payment) and then the final notification of insurance cancellation took a day short of three WEEKS to get to me! For a company that phones you as soon as soon as you hit their website to try to close a deal, they were pretty chy of picking up the phone and telling me there was a problem!
Enough of the sob-story - the bit I wanted to update people on was that you HAVE to use the MoneySaving Expert guide - it just saved me over £700!!!
LINK
edit:
£303 four years ago, then about £350, £450 and latest renewal came in at £589 - I thought it was £480 at first!! (only addition has been one non-fault scooter accident)... and with the new provider, I had to drop my folks off the insurance, which is a pain as it's great to let them take the car if they want to take the kids out (car seats, etc) and they drive A6's, so it's a pretty similar car..
Then when I went to insure my new car (A6 Avant 3.0TFSI - admittedly the perfect car for profiling people up or down!):
Audi insurance came in at £1080 for me, but >£1300 to add my parents.
Current insurer was around £900 just for me, £1100 to include my parents.
And MoreThan were £411, including my parents!
They've already shown some worrying tendancies to downvalue the car, etc, but with Audi's gap-insurance, I should be covered!