Young Kiwi drivers have been urged to take out insurance as a major insurer highlights how incurring a bill could last a long time.
Some uninsured drivers who had been involved in accidents dating as far back as the 1990s are still paying back their debts, as the value of uninsured claims continues to rise.
AA Insurance said that in the year to October 2016, it dealt with over $8.5 million of debt from claims involving almost 2,800 at-fault uninsured drivers, a 5% rise from the same period the year before, New Zealand Herald reported.
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Amelia Macandrew, customer relations manager for AA Insurance, said the problem lies not with there being a greater number of uninsured drivers, but rather, the rising cost of repairs.
“In the old days you could just get a second-hand bumper. But the cost of claims are getting more expensive for technical reasons,” she told the publication.
Macandrew said the insurer only had a few people still paying back their almost three decades old debt, but wanted to stress just how long-lasting the effect of a big bill could be.
The warning comes on the back of AA Insurance’s Driver Safety Survey which found that young people are more likely to get involved in accidents and less likely to think of insurance as something important.
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