Car Insurance... what a pain!

It's time to renew the car insurance. Why do companies make it so hard to get quotes?

First thing is, when we got our second car (I know, I know, two car family... I'm hoping that either we move at some point or one of our jobs moves at some point such that we can get rid of it again) our existing insurance people wanted to know if we'd made any claims on our other car's insurance in order for them to give us a quote. Why couldn't they just look it up? I gave them our existing policy details and they used that to get all our personal details. But oh no, they can't go that extra little bit and pull up the record of any past claims to save me the hassle of having to figure out what and when I've claimed in the past. And of course I forgot something... and they pulled me up on it... Gits.

Next thing is, trying to get a quote from another company. My wife had someone go into the back of one of our cars last year. Not her fault - she was stopped at a red traffic light with the handbrake on when it happened. One of the questions they insisted on getting the answer to was how much total damage was done to both cars involved in the accident. Now one of the reasons we pay the insurers lots of money is so that we don't have to worry about that sort of thing. We paid the excess & the insurance company paid the rest for having our car repaired & all this was subsequently reclaimed from the other driver's insurance company. Neither we nor our insurers knew how much damage was done to the other car, so how on earth are we supposed to give a total damage to both cars? In the end I managed to get our insurers to tell me how much they paid for our car... but no way to find out the other car's damage...