We spent six days asking strangers about car insurance

Looma exists because buying car insurance is worse than it needs to be. You type the same details into site after site, get back a wall of prices, and pick one without always knowing exactly what you’ve bought. We’re fixing the first part of that now. The second part, helping you understand a policy before you pay for it, is where we’re heading.

Looma had just gone live, so the timing was right to test both. We booked a stand at the British Motor Show and CarFest, and set about building something people would actually stop at, in eight weeks. Then we asked the people who wandered over to do one thing: choose a policy. Not insurance professionals, not people who’d downloaded our app, just drivers who happened to be walking past.

We wanted to know a few things. Firstly, how do people currently shop for car insurance? And if we show you more about what a policy actually covers, alongside its price, do you make a different choice? Finally, we wanted to know whether people would consider trying a different way of shopping for car insurance.

These questions matter because the answers help decide what we build next. The cover comparison experience isn’t in Looma today. This was about finding out whether it should be.

In total, 265 people completed the exercise across the two events.

This wasn’t intended to be a nationally representative study. It was a deliberately simple customer-discovery exercise with drivers we met at two motoring events. There was no control group, and everyone saw the information in the same sequence. But the consistency of what we saw gave us a strong enough signal to keep exploring.

Our goal was simple. What we learnt from six days of talking to drivers, some of whom are now users, surprised us.

1. The test: same four policies, more information

We kept it deliberately simple because we wanted to see whether additional information about the policy was associated with people making a different choice.

First, we showed people four policies and asked them to pick one. They could see the price, the excess and whether windscreen cover was included. It was deliberately limited information, intended to give us a baseline.

Then we showed them the same four policies at the same four prices, with additional examples of what each policy covered. Courtesy car, personal belongings, injury cover, whether you can drive other vehicles. The information was taken directly from the insurers’ own policy documents: the sort of detail that can be buried in policy documents or difficult to compare consistently before you buy.

And we asked them to choose again.

That was the test. Same policies, same prices, same person. The difference was the additional information in front of them, allowing us to see whether their choice changed once they knew more about what they were buying.

Alongside that, we asked two separate questions. First, how do you normally shop for insurance? One comparison site, several, direct to an insurer, over the phone, or just let it renew. We wanted to understand whether the pattern differed depending on how people normally bought their insurance.

And finally, simply: would you try Looma?

2. What happened when people could see more of the cover

The first round was more evenly spread than we expected. The most expensive policy was the single most popular choice at 31%, closely followed by the cheapest at 29%. The third policy attracted 27%, while the second-cheapest was chosen by 13%.

In other words, limited information didn’t automatically send everyone to the cheapest option. That challenged one of our assumptions going into the shows. We’d expected that, with relatively little else to differentiate the policies, people would naturally default to the lowest price. They didn’t.

But the distribution changed substantially once people could see more about what each policy included.

The cheapest option fell from 29% of choices to just 8%. Meanwhile, the third policy rose from 27% to 36%, and the most expensive policy from 31% to 45%.

Together, the two most expensive policies accounted for 81% of final choices once the additional cover information was shown.

The prices hadn’t changed. What had changed was the amount of information people had in front of them when making their decision.

And the movement wasn’t simply “everyone chose the most expensive”. Some people stayed where they were and some moved down as well as up. What stood out was the overall shift towards the two more expensive policies once the additional cover information was visible.

That matters. The point isn’t that a more expensive policy is necessarily a better policy, or that more expensive cover is right for everyone. It’s that, in this exercise, many people made a different decision when they had more information about the product in front of them.

3. The people who chose cheapest changed their minds the most

The overall shift is interesting. Where it came from is the real story.

We went back and looked at the people who had initially picked the cheapest policy.

Only 25% stayed with it once the additional cover information was shown. Another 10% moved to the second-cheapest, while 32% chose the third policy and 33% chose the most expensive.

Put another way, 75% of the people who initially chose the cheapest policy changed their choice once they saw more information about the cover.

And 65% ultimately chose one of the two most expensive policies.

Meanwhile, the people who had already picked the most expensive policy mostly stayed put: 86% chose it again after seeing the additional detail.

The pattern wasn’t identical across every starting policy, and people moved in both directions. But the behaviour of the cheapest-policy group particularly stood out.

Choosing the cheapest policy when relatively little information is available doesn’t necessarily mean someone only cares about price. In our test, three quarters of the people who initially chose it made a different choice when they were shown more information.

We can’t say from this exercise exactly why each individual moved, or that the additional information alone caused them to do so. Everyone saw the choices in the same sequence, and simply being asked to reconsider a decision may itself have had an effect.

But we can say something much simpler: when we gave people more information about the policies and asked them again, many made a different choice.

That was enough to make us want to understand the behaviour better.

4. It wasn’t just novice shoppers

The obvious question was whether we’d simply found an event full of people who don’t normally shop around.

That’s why we asked how people usually buy their insurance.

Two-thirds told us they use either one comparison site or several comparison sites, while a further 18% combine comparison sites with going direct. Just 6% said they let their insurance renew, 5% go directly to an insurer and 3% buy over the phone.

So this was predominantly a group already accustomed to shopping around for car insurance.

We then looked at the results by shopping habit.

There were differences between the groups, but the broader pattern was interesting: across every shopping habit we measured, a substantial proportion of people moved towards a more expensive policy once the additional cover information was shown.

That included people who already use several comparison sites when they shop for insurance.

That’s the part we found most interesting. These are people who already put considerable effort into comparing the market, yet many still made a different decision when additional product information was put in front of them.

Our conversations at the shows challenged another assumption we’d gone in with, too.

We expected younger drivers facing very high premiums to be the most obvious audience for a better way to shop. There was certainly interest there, but some of our strongest conversations were with experienced insurance shoppers who had been repeating the same annual comparison-site routine for years.

That’s an observation from six days at two car shows, not a conclusion about the wider market. But it gave us another hypothesis worth testing: perhaps some of the people with the most to gain aren’t those who don’t know how to shop around. They’re the people who know exactly how to do it and are fed up with doing it every year.

Comparison sites transformed insurance shopping by making prices dramatically easier to compare. We think the next opportunity is to make the product itself just as easy to understand.

If you were spending a few hundred pounds on a TV, you’d probably compare the specifications before you bought it. Car insurance costs hundreds, often considerably more every year, yet comparing policies feature by feature is still far harder than comparing their prices.

5. Looma is on the App Store

Looma quietly went live on the App Store just before the first of those two shows, which is why we could stand in a field and ask people whether they’d use it. Most said yes. A couple said no, but only because they needed van or bike insurance, which we don’t handle yet.

Here’s what they were saying yes to.

Today, Looma lets you compare the comparison sites. You enter your details once, in the app. Looma can then help fill in the forms on the sites you’d normally use yourself, so you can get quotes back from several places without typing the same information over and over again. You see what’s on offer and, if you want to go ahead, you buy from the site or insurer directly, as you would now. Looma doesn’t sell you anything or advise you on what to buy.

The part we care most about is how it does that. The forms are filled on your phone, inside your own sessions on those sites, not on a server somewhere. Your details are submitted to the sites you choose to use, just as they would be if you completed those forms yourself. We built it that way on purpose, because the whole point of Looma is that you should know exactly what’s happening with your data and your policy. That starts with us.

There’s one more thing in there, because it kept coming up when we talked to people: reminders. Looma will tell you when your MOT, tax and insurance are due, so the renewal doesn’t sneak up on you and you’ve got time to shop around rather than letting it roll over. Small feature, but it’s the one that turns Looma from something you use once a year into something that’s useful in between.

It’s early, it’s free, and it’s on the App Store now.

6. Where the cover detail goes next

We went to those shows to find out whether people would make different choices once they could see more of what each policy covered. In our test, many did, and the size of the shift was bigger than we expected. That’s a strong enough signal for us to take the next step.

The plan is to bring the cover detail into Looma, alongside the quotes you’ve already retrieved. The aim is to take information from insurers’ own product and policy documentation and lay it out so you can compare policies more easily, in the same way you compare prices. Courtesy car, personal belongings, driving other cars, injury cover. The details that can help you decide whether a policy is right for you, made easier to compare before you buy.

That work is already under way. Consumer insurance products are accompanied by an Insurance Product Information Document (IPID), designed to summarise key cover, exclusions and restrictions. We’re building technology to read and structure that information, alongside wider policy documentation where needed, so that policies from different insurers can be compared more consistently, feature by feature.

The shows gave us a strong indication that people value having more information in front of them when choosing a policy. The next few months of talking to Looma users will help us understand which features genuinely influence decisions, which matter to different types of driver, and which are mostly noise.

Because ultimately, the goal isn’t to show people more insurance information. It’s to show them the right information, in a way that actually helps them make a decision.

If you’re an insurer or a broker, this cuts the other way too. The same technology can help show how your policies stack up against the competition on more than price. If people make better-informed choices when they understand what they’re buying, that’s good news for anyone with a strong product. If you’d like to see yours side by side with the market around you, we’d like to hear from you.

Comparing prices was solved a long time ago. Comparing what you actually get hasn’t been. Understanding what you need comes after that.

That’s the gap Looma exists to close.

Until next time…

Chris, Rhys & Andrew