Auto Insurance for disabled drivers

The auto insurance industry is challenging to navigate in even the simplest of situations. Add into that a disability, auto modifications or expensive medical equipment and it makes finding the right policy stressful.

Luckily, as with most insurance situations, being honest and upfront with your agent and insurer from the get-go is the best way to handle it.

Let's take a look at what you need to do to insure your vehicle if you're disabled. The first thing to do is look at how insurers set auto rates.

How auto insurers set rates

Although there's no gold standard on how auto insurers set rates, there are a handful of factors that typically go into their decision.

The factors included

• Type of Car
• Cost of vehicle
• Size of car Theft history of the type of vehicle
• Location
• Driving record Driving experience
• Annual Mileage
• Age
• Credit History
• Gender

Some risks are easier to assess than others. Statistics show young, male, teen drivers to be riskier than almost all other categories. The fatal crash rate per mile driven for 16- to 19-year-olds is nearly three times the rate for drivers over 20. Of those fatalities, the number of males versus females is almost double. This puts them in a higher rate slot, which leads to higher rates.

Insurers can’t discriminate

In addition to these general factors, those who are disabled need to consider additional conditions. Those conditions include vehicle modifications and medical equipment on board.

Bill Fertig, director of the Spinal Cord Injury Resource Center, said that insurance companies can’t directly discriminate based on your physical abilities.

"You can have some agent make a personal judgment and never say anything and you'd never know it, but you cannot have any discrimination from insurers based on people having a disability of any kind, so I don't consider that a problem," he said. "But it's very important to be upfront with your insurance agent about what exactly you have and how much your cost was," he said.

An example: If you drive a generic car and just modify it by adding simple hand controls. The controls could cost $1,000 and your car might be valued at $4,000. If something happened, such as a crash, you would want to be compensated for not only the car’s value but also the tool’s value. In this example, the hand controls.

"The way they do that is they apply a rider -- just an additional little insurance product to your account to cover your hand controls,” Fertig said.

You wouldn’t want to have to replace the hand controls out of your own pocket. However, $1,000 to do that would be nothing compared to someone who has a modified van with sophisticated controls, such as a Scott Driving System. Those go for $100,000 and up.

So if you add those to a $30,000 minivan, and get into a crash, you don't want to just get the minivan replaced for $30,000, you want to get the entire vehicle replaced for $130,000. It's another case of being upfront about what you're insuring and how much it costs to replace.