The purpose of National Underwriter's annual online shopping exercise is to gain a consumer's perspective on the market for auto insurance, as well as to evaluate how well some Web sites do at providing reasonable quotes. No endorsement of any particular site or company is intended by the information presented here.

As in surveys past, I visited a number of auto insurance shopping sites to get a six-month quote on my 2004 Mitsubishi Eclipse GT. The quotes here reflect rates in the New Jersey market.

This year, I opted to go for what most of the sites considered slightly above standard coverage, meaning it was more than what New Jersey state laws require. Considering that I used a slightly lower standard in last year's survey, the decrease in auto rates seems all the more impressive.

I assumed that I would be paying in monthly installments, so I ignored quotes that offered a discount for payment in full up front. I also eliminated extras, such as roadside assistance and rental car reimbursement.

Even with these parameters, however, I found that the sites vary widely in terms of how much they allow customers to specify coverage limits. Some provided almost no flexibility, while others allowed buyers to “customize” their policies to some extent.

As far as possible, I attempted to level the playing field at each site to match the same limits, but in some cases I could only approximate the coverages.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

I began my search with InsWeb, the well-known aggregator site, primarily because I knew it would deliver several quotes based on a single input of information. I later found out, however, that some of the insurers who offered results via InsWeb still required me to answer the same questions over again.

The upfront process with InsWeb is short and sweet, and the aggregator delivered five companies, but only one actual quote–$701 from AIG Direct, easily the highest quote I would receive.

I was also promised quotes from Allstate (via an agency that is easily 70 miles from my home), Consumer United, Liberty Mutual and NetQuote. Consumer United–even farther away, in Boston–turned out to be an agent for my real-life insurer, so I threw that figure out.

A Liberty Mutual agent contacted me the same day and seemed to know that his company had sent me a snail-mail discount offer involving my graduate school. They were going to quote based on that, but when I told them I only wanted the quote for me and not for my wife, they suddenly became suspicious.

The agent wanted to know why I wasn't including her on the policy, suggesting that perhaps we weren't together any more, or maybe that she had a really bad driving record. I assured him that our marriage was happy and her driving record clean, but he refused to give me a quote without including my spouse, so I ended the call.

NetQuote, from the InsWeb site, was perhaps the most interesting journey. They immediately forwarded me to GEICO, which required me to re-input nearly everything I had already given InsWeb, plus more information.

GEICO would also not quote me a rate unless I included my wife on the policy, so I relented and listed her as a driver. When I got a quote, it was curiously lacking both comprehensive and collision rates and deductibles, so I had to edit those in at the end.

My final rate from GEICO was $206 for six months–except that it was also $60.34 per month, so my six-month rate should have been around $360. I began to wonder if my high school English teacher was right about me not understanding math. A subsequent e-mail from GEICO brought me back to reality with a rate of $362–the lowest quotation I would receive.

I can imagine, however, that some consumers might blithely proceed on the assumption that they were paying the $206 rate initially displayed. I'm sure that figure must have mysteriously materialized on the GEICO Web site from the ether.

Winding up InsWeb, the Allstate agent e-mailed a quote of $597 for six months.

Next stop on my Internet sojourn was Progressive Direct, which hangs its marketing mojo on the idea that it will give you competitors' rates to compare with the quotes it provides. Progressive also insisted that I include my wife on the policy, and I did so.

The Progressive rate was $474, if paid in full, but $519 if paid monthly ($86.52), which is the figure I used. When I asked for competitive rates, I was forced to answer a battery of detailed questions first.

Progressive then provided just one “competitive” rate from State Farm, which it said would charge me between $520 and $582. The actual State Farm rate, as you will see later, was just $472, which caused me to have considerable doubt about the accuracy of Progressive's competitive quotes.

(I later found out that if I “adjusted” Progressive's estimation of my creditworthiness, the State Farm quote would be $474, just as Progressive predicted. The problem was that unless I looked closely, I couldn't see that changing this parameter was even an option on the Progressive results page.)

Progressive also did its utmost to sell me on its MyRate Discount, an upfront $52 savings offered if I would plug the “MyRate device” into my vehicle. The device apparently reports speed and time data to determine how far motorists drive, the time of day they drive, and how aggressively they drive. At renewal, the data can help drivers get a discount–or not–depending on the results.

One interesting feature of this program is that users can view some of their own data to track their driving habits.

To keep the playing field level, however, I declined the MyRate discount offer.

Since I had asked for quotes from others that included my wife, I decided to return to Liberty Mutual via their own Web site in order to get a quote. Their figure, not including my alma mater discount, was about $71 per month, or $428 over six months.

Next on the list was Allstate, which was unique in that it allowed me to get a quote without providing my name or other personal information. It simply asks for data on gender, age, accidents in the last five years, vehicle details and “billing history”–their code for credit history.

(A word about the credit issue: Virtually every site either asks about your credit, or makes it clear that they will check your credit as part of their evaluation process.)

The six-month quote I received from Allstate was $550–or $47 less than quoted me by the Allstate agent via InsWeb. In fairness, however, the agent had more details to work with, thus his quote was probably more accurate.

I then proceeded to State Farm, which had the distinction of being the only site to insist that I provide my drivers license number. The quote here was $472, as mentioned, or $78.65 per month.

WHAT I LEARNED

After so many years of selling auto insurance online, you would think that insurers would make the process less time-consuming and more user-friendly, while refining their evaluation tools to the point where the differences in rates would be relatively small. Unfortunately, our latest foray into Web-based buying found just the opposite in some cases.

One must appreciate that insurers walk a delicate line between providing a fast quote and providing an accurate quote. More information will, in most cases, allow carriers to give you a quote that is closer to what you will actually pay.

On the other hand, it takes more time to provide more information, and that could cause some prospective buyers to give up and go elsewhere.

So where does the consumer draw the line?

For me, it becomes a nuisance to stay on a Web site that forces me to answer the same questions more than once. It is equally annoying to input information via an aggregator, only to have to input the same information again for carriers that are providing quotes through the aggregator.

If an aggregator can't offer freedom from that aggravation, they aren't offering much value.

It also remains obvious that a slew of other factors besides customer data must be involved in the final quote. As with most insurance coverages, the true extent and weight of these factors remains a mystery to the consumer. This is demonstrated by the last two years' increased gap between lowest and highest quotes for the same coverage.

We have seen that the online auto insurance buying experience remains fractious in some cases and annoying in others. Customers are likely to be frustrated and confused by the experience–and who can blame them?

Overall, we must conclude, as we have in past years, that consumers can get some interesting ideas on auto quotes from online outlets, but in the end, it may be to their advantage to consult a human being who happens to be an agent.