The Nissan GT-R has been gobbling up industry awards: It garnered Automobile Magazine's "2009 Automobile of the Year" award, Motor Trend's 2009 "Car of the Year" honors and Kelley Blue Book's "Best Resale Value Award" for the high-performance-car category.
Nissan calls the GT-R, which starts at $76,840, a "multi performance supercar" that is meant to deliver fantasy driving. It logged the fastest-ever lap time for a mass-produced car on the Nurburgring Circuit, a racetrack in Germany. It's a 3.8-liter, twin-turbocharged, 24-valve V6 with 485 horsepower. (By comparison, the Honda Accord Coupe EX-L V6 has 271 horsepower.)
If you have a GT-R supercar, you're surely the envy of your neighbors.
But they wouldn't be envious if they saw your car insurance bill. The 2009 Nissan GT-R also garners the highest insurance rate of any 2009 vehicle, excluding convertibles.
Insure.com compiled average car insurance rates for almost 300 model year 2009 vehicles. Sports cars dominate the most-expensive list, with the GT-R driving away with the top bill.
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A sortable chart lets you compare models by average insurance premiums and more.
Flooring it
Kim Hazelbaker, the senior vice president of the Highway Loss Data Institute, says he'd be happy to drive any of the cars that top the most-expensive-to-insure list. But there's a reason they're there."I'm assuming that most of the people who buy these are going to stick their foot in it," Hazelbaker says. "That means insurance losses will be higher."
Cars shoot to the top of the most-expensive-to-insure list because their drivers have submitted frequent and expensive insurance claims. On the other hand, when a car model attracts experienced drivers who don't crash often, all drivers of that model benefit.
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How cars are priced for insurance
When a vehicle is in its first model year in the U.S., like the 2009 GT-R, with no claims history, the collision and comprehensive insurance rate is based primarily on the manufacturer's suggested retail price."They look at the sale price of the vehicle, and that's what they start at," explains Don Griffin, the vice president of personal lines for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, a trade group. "Then rates are adjusted up or down based on loss history over time."
Insurers also might look at horsepower-to-weight ratio or the 0-to-60-mph times to distinguish a high-performance car from a midperformance one, Griffin says, and adjust the insurance rate accordingly. Griffin estimates it'll take three to five years for insurers to have enough claims data on the GT-R to make a reliable adjustment, in part because relatively few will be sold.
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Small cars get poor marks in crash testsWatch what happens when the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashes tiny cars into bigger ones.
In most cases, liability premiums aren't affected by car choice. But in the case of high-performance sports cars, drivers could be charged higher liability rates because insurers expect that they chose their cars for speed and intend to use them that way. Drivers of vehicles like the Hummer (the H2 is 10th on our list) also could get higher liability rates because their vehicles inflict more damage.
And then there's the theft history. The Cadillac Escalade isn't famous for speed, but it's famous for being stolen. It tops Highway Loss Data Institute's theft-losses list. That's why it's in the top 10% of most expensive cars to insure.
Continued: Premiums can vary wildly
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