GEICO and Allstate are two of the more recognized car insurance companies in America. Each year they spend millions of dollars are spent on print, television and internet advertising in an attempt to lure you into one of their car insurance policies.

New tests conducted by the Institute for Highway Safety have rated the Chevrolet Silverado 1500, the Dodge Ram 1500 and the Nissan Titan pickups poor for side impact crash protection.

The Ram, equipped with standard side air bags, earned the second-lowest score of marginal. The Titan and Silverado received the lowest mark of poor when tested without optional side air bags.

Since Colorado moved from a no-fault auto insurance system in 2003, drivers involved in auto accidents have often found they didn’t have the medical payments coverage they needed to pay for treatment of their injuries. A new law for 2009 requires car insurance companies to automatically add $5,000 of medical payment coverage to every Colorado car insurance policy.

Sounds good, right? Here’s the catch.

These are trying economic times and simply turning on the television can put you in a state of depression. You may be a casualty of a layoff at work, a downsizing or a flat out firing and you still have to pay that stack of bills that are piling up on your counter. The temptation to cut your car insurance coverage to save money may end up costing you more in the end than it saves you today.

Progressive Insurance has some changes coming to their car insurance policies that may lower your car insurance bill. Drivers will now be rated by averaging the driver risk across all the vehicles on your policy rather than on a specific vehicle. The changes include:

Household Averaging Driver Assignment – This change means drivers are averaged across your vehicles instead of rating a specific driver on a specific vehicle.

If you haven’t noticed GEICO’s new advertising campaign, you haven’t missed much. I don’t know how much they paid their advertising agency to slap a pair of google eyes on a stack of cash and build a commercial around it, but it was too much. The new GEICO car insurance commercials are almost as annoying as Travelocity’s gnome commercials.