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.

Insurance is a personal matter and finding the right insurance agent is an important decision. Licensed insurance agents are trained to help you analyze your insurance needs and make coverage recommendations based on your personal or financial situation.

Progressive Insurance Company has a new car insurance program called MyRate which allows drivers to opt-in to save money on their Progressive auto insurance bill.

When you sign up with MyRate, you receive a wireless transmitter which plugs into the diagnostic port of your car.

When buying car insurance from an agent, there are different types of agents you can choose from. Agents who write with companies like State Farm and Farm Bureau Insurance are captive agents, which means they only write for one company. They do not have access to car insurance rates of any other companies, so they cannot comparison shop your coverage for you.

I thought I’d write a bit about an experience I had with Progressive car insurance. Keep in mind that I’m an independent insurance agent and I can insure my family’s vehicles with any of about 15 different insurance companies. I chose to insure my cars with Progressive, primarily because their rates were very competitive.

If you’ve had a bad experience with an insurance company, how do you go about making sure other consumers don’t have the same problem? Your state insurance regulators are responsible for making sure admitted companies handle your claims fairly and to the letter of the law. If you feel you haven’t been treated fairly, you don’t have to take the insurance companies decision as final.

When we talk about “green car insurance”, I’m not talking about the color of GEICO’s gecko, rather I’m referring to the footprint car insurance companies leave on the environment with their practices and policies. There has been a significant push in the U.S. towards more environmentally-friendly car insurance options and hopefully 2009 will see some real action taken by companies to be more eco-friendly.