There’s this moment, usually sometime after you’ve renewed your policy for the year, when you sit back and think: *Why on earth is my car insurance creeping up again?* I had that moment recently while staring at an email from my insurer, the premium nudging up just enough to annoy me but not enough to justify switching. Classic South African dilemma.

And the thing is, it’s never just one thing pushing our premiums higher. It’s a whole messy ecosystem—crime, infrastructure, the economy doing whatever the economy feels like doing—that quietly shapes the cost of personal insurance in ways we don’t always see.

The uncomfortable truth about theft and hijacking

Let’s start with the obvious one. Theft and hijacking.
People talk about crime rates in SA like rugby scores—animated, confident, a bit desensitised—but when you look at the specific numbers tied to vehicle theft, it’s grim. Insurers have access to granular data that never makes it into news headlines: make, model, time stolen, neighbourhood patterns. I once chatted to a broker who told me that certain bakkies practically “walk themselves off” dealership floors. Another friend had their Toyota Fortuner stolen twice in the same year. After the second claim, his insurer politely suggested he consider a different vehicle if he wanted affordable cover.

So premiums don’t rise just because crime is high. They rise because the types of cars we love to buy are high-risk, and the patterns of theft aren’t random.

Insurers price risk like detectives. They follow the clues.

Load shedding — the villain we didn’t expect

It sounds ridiculous the first time you hear it, but yes, load shedding does affect car insurance costs. Not directly, like your headlights failing mid-drive (although that’s happened to me once, crawling home in second gear, praying Eskom would give me ten minutes of light).

It’s the knock-on effects.

• Traffic lights down = more accidents.
• Alarm systems resetting = more vehicle break-ins.
• CCTV failures in parking lots = more “sorry, the cameras weren’t recording.”

I remember walking out of a mall in Randburg during Stage 6. The entire parking structure was pitch black—a sort of post-apocalyptic calm. You could hear trolleys, footsteps, but couldn’t see five metres ahead. And yes, those are the exact moments criminals use.

Insurers see the stats long before we feel the discomfort, and they quietly adjust premiums to reflect the country’s unique “risk architecture.”

Repair costs are… not fine

Something people forget: the cost of repairing a car in South Africa has skyrocketed.
Parts are imported. Labour is expensive. Paint isn’t exactly cheap either.

If your bumper gets taken out by a taxi that drifted slightly too enthusiastically into your lane (it happens), the repair shop isn’t ordering a miracle—they’re ordering parts from Germany or Japan or wherever your car’s ancestors come from. And with supply chain delays still lingering, insurers pay more, wait longer, and factor that into premiums.

One mechanic once told me, half joking, half not, that he can tell how bad the rand is doing by how often customers opt for “just fix the essentials, please.” The rand weakens, the costs go up, and insurers—well, they do the math.

Location matters more than people think

Here’s the thing: we don’t all pay the same. Far from it.
Your suburb, your daily route, even where you park at night all feed into the algorithm.

Live near a hotspot? Higher premium.
Commute on a high-accident freeway? Higher premium.
Park outside instead of in a garage? You get the idea.

What insurers won’t always say outright is that risk mapping in SA is hyper-detailed. Streets can have different profiles from the suburbs they sit in. One broker told me they can tell “which roads produce more smash-and-grabs than others,” which sounds like a sci-fi surveillance thing until you realise these are just actuarial spreadsheets with too much personality.

The economy’s quiet pressure on personal insurance

To be fair, some of the costs creeping into premiums have nothing to do with crime or Eskom. Inflation hits insurers, too. So do rising medical costs (affecting injury payouts), legal fees, and the sheer unpredictability of the economy.

And then there’s fraud.
We don’t talk about it much, but fraudulent claims—small ones, big ones, creative ones—increase the overall pool of costs. Insurers won’t call it out directly, but they absolutely spread that cost across everyone.

It’s a bit like being in a communal potluck where one person keeps taking food home in Tupperware containers.

A few hidden quirks you wouldn’t expect

There are also these odd little things that influence pricing, which I didn’t know until way too late:

• Insurers track accident spikes around public holidays.
• Certain models become high-risk overnight because a new hacking method trends (yes, criminals have trends).
• Claims go up during heavy rain seasons, especially in provinces with poor drainage.
• Even school traffic patterns bump up accident numbers in certain zones.

It’s all strangely ordinary but also deeply specific—the kind of stuff no one tells you unless you ask the right questions.

So yes, we pay more. But there’s context.

Living in South Africa comes with unfortunate complexities—load shedding, crime, shaky infrastructure, a volatile rand. Insurers don’t raise premiums just because they feel like it; they raise them because they’re constantly trying to anticipate risk in a country where the risk changes faster than the weather.

And once you see how many moving parts there are, the numbers start to make (slightly annoying) sense.

I still don’t enjoy paying more each year. But at least I have a better appreciation for the chaos behind the calculation. And maybe that counts for something.