Private Motor Insurance. A five-minute product with two or three decisions worth getting right.

None of this is Compulsory Third Party (CTP, sometimes called a green slip). CTP is bundled into your vehicle registration and covers injury to other people if you're at fault in an accident. It doesn't cover your car, or anyone else's property. This product is the one that does.

Agreed value means you and the insurer settle on a fixed payout figure now, and that's what you get if the car is written off, regardless of how much it's depreciated by then. Market value means the payout is whatever the insurer assesses the car is worth at the time of the claim, which is usually less than what you paid and keeps falling every year you own it. Agreed value costs more in premium. It also means no argument about what your car was worth on the worst day of owning it.

Comprehensive cover generally responds to storm, hail and flood damage to your own car, not just collisions, which is worth knowing in Queensland specifically: the 2022 South East Queensland floods alone produced almost 12,000 separate motor vehicle claims, on top of the property damage most people think of first. A written-off car in a flood is still a written-off car, and that's exactly when the agreed value versus market value decision stops being theoretical.

The excess is the amount you pay before the insurer pays anything. A higher excess lowers your premium, and that's a genuinely fine trade if you can comfortably find that amount the day something happens. It's a bad trade if you chose the highest excess on the list purely because it looked cheaper on the quote screen, without thinking about whether you'd actually have that money sitting there when you need it.

Under the Insurance Contracts Act 1984, you have a duty to take reasonable care not to misrepresent anything the insurer asks about when you take out or renew the policy. Using your private car for ridesharing, food delivery, or regularly carrying tools and materials for work is exactly the kind of fact an insurer is likely to ask about, and most private policies either exclude it outright or expect you to have answered honestly.

The Australian Financial Complaints Authority's published approach to motor vehicle insurance and ridesharing backs this up. Most insurers exclude ridesharing, and if the insurer asked you about it when you took out or renewed the policy and you didn't tell them, it can reduce a claim, even to nothing, where it can show it would never have covered the car for that use.

The same document makes the reverse point too. If you started ridesharing partway through the policy without telling your insurer, but you weren't ridesharing when the accident happened, AFCA's view is that it's fair for the insurer to pay the claim, because the private trip didn't add to the risk they took on.

Where's the actual line between "still fine on a private policy, just tell the insurer" and "you need a different policy altogether"? In our experience placing this business, it comes down to one thing: an ABN. An occasional work trip, a single client visit, or driving to one fixed workplace is still private use, once you've disclosed it. Once the car is doing genuine income-earning work for a business that has an ABN, regular deliveries, job-site runs, or carrying business equipment as a matter of course, disclosure isn't the issue anymore. It's the wrong product (see Who Needs This, below).

The point isn't that using your car for work is forbidden. It's that "occasionally for work" is a sentence your insurer needs to hear, not one you get to leave out because it felt minor at the time.

We're not going to claim a car policy needs the same depth of advice a commercial insurance program does; it doesn't, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of overselling this site argues against elsewhere (see Why Use an Insurance Broker for the fuller case on that).

Private motor is honestly a smaller part of what we do. Most of the private car insurance we place is for people we already look after on other policies, rather than something we chase as a standalone product, and the market for everyday private motor cover is fairly narrow. We'd rather be straight about that than pretend we're the best-placed broker in the country for a car policy.

What we will do is ask the two or three questions an online quote form doesn't: what you'd actually want paid out if the car was written off, whether the excess you're picking is one you can genuinely afford at claim time, and whether anything about how you use the car, including for work, needs to be on the record. Small product, same habit.

If your car is an exotic or high-value vehicle, that's a different conversation. We have access to specialist markets built for those cars specifically, which is worth a call rather than a standard online quote.

This page is for anyone insuring a car, ute or SUV for personal use, including the everyday mix of commuting, family trips and the occasional work-related errand.

Where's the line between private and commercial motor cover? An ABN. If the car is used for a business that has one, doing daily job-site runs, carrying tools and materials, making deliveries, or one of a fleet of vehicles, it's a business tool, not just a private car with an under-disclosed use problem. That's when it's time for a commercial motor placement, covered on our Motor Fleet Insurance page (which also handles commercial motor for 1 to 14 vehicles), instead of a private policy stretched further than it was written for.

Choosing market value to shave a small amount off the premium, without weighing up what that means the day the car is written off and the payout is less than expected, and falling every year.

Picking the highest excess on the list because it made the quote cheaper, without checking whether that amount is actually sitting in the bank account the day you need it.

Not mentioning the occasional work trip, delivery run or client visit, because it felt minor. It's exactly the kind of fact an insurer expects to be told about (see the risk section above).