car insurance

We had an absolute nightmare arranging our car insurance here in France. All because we have no history of insurance in this country. I understand this makes it difficult but there are some things the French companies could do better.
We have imported our car from England and then bought a 2nd car here through our brother-in-law.
Our car insurance on the English car, we assumed, would no longer be valid as soon as we became residents in France, so we searched online for the best deal (as we always did in the UK) and Francois found a good one. As he was going to be to using the English car just for commuting to and from work each day which is a 10 min journey, he decided to go for a "pay as you drive" scheme with Amaguiz.com.
We pay a basic of 10Euros a month and then 10 centimes per Km after that. We had to have a Km counter box installed in the car for this to work, and the data from the box of how many Km you've driven is sent by satellite to the central office every month so we can be billed. So for fully comp insurance on a Vauxhall Astra we are only paying about 15-20 euros a month, not bad at all.

The French car was a whole other matter though, we purchased a Renault Scenic (second hand) and again tried to search online for the best deal. Comparative websites are fairly new here, and as we've discovered they are VERY inaccurate! Now even on the UK websites we know that the price quoted will probably increase slightly once you define all your options with the insurer. But on the French website we were quoted for example 250Euros for the year with a company called Nexx, only for us to follow the quote through and have it increase to 400Euros once we had all the options we needed. Fine, OK, there actually wasn't anywhere else much cheaper.
We then had the struggle with the No Claims document we have to provide. In France each insurance company must provide you with a "Relevé d'informations" dated within 3 months, this document summarises your previous insurance and no claims and you pass this on to your next insurer for them to calculate the no claims.  UK insurance companies don't do this, we normally just send off the renewal form to our new insurer. So we requested a letter from Churchill containing the details required. We also provided a copy of each insurance certificate from the last 6 years as this is the proof they requested. The people at Nexx (and I spoke to a lot of them!) were extremely surprised to hear that in the past 6 years we had been insured with 3 different companies. Martin Lewis has A LOT of work to do in this country!
I don't like to generalise, but in my experience the majority of the French do not tend to shop around for the best deal, and for this reason there are companies here that will charge you extortionate prices!
Anyway to get back to our ongoing saga with Nexx, our document from England took a while to come and despite showing them all the other proof we had to wait for it to arrive. Once it finally did, we were at the very limit of our 1 month cover note both companies had provided us with. Amaguiz for the Astra were happy and sent us out our official insurance documents, all sorted.
Nexx, went very quiet and didn't acknowledge receipt of the document they had been chasing us for everyday for the last 3 weeks! When we called them to doublecheck it was ok, they denied receiving it, so we sent it by email and this is when they did us a new quote based on our proof. The price went up from the 400Euros, to over 600! When we questioned this, they said they were only giving us 3 years no claims bonus instead of 6! Their reason was, that the English documents they receive are never good enough so it's their policy to only offer 3 years No Claims?!?! We couldn't believe all we had been through for them to tell us something they should have mentioned from the start! We suppose they know we would have gone elsewhere had they mentioned this before. So before telling them to stick it, we called another company Macif who had given us a fairly competitive quote and were happy to insure us based on the certificates alone. They were still happy to go ahead, so we called Nexx and for some reason they were surprised when we said we wouldn't be insuring our car with them after all!

A lot of French and English ex-pats here, say you must go to an insurance broker and not online. It may not be the cheapest but they can often do you a deal and at least you are seeing someone face to face. We both believed that was just a generation thing, and we're of the online generation where we prefer to buy everything on the internet where you get the best deals. But maybe in this case they are right. It depends what you are buying, but online shopping in France is certainly not as reliant or simple as what we were used to in the UK.