October 29, 2015

Almost all Vespas in capital stolen within five years

Filed under: Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 1:31 pm

According to insurance data gathered by newspaper Het Parool, some 95% of all Vespa scooters are stolen off the streets of Amsterdam within five years. Throughout the rest of the country only about 4% of Vespas are stolen in the same period of time.

I once had that Roman Holiday vibe and seriously considered buying a Vespa. British comedian Eddie Izzard made owning a Vespa (video excerpt) even more appealing to me during one hot Dutch summer and after a memorable trip to southern Italy.

The NLTimes and other sources claim that “Piaggio brand scooters are also a hot target, with 12% of them being stolen within five years”, but then Vespa scooters are made by Piaggio, so that sounds off. Het Parool does explain that Vespas and Piaggios (not Piaggo dear Parool) are registered separately by Stichting Aanpak Voertuigcriminaliteit (SVAC) who handles stolen vehicles.

(Links: www.nltimes.nl, Het Parool)

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September 6, 2014

Audi drivers are the biggest scofflaws

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 4:39 pm

audi-parking-ticket-london-lars-plougmannA study by an insurance company from Emmen in Drenthe states that nine in ten drivers gets ticketed occasionally for violating the rules of the road.

Audi drivers take the cake though. One in five of them gets fined more than ten times a year. Driving over the speed limit is a particularly favourite pastime for Audi drivers as each and every one of them gets caught speeding at least once a year. Especially heinous is their track record for red light jumping, something which almost half of the Audionistas has ever done.

Autoblog.nl’s Casper Heij has his doubts about the study. He questions the sample size together with the methodology (1,081 drivers against over 18 different brands of cars). He also wonders out loud about curious results such as Mercedes drivers being paragons of virtue (“I take it they failed to poll cab drivers”) and Peugeot drivers never getting fined for broken lights (“I own both a Peugeot and, not by coincidence, shares in an automotive lights factory”).

(Study: Netpolis; photo of an Audi R8 and a London traffic warden by Lars Plougmann, some rights reserved)

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April 18, 2009

Gorilla-proof glasses

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 2:32 pm

Last year a gorilla called Bokito attacked a woman in the Rotterdam zoo, presumably because she had behaved herself aggressively by staring at the animal and grinning at it. Advertising agency DDB came up with a campaign for insurance company FBTO which resulted in the handing out of 2,000 of these Bokito-proof glasses that lets you look at a gorilla directly while seemingly looking away. Nice case of gorilla marketing (pun intended).

(Image source unknown, presumably one of the two companies mentioned above. Link: BoingBoing.)

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September 15, 2008

Bunny insurance is merrily hopping along

Filed under: Animals,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 9:20 am
rabbit1.jpg

First, it was cats and dogs, and now it’s rabbits. Insurance, that is. You can now get health insurance for your bunnies. The Petplan company is claming that as of today it is the first insurance company in the Netherlands to offer health insurance for rabbits.

According to the insuror, rabbits are increasingly popular as pets. In the Netherlands there are about 750,000 of them hopping around. To many families, bunnies are just as important as dogs or cats. They also make their way around the house and are house trained. (And they are really quiet!)

The insurance market for pets is growing by 10 to 20% a year. Out of the almost 6 million dogs, cats and rabbits, only about 2% are insured.

If you think pet insurance is an odd way to find new clients, there is also the emergency car help for the highly educated.

(Link: depers.nl)

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August 15, 2008

Emergency car help strictly for the highly educated

Filed under: Automobiles,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:43 am
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An insurance company in Dordrecht offers an emergency help service that caters to people with high vocational education, university level education and middle and upper management personnel. The company National Academic claims it can offer prices that are lower than that of the competition, ANWB (the Dutch automobile association) and Route Mobiel.

Although the car insurance has been around for two years, the emergency help can now be offered separately from the car insurance, which is why it’s in the news. The prices are lower because apparently the target group “is more careful with their things and has regular maintenance done more often.” They are also not clear on who falls under middle and upper management, which gets sorted on a request form. If someone lies about this fact, they will served but told to look elsewhere next time.

And yet this year if I remember correctly, giving women lower car insurance rates because they have less accidents was ruled sex discrimination. Just so you know. I can imagine one good reason why the not so highly educated take care of their stuff better: money, and not intelligence.

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July 29, 2008

Party tents lead 2007 summer insurance claims list

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:41 am

Party tents that got blown to shreds lead the list of 2007’s summer claims at insurance company Fortis ASR, according to Z24.

The top 5:

  1. Wind destroying party tents
  2. Laundry stolen from washing lines
  3. Stolen garden furniture
  4. Broken window panes because of sun shades blowing over or away
  5. Singe or burn damage caused by barbecues

If the wind was such a contributing factor in 2007, then why conclude that those clothes and garden furniture got stolen? Perhaps they just blew away. It’s sloppy quoting from press releases like this that gives thieves a bad rep. (That, and the fact that thieves steal).

Read what appears to be the full press release disguised as a serious journalistic article at Blik op Nieuws. Photo: Hedwig Storch, used under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

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