GM experiments with free car insurance for a year

GM has a unique new incentive where they will foot the bill on 12 months of auto insurance for new car buyers.

While the American automaker has been emerging well out of bankruptcy, they’ve long had trouble finding receptive buyers on the West Coast. It’s a challenge that’s shared by other U.S. manufacturers like Ford and Chrysler (which is now Italian-owned).

So that’s led GM to test the free auto insurance incentive in Oregon and Washington. The program applies to Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC nameplates. If it works well, look for it to be expanded to other states.

To participate, you have to go with the insurer that GM selects. The coverage includes pretty much everything you need for both the individual owner and anyone the owner says can drive the vehicle for the first year.

Also of note is that under the plan, if your GM car is totaled in the first 12 months, you get a brand new vehicle, there’s no depreciation. Cynics may say that people will wreck their car in the 11th month just because they can. But I don’t believe that most people (except for a tiny sliver of the population) wake up and try to figure out how to commit insurance fraud.

So I love what GM is doing. It’s a way to bring attention their brand, especially considering they never make it into “the funnel” of most car buyers in Oregon and Washington.

While my main vehicle is a Toyota Prius, I ride American cars all the time because I rent them so much on the road. It used to be that I dreaded certain American cars. But now they’re fun thanks to new imagination about what they produce on the assembly lines.

Inquiring minds want to know: Would I buy an American car? There’s no question about it that I would. In fact, Ford is working on designs of state-of-the-art plug-in hybrids and electric-only vehicles that I can’t wait to see make the leap from vaporware to the real thing.