Thanks for your comments, Jason. You can’t fault Progressive for trying to gain more customers. Anything (like Price Comparisons) to help distinguish their company can help when they court new customers – even if it’s not very accurate.

Hi Todd, I came across your article (from a while back) and thought that I’d chime in. Progressive’s comparison rates are gathered by using publicly available data filed on the state-level as per regulatory requirements.

You are correct that Progressive then tries to reverse engineer these quotes to come to a ‘best estimate’ — if you see the disclaimers on their website, they state that the comparisons are just estimates.

For me, I was able to get a comparison quote from Progressive, but it said that State Farm would charge me between $800 and $4,800 per year, which wasn’t all that useful.

The one time I tried Progressive’s comparison feature, I got a similar “sorry we can’t compare prices right now” explanation. Makes me wonder if it ever works…

Progressive got me about $280 (appr) for 6 months, basic insurance. I let it lapse for a couple of months after that because I was unemployed. Got it again from them, it was around $360 for 6 months. I wrote them to say that was too high, that I knew I could get it a lot cheaper around $280 (although I hadn’t researched) and why were they charging me so much now. There was one initial discount for about $50 when I first signed up. Okay, good. So they write me a lenghthy letter with a lot of excuses and nonsense about my state having had changes and that caused the rates to go up etc etc and that they could not offer me any discount now on the $360, but they pointed out that I am getting their minor “online mileage discount” for recording my mileage…whoopee.

I checked with Geico on their site…same coverage, same everything. $192 for 6 months! Unbelievable! Progressive has lost a customer because they made excuses, wrote me a 2 page mostly-canned letter, because they did not even BEGIN to treat a repeat customer as they should, and because $170 difference for 6 months of basic car insurance is a MAJOR difference. I now think Progressive with their pretty advertisements are simply shysters.