Car Insurance & Your Stereos

With MP3 players dominating the personal music market it comes as little surprise that their influence is starting to spread into your car. Already some car manufacturers are offering iPods(apples very popular MP3 player) as a standard accessory.

However, people need to be aware that these devices are quickly becoming the reason that thieves will break into your car. If you need to make a claim, there is a very good chance that you will lose your no claims bonus and your car insurance will most likely rise. Most car insurance policies will offer some stereo cover but it's usually not enough if you've had an aftermarket stereo fitted.

The problem in the past was the amount of extra accessories you would need to carry around to beat the convenience of a normal CD player in your car. However, as technology has progressed it had become easier and easier to integrate an MP3 player into your car with the bare minimum of cables etc.

Devices are available that broadcast your MP3s on a radio frequency that you can then pick up through your own radio. Of course these devices aren't powerful enough to go much further than your own car but there have been concerns about the legality of these devices.

There are also some devices that allow you to actually control an MP3 Player from the controls on your steering wheel, but to use this facility you will need to run a cable from the back of your stereo to your mp3 player.

The benefits of MP3 are clear for all to see, on a device no bigger than a pack of cards, you can carry up to 5000 songs and very often much more. This is equivalanet to over 350 cds, you'd need a lot of autochangers to live up to that.

In the next article in this series, we're going to talk about how the future of in car entertainment is going to progress.