Top Gear actually talking about Dacias? What a shame!

Just for some nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7-7Ps8EWnk

???

I looked at their website www.buick.com and all I saw were really boring looking SUVs. Not one of them has any design features worth noting.

And only SUVs and crossovers? Come on! The one type of car I have sworn myself to never ever buy.

Ring me again when they build a really goodlooking sedan or preferably a wagon.

I think that the insurance company has made some pretty clever calculations with a pretty clever simulation software created by pretty clever mathematicians and now nobody knows why a car comes out the way it comes out.

With the Rivian though I think the maths are as follows: It will be used for maybe 3000 miles per year and that might be even too much. It also will probably be driven mostly on open roads, because a Rivian does not make much sense in a dense urban area.

while a minivan is a typical car for family vacation, commuting and soccer mumming, so it will make 5 times as many miles and will spend a lot of this in urban areas with dense traffic.

Most accidents of course happen in dense, urban areas. More cars closely packed around you, more chances to hit one of them. So you drive more miles in a more critical environment.

They also might consider that many of the miles done in a Rivian are not even done on the road but maybe on a closed track, which might be completely excluded from your police of - if it is included - still is not as problematic, because there is less chance to hit another car.

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Of course it is all speculation what in the end caused the Rivian to be cheaper than a minivan. But those are the lines, insurance companies think in. They want you as a customer, so they must be cheaper than the other insurance, yet still want to make money so they will have lots of variables to consider. Some of which are unclear to us or which we would judge completely different.

Here in Germany the insurance is based on accident probability.

The more kilometers you drive, the higher the chance and due to higher taxes on diesel engines combined with lower price for diesel itself diesel was always considered the choice for people doing much long distance, so everything else the same, car, HP, speed, the diesel engine will be more expensive to insure.

They also look at the model. When I was 18 and thinking about a first car, the VW Golf 2 was the standard „old“ car that kids bought, so it was really expensive to insure even though it had a low power, small displacement petrol engine. The Jetta 2 on the other hand, exactly the same car but a three box sedan instead of a hatchback, was really cheap, because that car - like most sedans to this very day in Germany - was considered a car for retiree. My first car turned out to be an Audi 80 B3, which was a small sedan and due to its conservative styling made for older people. That and its whooping 1.6l engine with 71 hp resulted in really nice insurance rates.

Despite costing more than twice as much and being faster, a Porsche 911 was considerably cheaper to insure than a Subaru Impreza, because the Porsche in Germany also is a car mostly bought by people above 50.

I am absolutely certain that it is like that all over the world. Insurance companies hire really good mathematicians who create really complex simulation models to determine the risk of a specific brand. You will never know why; most pobably even the mathematicians do not know why cars come out as they do.