State Farm to rise insurance premiums in Florida

State Farm Florida Insurance Company is asking the Florida government to rise insurance premiums by 58.8%. And the automotive division of the company being State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is asking for a 71.5% hike.

State Farm is the largest private US property and casualty insurance carrier and it is also the biggest one in Florida. The proposed increases are very significan and met with some public resistance but these are to be necessarey to cover much higher insurance claims then in the rest of the country - should the recent high frequency and intensity of hurricanes to continue in the region.

As high as these proposed rates are, these vary by the particular Florida region. For example State Farm is asking for a 117.7 rates hike for mobile homes in the Palm Beach area.

And State Farm is not alone in this trend - some Florida insurers asked for average rate hikes up to 92%.

Also Florida Insurance Comissioner Kevin McCarty said last week that he was 'deeply concerned' about these developments.

Meantime Allstate Corporation being currently the second largest home insurer in the US is seeking to close its Florida operations.

VIN Stands For Vehicle Identification Number

Yes, did you know that VIN stands for Vehicle Identification Number?

Those 17 digit codes being usually placed around the upper left part of the dashboard can tell you a number of things about your vehicle. The history of VIN started in around the 1950's when american auto manufacturers begun stamping numbers on auto parts and the vehicles themselves. It was not untill the early 1980's though before the National Higway Traffic Safety Administration - a division of US Department of Transportation created the current 17 digit VIN standard which requires all newly manufactured vehicles to be identified by one. Actually, technically speaking the current Vehicle Identification Number standard was first introduced in February of 1977 by the ISO standards commitee under the number 3779 which was precursor for the later official US governmen standard adoption.

Now, what do those numbers mean? All right - the first threee numbers are called WMI or World Manufacturer Identifier except when the manufacturer makes less then 500 vehicles of a given type then the third digit is always 9 and the second position of it is in digits 12, 13 and fourteen. The WMI is specified in the ISO 3780.

Next, the characters 4 through 9 correspond to the VDS orVehicle Descriptor Section and can be used by manufacturers for coding their vehicle description.

And then the last 8 characters of VIN are called VIS or Vehicle Identifier Section while the last 4 characters of it are to be always numeric. ISO also reccomends that the VIN possition number 10 relate to the vehicle production year when such is being encoded. And the position number 11 is to reffer to the factory plant code with letters from A to Z and digits from 1 to 0 except the letters I, O and Q with no spaces or signs in the whole VIN otherwise.

In Europe, the European Union has also issued a vehicles identifying procedure, albeit not as stringent. In it, the year part is not mandatory and the relating of VDS part to the vehicles attributes is also optional.

The VIN plays also an important part in the auto insurance industry as this is the key number by which the insured vehicles are being tracked.