Insurance: Bercy announces the abolition of the automobile “green card” from April 1

After 38 years of existence, the insurance certificate, affixed each year, to the windshield of a car (or the frame of a motorcycle) will be removed from April 1, 2024. Same fate for the certificate insurance whose possession in the event of control has been obligatory since 1958! It was a promise from the Minister ofANDeconomy, Bruno Le Maire, made in September 2022 to respond to a very old demand from insurers, in exchange for price moderation. This has now been confirmed and a decree to this effect will soon be published in the Official Journal, probably on Saturday.

Concretely, the insurance “green card” is replaced by a “memo” of the insurance contract, sent only once by the insurer (or with each new insurance contract). This abolition of the green card obviously does not mean that car insurance, in terms of civil liability, is no longer compulsory!

It remains compulsory but the check will now be carried out via consultation of the Insured Vehicle File, which compiles all car insurance contracts, which can be consulted from the vehicle registration. This file is accessible only by law enforcement during inspections. For the moment, there are no plans to connect this file to radars for automatic checks, even if the law would allow it.

Officially, it is a question of simplifying the lives of policyholders and insurers who must send 50 million green cards each year while making it possible to reduce the carbon footprint of all this paperwork (1,200 tonnes of carbon equivalent per year). The time has come for dematerialization, like that of the driving license soon.

The scourge of uninsurance

Above all, it is a way to fight more effectively against fraud and driving without insurance. Because, with the continued rise in car insurance premiums, especially for young drivers, and an explosion in driving without a license, lack of car insurance is a worrying and growing phenomenon. In 2022, some 147,000 people were fined for lack of license and 218,000 people for lack of insurance.

According to the latest barometer from the Compulsory Damage Insurance Guarantee Fund (FGAO), which covers third-party compensation in the event of non-insurance – but which the uninsured must still repay, generally for their entire life taking into account the sums incurred. – above all shows that young people under 30 represent half of the perpetrators of uninsured road accidents. This is all the more worrying as young people under 34 are responsible for half of accidents and the number of students checked for lack of insurance has jumped by 30% since 2018.

While car insurance for young drivers costs on average two to three times more than for an adult, this segment of the insured represents the worst risk for an insurer. A tacit market agreement means that each insurer shares this risk in proportion to their car market share.

The fact remains that the lack of insurance is in the majority not a deliberate choice but also the result of either termination for unpaid or termination for loss. Nothing is provided in the latter case to allow an insured person to find insurance, which is not prohibitively expensive.