Originally Posted by
JBMcB
Sure. One of the largest factors in geographic pricing in car insurance is car theft rates. Since the insurance company basically eats the cost of the whole car, it costs them a *lot* [[as it does when you get in an accident with an uninsured driver) Detroit has an incredibly high rate of car theft [[over 4x the national average) If an insurance company just lumps all the zip codes together with Detroit as a whole, you're insurance is going to be pretty high. If you live in an area of Detroit with relatively low incidents of car theft, and an insurance company is that granular in their analysis, you'll get a much better rate than in a different area.
Several other factors could weigh in as well - accident rates, rates of uninsured drivers, and an individual company's history of insuring a particular area. These can all be grouped in several different ways.
When we bought our house we moved less than one block away from our apartment. That one block, however, crossed not only a city but a county border as well. Our car insurance shot up 40%. We looked around and found several other insurance companies with rates comparable to what we had at the apartment. I understand it isn't a order of magnitude difference as other people had seen, but when you're dealing with an area as large as Detroit, I think there's room for a lot of variation in determining rates like this.