Two lines in an insurance loss table measure the same collisions from opposite ends. Collision cover pays to repair your car. Property damage cover pays to repair the one you hit.
Over twenty model years they have done completely different things.
| Model years | Collision (your car) | Comprehensive | Property damage (their car) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000-2004 | 109 | 117 | 97 |
| 2005-2009 | 107 | 117 | 97 |
| 2010-2014 | 126 | 133 | 95 |
| 2015-2019 | 133 | 147 | 92 |
| 2020-2024 | 137 | 148 | 97 |
Repairing your own car got 26% more expensive. Repairing somebody else's finished exactly where it started.
The bumper explains most of it
Think about what gets damaged in an ordinary low-speed collision, and what that component used to be.
In 2004 a front bumper was a painted plastic cover over a steel bar. Replacing it was a body shop job measured in hours: unbolt, fit, paint, done.
On a 2024 car the same bumper carries the radar unit for adaptive cruise control, ultrasonic parking sensors, sometimes a forward camera, and occasionally a heating element to keep the sensor clear. Replacing it means fitting the parts and then recalibrating the driver assistance system, which requires equipment, a level floor, a target board and a technician who knows the procedure.
The same logic applies to a wing mirror carrying a blind spot sensor and a camera, and to a windscreen carrying the mount for the forward camera. The cheapest, most frequently damaged parts of a car are exactly where the electronics went.
Why the other line stayed flat
Property damage did not stay flat because those repairs are cheap. It stayed flat because of whose car it pays for.
Your collision cover pays for your car — a 2024 model with 2024 sensors in it. Your property damage cover pays for whatever you hit, and what you hit is drawn from the entire road fleet: cars from 2006 and 2013 and 2021, mostly older than yours.
The average age of vehicles on American roads is over twelve years, and that average moves slowly. So the cost of the car you damage tracks the whole fleet, while the cost of your own tracks the newest slice of it.
The comprehensive line moved even further
Comprehensive went from 117 to 148, a larger rise than collision. Same cause, plus one more.
Windscreen replacement used to be glass and adhesive. On any car with lane keeping, it is glass, adhesive, and a camera calibration — which has turned the cheapest common claim in insurance into a four-figure one on many models.
What it means when you are comparing cars
The instinct is to price insurance off the vehicle's value: cheaper car, cheaper cover. That holds for the theft and total-loss portion and it does not hold for repairs.
A modestly priced car packed with driver assistance can cost more to repair after a minor bump than a plainer car worth twice as much, because the repair bill is set by what is behind the panel rather than what the vehicle is worth.
Two things worth doing before buying. Get a quote on the exact trim rather than the model, since assistance packages are often optional and the index differs between a base car and a loaded one. And on a used example, find out whether the front end has been repaired before — a recalibration that was skipped by a previous owner's body shop is invisible until the system misbehaves.
A free VIN check shows the accident history on record, which is the closest you can get to knowing whether those sensors have been apart already.
Frequently asked questions
Why has car repair got so expensive?
Because the parts that get damaged first now contain electronics. A front bumper used to be a plastic cover; on a modern car it houses radar for adaptive cruise control, parking sensors and sometimes a camera, and all of it needs recalibration after replacement. Collision claim costs rose 26% between 2000-2004 and 2020-2024 model years.
Is a newer car more expensive to insure?
The repair half of it, yes — and by more than most buyers expect. The collision index runs 109 for 2000-2004 models and 137 for 2020-2024 ones, with comprehensive rising from 117 to 148 over the same period. That is separate from the vehicle's value, which also pushes premiums up.
Why did property damage cover not get more expensive?
It did not stay flat because cars got cheaper to fix — it stayed flat because the mix of what gets hit did not change. Property damage pays for the other party's vehicle, and the other party is drawn from the whole road fleet, which contains cars of every age. Your own repair cost reflects only your car.
Does driver assistance technology reduce insurance costs?
It reduces the number of crashes and increases the cost of each one. Automatic emergency braking demonstrably prevents low-speed collisions, but the sensors that make it work sit in the exact spots that get damaged in the crashes it fails to prevent. So far the two effects have roughly cancelled in the claim data.
Denis Kataev is a serial solopreneur and the founder of ForCar. With 15+ years in software engineering and 10 years in SEO, he builds data-driven products end to end — backed by a sharp eye for design. At ForCar he mines proprietary vehicle datasets, turning raw numbers into buying advice you can actually trust.
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