Do you use your phone while driving?

It has been forbidden to hold a phone while driving for years, but until now this has not always affected your insurance. That has changed. From December 2024, various insurers will not pay out the damage or will only pay out part of it if it turns out that you were using your phone at the time of the accident. With this measure, they want to contribute to safer traffic.

In practice, this means that in the event of an accident, you still have coverage for damage to the other party. This is required by law. But the insurer may then recover that damage from you. Damage to your own car will not be compensated anyway.

The insurer must be able to prove that you were actually using your phone at the time of the accident. In practice, this is often difficult to prove. However, there are several ways in which an insurer can find this out:

• Through police investigation and the police report
• Through witness statements
• Via telephone data (times of messages or calls)
• Through camera images from, for example, dashcams or traffic cameras

In order to better assess whether you were using your phone during the accident, a new question will be added to the European claim form from summer 2025: "Was a mobile electronic device held or manually operated?" This is on the back of the form, immediately after the question about alcohol consumption. The app MobileDamageReport will be adjusted.

It is important that you always use the most recent version of the claim form or the updated app. But more importantly, leave your phone alone behind the wheel. This will not only prevent accidents, but also financial misery. Damages can add up considerably, especially in the event of injury. And those costs can easily run into tens of thousands of euros, for your account.

Find out more

Would you like to know more about what this means for your car insurance? Feel free to contact us. We are happy to help you.