Car insurance premiums are soaring but you can beat the rises and slash the cost of your cover even further.

This involves making sure your car is as risk-free as possible, searching for as many quotes as possible through comparison websites, haggling with your current insurer and checking whether you can get cashback. Some have even managed to drop their premiums below £50 a year.

The It Pays To Watch Studio Challenge

We challenged our three studio volunteers to see if they could cut the cost of their cover and the results were a resounding success. Between them, they saved £590.

How to Cut Your Car Insurance Costs

Step 1: Lower your risk

The first thing when buying cover is to lower your risk as insurers will charge you more if they think there is a greater chance of you making a claim. This means keeping your car in a garage or a driveway if you have one, getting an alarm or an immobiliser, and not over-estimating your annual mileage.

For full details read Martin’s Car Insurance: Reduce Your Risk article.

Step 2: Super-speedily shop around with a screenscraper

The next step is to use the web-based ‘screenscraping’ comparison services. With these you enter your details which are then zipped to a raft of insurers and brokers, scraping the quotes off their screens to bring you back the cheapest price. Yet no comparison site searches the whole market so you need to use multiple ones to ensure you get quotes from as many insurers as possible.

The key is to do it in the correct order, that way maximising the number of quotes in the shortest time. This is done by analysing the coverage of each screenscraper.

The current order is as follows Moneysupermarket, Confused.com, Compare the Market, Tesco Compare, Uswitch then Go Compare; it's also worth adding in Direct Line as its often price competitive but not included by any comparison service

For detailed explanations, links, the full analysis and the regularly updated list of which screenscrapers/comparison services to use in the correct order, read Martin’s full Cheapest Car Insurance article.

Step 3: Get cashback, use cashback sites or haggle

Once you’ve found your cheapest insurer, go direct to its site and double check the price. Also ensure that you check the cover is appropriate for you.

After that it’s time to search for special hidden cashback deals. These may be direct from the insurer of from specialist cashback websites. And if that doesn’t work… haggle.

For full information, the detailed technique, the best cashback sites and current deals read Martin’s detailed Cheapest Car Insurance article.