Third-party liability is the only insurance the law requires in Greece. Every car on the road must have it, and it is the reason the cheapest policy on the market cannot fall below a certain figure.
What it covers
Any damage you do to someone else with your car: injury or death of a person, and material damage to somebody else’s property, whether another vehicle, a garden wall, a shopfront or a lamp post. The minimum limits are set by law and they are very high, in the millions of euros per accident; no company sells less, because it is not allowed to.
It also covers your passengers, with one exception: the driver.
What it does not cover
- Your own car. Not at all. Not if you are at fault, not if it is stolen, not if it burns, not if a tree falls on it.
- You as the driver. If you are injured in an accident you caused, third-party liability pays nothing for you. That is the “driver’s personal accident” cover and it is separate.
- The windscreen. Not even one stone on the motorway.
The most common way to find this out: you park, come back and find the side scratched with no note. Third-party liability has nothing to do with it; it covers the other person, not you.
When it is the right choice
When the car is not worth enough for insuring it to make sense. The practical rule: if the car’s market value is below about six to eight times the annual premium of a comprehensive policy, comprehensive rarely pays off. With a fifteen-year-old car worth €2,500, you pay every year to insure something you could replace with two years of premiums.
What is almost always worth adding on top of third-party liability are the cheap, high-frequency covers: glass breakage, roadside assistance and legal protection. They cost a few tens of euros a year and they are the three that actually get used.