How Elephant Rates Auto Insurance
Elephant Insurance is a direct auto insurer owned by the UK's Admiral Group, and like every carrier it prices from a filed, regulator-approved rate manual. We read its Tennessee filing directly, and several levers stand out: the filed base rates are $749 for bodily injury, $927 for property damage, $1,552 for collision, and $678 for comprehensive; a 2026 model year carries a 1.240 comprehensive factor; garaging your car in the Antioch area of Nashville applies a 1.262 territory factor; and a brand-new customer carries a steep 1.850 expense factor that falls to 0.984 by the sixth renewal. Every figure here is a real filed value we transcribed from the Tennessee rate pages, not an estimate.
Elephant Insurance is a direct-to-consumer auto insurer, part of the UK-based Admiral Group, and its prices are set the same way as any carrier's - from a filed, regulator-approved rate manual, not from its advertising. We pulled Elephant Insurance Company's Tennessee private-passenger auto filing and read the rate pages directly. Below is how several of its most consequential levers actually move a price, every number transcribed by hand from the filing and cited to it.
Reading the primary document instead of brand impressions shows exactly what Elephant charges to start on each coverage, and what it rewards or penalizes - your car's age, where you garage it, and how long you have been a customer - and by how much, so you can see the mechanics rather than guess from a single quote.
How we read Elephant's filing
Everything here traces to Elephant Insurance Company's Tennessee private-passenger auto rate pages, on file with the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance through the SERFF filing system, with rates effective March 13, 2026. A filed rate manual is the document a carrier must submit and justify to the regulator before it can charge a premium, so these are the numbers Elephant actually filed. As the Insurance Information Institute explains, a premium is a base rate multiplied by a chain of filed factors; what reading the filing adds is the exact base rates and multipliers, which we quote below.
Key data
Elephant's base rates, coverage by coverage
Most carriers hide their base rates; Elephant's Tennessee filing lists them cleanly, one per coverage. The annual base rates are $749.00 for bodily injury, $927.00 for property damage, $1,552.00 for collision, and $678.00 for comprehensive. These are the anchors every factor multiplies against before your specific profile is applied - not your premium, but the starting point.
The relationship between them is revealing. Collision, at $1,552, is by far the most expensive coverage to start, because it pays to repair your own car in an at-fault crash - the most frequent and predictable physical-damage claim. Property damage ($927) outweighs bodily injury ($749) here, and comprehensive ($678) - which covers theft, weather, and animal strikes - is the cheapest of the four. Seeing the raw base rates explains why dropping collision and comprehensive on an older car saves so much: those two coverages start from the two highest anchors on the sheet, so the physical-damage half of a policy is usually the larger half of the bill.
Model year swings physical damage
Elephant files a model-year factor - part of a combined MSRP-and-model-year table - and it drives physical-damage cost the way it does at every carrier: a newer car costs more to repair or replace. At the base symbol, a 2026 model year carries a 1.240 factor on comprehensive, and the factor climbs steeply for higher-value vehicles within the same year. Older model years carry lower factors, which is why comprehensive and collision get cheaper as a car ages.
Because model year is filed against the physical-damage base rates ($1,552 collision, $678 comprehensive), it compounds with them: a new, expensive car feels the high base rate and the high model-year factor together. This is the mechanical reason a brand-new vehicle is so much more expensive to fully insure, and why many drivers of older cars carry liability only - the model-year factor keeps falling, but so does the value the coverage could pay out.
Where you garage the car matters
Elephant files territory factors by ZIP code, and they can move a rate as much as many personal characteristics do. In the Tennessee filing, ZIP 37013 - the Antioch area of southeast Nashville - carries a 1.262 factor on bodily injury and property damage, meaning liability there costs about 26 percent more than the 1.00 territory baseline. Territory captures local claim frequency: traffic density, theft and vandalism rates, uninsured-driver prevalence, and repair costs all vary by where the car sleeps at night.
The practical point for a shopper is that your garaging address is a real, filed input you usually cannot change - but it is worth knowing it is there. Two otherwise-identical drivers a few ZIP codes apart can see materially different Elephant premiums purely on territory, and carriers weight territory differently, so the insurer that rates your specific ZIP most favorably is not always the one that is cheapest across town.
Customer tenure is a large lever
The most striking factor in Elephant's Tennessee filing is a tenure-based expense factor. A brand-new customer at zero renewals carries a 1.850 factor, and that factor falls to 0.984 by the sixth renewal - a swing of nearly half on the affected portion of the premium purely from staying with the company. In effect, the filing loads a new customer's rate up and then unwinds that loading as the relationship matures.
This is worth understanding when you shop, because it cuts both ways. It means a first-year quote from Elephant reflects a large new-customer loading that a long-tenured customer does not pay, so the introductory price may not represent what a settled Elephant policyholder pays - and it means that if you do join, the filed factors reward you for staying rather than churning. It also means comparing a first-year Elephant quote against a first-year quote from another carrier is the fair comparison; comparing it against your current insurer's loyalty-adjusted renewal is not.
Elephant's discounts and how to compare fairly
Beyond the base rates and factors above, Elephant's Tennessee filing carries the usual stack of filed discounts - multi-policy for bundling auto with home or renters, multi-car, paperless and automatic-payment credits, and safe-driver and prior-insurance rewards among them - each applied as its own factor against the base rates. Because they are filed as separate multipliers, a household that qualifies for several sees them compound, the same logic every carrier uses to reward a stack of lower-risk signals. We quote the clean, unambiguous base rates and rating factors above rather than each discount's exact fraction, because those are the levers a shopper can reason about most directly.
The single most important thing to get right when comparing Elephant is the tenure loading. Because a first-year quote carries the 1.850 new-customer expense factor that unwinds to 0.984 over six renewals, an Elephant introductory price is not directly comparable to your current insurer's loyalty-adjusted renewal - you would be comparing a loaded new-customer rate against a matured one. The fair comparison is Elephant's first-year quote against another carrier's first-year quote for identical coverage, or Elephant's expected rate a few years in against your renewal. Getting that comparison right is the difference between judging Elephant on its real long-run price and being misled by a first-year number that is designed to move up before it moves down.
How the factors stack up
Because these factors multiply rather than add, they compound, and the practical effect depends on which coverages you carry. A driver of a new car who buys collision and comprehensive feels the high physical-damage base rates ($1,552 and $678) and the model-year factor (1.240) together; a driver of an older paid-off car carrying only liability feels the bodily-injury and property-damage base rates ($749 and $927) and the territory factor (1.262) instead. And every new customer, regardless of car, feels the 1.850 tenure loading in year one. That is the useful thing about reading the filing: it shows not just the size of each lever but where and when it applies.
Put together, a sensible read of Elephant's Tennessee filing is that physical-damage coverage is expensive to start and worth revisiting as a car ages, territory is a fixed input worth comparing across carriers, and the new-customer tenure loading means Elephant may look most competitive to drivers who intend to stay for several years. Those are patterns the filed base rates and factors let you see before you buy.
What the filing does not show
In fairness, a rate manual is not the whole price. Elephant files many more factors than the consumer-facing ones we pulled - driver age and class, prior-insurance history, coverage-limit selection, vehicle symbol, and a full discount stack among them - and each multiplies against the base rates above. Several factors vary by coverage, so the exact effect on your total premium depends on the mix of liability, collision, and comprehensive you carry. And every figure on this page is specific to Elephant's Tennessee filing and its current edition; the same insurer files different numbers in other states and updates them over time. We quote what is cleanly filed and verifiable, and flag what we cannot see.
What this means when you shop
Elephant's Tennessee filing shows a rating plan driven by visible base rates, your car's age and value, where you garage it, and how long you stay a customer. None of that is unique to Elephant - what is useful is seeing the exact filed base rates and multipliers, because they let you predict how a change on your side (an older car, a different address, a few years of tenure) moves the price, and they give you a real yardstick against another carrier's filing rather than a single quoted number. Hold your coverage identical and compare several carriers, since each files its own version of every factor above, and the same profile can land very differently from one filing to the next.
Frequently asked questions
How does Elephant decide my car insurance price?
Elephant prices from a filed, state-approved rate manual: base rates for each coverage multiplied by filed factors for your car's model year and value, where you garage it, how long you have been a customer, plus driver class, prior insurance, and discounts. We read its Tennessee filing and quote the real base rates and multipliers on this page.
What are Elephant's base rates for car insurance?
In Elephant's filed Tennessee manual, the annual base rates are $749 for bodily injury, $927 for property damage, $1,552 for collision, and $678 for comprehensive. These are the anchors every factor multiplies against before your profile is applied - collision starts highest because it pays to repair your own car.
Does being a new customer cost more with Elephant?
Yes, notably. Elephant files a tenure-based expense factor of 1.850 for a brand-new customer at zero renewals, and it falls to 0.984 by the sixth renewal. A first-year quote reflects a large new-customer loading that a long-tenured Elephant policyholder does not pay, so Elephant tends to look most competitive to drivers who plan to stay for several years.
How much does model year affect an Elephant rate?
A lot, on physical-damage coverage. Elephant files a combined MSRP-and-model-year factor; at the base symbol, a 2026 model year carries a 1.240 factor on comprehensive, and it climbs for higher-value cars. Older model years carry lower factors, which is why collision and comprehensive get cheaper as a car ages.
Does my ZIP code change my Elephant premium?
Yes. Elephant files territory factors by ZIP. In Tennessee, ZIP 37013 (the Antioch area of Nashville) carries a 1.262 factor on bodily injury and property damage - about 26 percent above the territory baseline - reflecting local claim frequency, theft, and repair costs. Garaging address is a real, filed input, and carriers weight it differently.
Who owns Elephant Insurance?
Elephant Insurance Company is the US direct-auto arm of Admiral Group, a large UK-based insurer. It files rates with state regulators like any carrier - its Tennessee rate pages are on public file with the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance through SERFF - and availability varies by state.
Are these the actual numbers Elephant uses?
Yes - every figure on this page is transcribed from Elephant Insurance Company's Tennessee auto rate pages on file with the state (effective March 13, 2026), not an estimate. Factors and base rates vary by state and edition, so your state's filing may differ, but these are real filed values.
Will I get the same price from Elephant as these factors suggest?
Not exactly - your premium is the coverage base rates times the whole chain of filed factors, and many factors (driver age, prior insurance, limits, symbol) are not shown here. Use these numbers to understand how Elephant weighs each characteristic and to compare against other carriers, then get quotes with identical coverage to see your real price.
Sources cited
- Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance via SERFF Filing Access - Elephant Insurance Company, TN private-passenger auto rate pages — captured Jul 2026
- Insurance Information Institute (III) — captured Jul 2026
- National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) — captured Jul 2026
- Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance — captured Jul 2026
- Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) — captured Jul 2026
- Federal Trade Commission - credit-based insurance scores — captured Jul 2026
