On Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:15:49 +0000 (UTC), John Levine
wrote:

If one has a gold card or better from the credit card company, that includes
insurance for the collision damage waiver portion of rental company insurance.

For USA cardholders and rentals in USA, perhaps. There's a whole bunch
of people for whom neither applies.

That rather surprised me. I have similar Mastercard credit cards from
HSBC in the US and the UK. The US card includes rental car cover,
like all high-end US cards do, the UK card doesn't.

UK motor vehicle insurance seems to have turned against anything
amounting to insuring drivers rather than vehicles in the last few
years, possibly because of the uncertainty of what somebody might be
driving when not using their own vehicle. My own insurance used to
cover driving other vehicles (but not for damage to that other
vehicle) but that feature was dropped about 15-20y ago.