Your credit history could be costing you more to drive

toggle caption Sofia Valiente for NPR

Florida graduate student Alexis Brake is doing something pretty unusual. Not only is she pursuing a combined M.D./Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Miami, Brake has decided to steer clear of something most Americans rely on every day: credit.

She went to college on a scholarship, has no credit cards and paid cash for her car. And about that car: She only drives it about 6,000 miles a year, commuting part of the way to work.

So when her car insurance started going up repeatedly, by hundreds of dollars per year, she was puzzled.

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She wondered: Could her non-existent credit rating be a reason for her rising auto insurance rates? She started calling around.

"I was calling not only my insurance company but multiple insurance companies. I would ask them all the same questions," she recalls before her commute to the university one morning in April.

"How does credit score get factored into my rate?" she wondered, "And uniformly they were not able to answer my question."

"Not able," as in the company staffers she spoke with really didn't know. The algorithms the companies use to set premiums were opaque, even to frontline workers.

An NPR investigation did try to get answers: How much does a driver's credit factor into how much they pay for car insurance, and why does it matter at all?

We obtained more than half a million insurance premium estimates for nearly every ZIP code in the country.

The data came from Quadrant Information Services, a pricing analysis firm that serves the insurance industry and consumers.

We found startling differences in auto insurance rates between drivers with poor credit and those with excellent credit — often thousands of dollars per year in premiums.