smile.car Insurance Review 2026 – Pros & Cons

Smile online insurance company

Online insurance made easy

Smile

4.0

Smile is a company providing many different insurance policies online and paperless. Get 40 CHF by using my link.

Pros:

• Online-only

Get a new insurance Our review

Only new customers with their first policy will get the 40 CHF bonus. The points can only be redeemed for customers of Smile.

Smile is not a new company. They started as a startup in 1994 (as Coop Televersicherung). At this point, they started as an insurance company that sold over the phone only. In 1999, they started to sell over the internet. And in 2008, they became smile.direct. In 2014, they became a subsidiary of Helvetia. While they still keep their smile.direct name legally, they are now usually referred to as Smile.

As of 2024 (on their 30-year anniversary), they have more than 200,000 customers. So, they are serious actors in the insurance world of Switzerland.

Their main selling point is their digitalization. Everything is done online, and there is no paper involved. This means it is faster and easier to get a new policy with Smile than with some other providers. For some people, this can be a disadvantage since they would need to do that on their computer or phone.

Smile is available in the three national languages: French, German, and Italian. But it is currently not available in English.

As of 2026, they now offer many different insurance plans:

• Car insurance with smile.car
• Bike insurance with smile.bike
• Household and personal liability with smile.home
• Travel insurance with smile.travel
• Legal insurance with smile.legal
• Life insurance with smile.life
• Health insurance with smile.health

In this review, I want to focus on smile.car, the car insurance policy. I have already covered car insurance in detail before, so I will not go into the details of it again.

smile.car insurance for cars

smile.car is the car insurance policy of Smile. It offers all the standard packages of car insurance:

• The personal liability insurance that covers damage to others
• The casco (partial and complete) that covers damage to the car, either natural or through a collision
• The occupants insurance, which covers occupants that have no accident insurance, is pretty useless in Switzerland since accident insurance is mandatory.
• Assistance insurance to tow your car or help you start again in case of an issue (broken tire, dead battery, …).
• Bonus protection if you want to keep your bonus even if you made a mistake.
• Legal protection for legal issues related to the car
• Personal effects coverage for your personal belongings in the car (often overlapping with household insurance).

They also have some extras if you would like to cover more of your belongings or glass damage to the lights.

Overall, they have all the features you would need from car insurance. As usual, you have to be careful about only getting the options you need. Many of these options are not necessary, and some options are dependent on your car.

Comparison with other insurers

Comparing car insurance is impractical because it is different for each car brand and model. Also, the prices are changing all the time. As a comparison, I have run the comparator again (the one from Comparis this time, but the one from Bonus works well too) for both cars. These numbers are from the end of May 2026.

First, for our small electric car (Zoé), we can compare using only a partial casco for me as a driver. The five cheapest offers are:

1. Baloise (Direct M) at 359.30 CHF per year
2. smile.car at 423.60 CHF per year
3. TCS (M) at 426.50 CHF per year
4. Helvetia (PLUS) at 438.60 CHF per year
5. Simpego (Car L) at 442.20 CHF per year

Smile is in the list, but it is not the cheapest one. Of these five offers, only Smile offers a free choice of car mechanic, which was important for us where we live. And only Smile and Simpego have a short notice period of one month. For us, the free choice of mechanic and the online process were enough to justify the extra fees of Smile here.

We can also do the same comparison with our primary car, a Cupra. This car is leased, so we are forced into comprehensive casco insurance. For the Cupra, we can compare collision insurance, bonus protection, and park damage coverage. Again, I am using myself as the driver. This time, the five cheapest offers are:

1. Simpego (Car L) at 1048.60 CHF per year
2. Helvetia (PLUS) at 1287.50 CHF per year
3. ELVIA (fair) at 1317.10 CHF per year
4. Baloise (Direct M) at 1377.80 CHF per year
5. Zurich (Optimum) at 1379.50 CHF per year

Interestingly, smile.car is not even in the top five list. In this case, it costs 1689.80 CHF per year. This is more than 50% more expensive than the best offer. In this case, I would not have chosen Smile.

I have played  a bit with the options to see what makes Smile less competitive. Interestingly, the bonus protection option is significantly more expensive with Smile than with other insurers. It also looks like smile.car shines when not using the collision insurance. Overall, it looks like smile.car shines for cheap cars and few options but is not so great for more expensive cars with more options.

So, as usual,  it is essential to compare options. Just because one car has a great price with smile.car does not mean any other car would. In this example, I am happy insuring my small car with smile.car, but I would not be using them for the other car.

It is interesting to note that despite Smile being a Helvetia subsidiary, they are actively competing against each other. Indeed, it appears like Smile is better than Helvetia for cheaper cars and worse for more expensive cars. It is a bit ironic that the digital budget insurer of Helvetia is sometimes more expensive than its non-budget parent.

Our experience with smile.car

Our experience so far is positive with Smile. But we had the insurance for a short time at this point, and we never had to submit any claim.

The onboarding process was incredibly smooth. Everything was done in 10 minutes. I was thrilled about this process, which should be the norm for each insurance onboarding process.

The only thing I am not convinced about is the Smile app. I do not think the app is necessary. I would have much preferred an online portal with all my details available there. You can actually do everything without the app (except for the rewards).

smile.car User reviews

It is important to look at other reviews so we can have a wider range of experience with Smile. It is difficult to find user reviews of the car insurance in particular, so I am using user reviews for the Smile company as a whole. I collected these reviews at the end of May 2026.

On Google, Smile has 6730 reviews with an average score of 4.5 stars out of 5 stars. This is a great result. Positive feedback is mostly about simple onboarding and a simple claim process. On the negative side, people are mostly complaining about premiums increasing over time. Also, some people are complaining about long times before repayment.

If we look on the Play Store for the app, we can see 4.1 stars out of 5 stars over 1840 reviews. This is a good result for an app, but it is worth mentioning that ratings are going down. They had a rating of 4.5 stars two years ago. Overall, people are very happy about the app and its simplicity. Almost all negative reviews are about language issues where the app is not in the same language as the phone.

With over 2418 reviews, the app has 4.7 stars out of 5 stars on the App Store. This is an outstanding result; it is rare for apps to get such high ratings. Positive reviews are mostly the same as on other platforms. Negative reviews are about a long time before replies in the app.

Overall, it looks like users of Smile are happy. In the last few years, the time before a response has increased.

smile.car FAQ

smile.car Summary

Review of smile.car insurance in Switzerland. See the exact premiums, pros, cons, and when this digital insurer is great and when it is expensive!

Product Brand: Smile

Editor's Rating:
4

smile.car Pros

Let's summarize the main advantages of smile.car:

• Very affordable
• Paperless process
• Fully online process
• Very flexible
• Many options for car insurance

smile.car Cons

Let's summarize the main disadvantages of smile.car:

• Not always the cheapest
• Only available online

Conclusion

Online insurance made easy

Smile

4.0

Smile is a company providing many different insurance policies online and paperless. Get 40 CHF by using my link.

Pros:

• Online-only

Get a new insurance Our review

Only new customers with their first policy will get the 40 CHF bonus. The points can only be redeemed for customers of Smile.

Overall, smile.car is a nice car insurance. Smile in general has the advantage of being quick to open a new account, and their policies can be canceled with a short one-month notice period.

smile.car is generally quite affordable. However, it is always important to compare. In our case, smile.car was great for our small Zoé car but not affordable for our larger Cupra car.

So far, we are happy with our insurance, but we did not have to submit any claim.

If you use the code present above, you can get a 40 CHF cashback on your account. You will get this as points that can be redeemed as a direct wire to your own bank account. Important to note that you need to be a customer to reclaim the points.

If you would like to learn more about this subject, we have a complete guide on car insurance.

What about you? What do you think about smile.car or any other Smile insurance?