For those of you who remember my car-accident in Taiwan a few years ago, I would totally recommend taking out decent auto insurance. After driving nearly 45K km in the past years, I can testify to the necessity of having insurance, for much more than basic cover.
For example, if you scratch your paintwork in an accident, my policy actually covered some of the damage! Since most of the documents were in legal Chinese, I couldn’t really figure out why.
And for the repainting work, there was a small element in the policy included. Apparently, the Mazda garage provides cheaper pricing for such repairs than if I were to pay for it myself! Go figure!