I was reading the thread in the Uno section of the forum, which advised to declare all mods on your car. So i did and was a bit shocked.

My car had a tatty k&N air filter on when i bought it and apart from that the car is bog standard. But because i am under 25 my insurance policy apparently dosen't cover any modifications to the car, you can't even pay extra for them. I cant really swap insurance companies again as i do it so regularly i havent even built up 1 year NCB.

So my car is uninsured until i can find a standard airbox, which is annoying because every cinq i see in a scrappy is either a 900cc or if its a sporting never has one on anyway.

It is also annoying as when i changed the head gasket i forgot to put the pipe from the exhaust manifold back on so i would have to unbolt that to fit the warm air feed to the standard airbox properly. Am a bit pretty annoyed really, i have never driven a cinq with a standard airbox but i would very much doubt that it makes the car so dangerously faster than standard i am "uninsurable"! ridiculous if you ask me!

If any of you guys have a spare standard airbox i would be interested so PM me you do.

Cheers

Phil

i got told this before my cinq was insured and told i could not have any mods at all untill i was 19 so as my mum drives the car and it was in her name she took out an insurance policy with me as named driver which means any mods are allowed including bodykits with the exception of performance mods

to b honest man if somethin like that means u are not insured, tell u insurance company it is standard, then if u get in a prang, take the k&n off.... at least for this year so u can build up some no claims, then when u renew change to adrian flux, or HIC they are awesome with mods an stuff

mase said:

to b honest man if somethin like that means u are not insured, tell u insurance company it is standard, then if u get in a prang, take the k&n off....

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That is assuming you can walk away from the prang - do not fob off insurance companies, it will only come back at you big time.....

insursnce companys con us big time with insurance premiums why not get them back

I hate this, how come they con us? If you ran a business, would you:

a) Try to make a profit charging what is necessary to cover your costs + extra
or
b) Sell at a loss to be nicer to your customers

Personally I would go for the first option a.

In the 90s insurance companies in general made huge losses (remember we're talking bilions here, not millions). It's a known fact, no creative accountancy involved (rarely would you destroy your share price like that intentionally!).

Now one of the major costs insurance companies have to account for is a central kitty to protect their customers if they are hit by uninsured drivers, like for instance you are mase are saying should be done in this case.

Hence instead of them conning you, you have conned yourself whilst also conning all your mates who legitimately pay for car insurance. If you can't abide by the insurance company's rules then you should take the option not to drive, simple as.

Also if you think about it, I expect you know plenty of people who have had prangs or full scale crashes, there have been plenty on here, where do you think the money comes to pay for the repair?

Stuart DemonD said:

That is assuming you can walk away from the prang - do not fob off insurance companies, it will only come back at you big time.....

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saying that tho, when my mate crashed his car - it had undeclared mods on it (remap, filter, and 17" wheels). The car suffereed quite a bit of damage (smashed the dif at the back, the gearbox housing, collapsed the front sus and bent the steering rack, totalled two of the wheels). It was written off, but they didnt seem to mind us being in the garage removing anything that wasnt standard, so long as we put the standard parts back onto it.

I'm not saying dont delcare stuff, hell i would delcare everything - but they dont seem to be as strict as people always say in these threads.

Stuart DemonD said:

That is assuming you can walk away from the prang - do not fob off insurance companies, it will only come back at you big time.....

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that is a good point.... and a vaild one about fobbin companies off, but personally i think they fob us off every single month, and if it is somethin that u cant really c then they dont need to kno about it in my eyes, it is hard enough for young people to afford to insure our cars, a little extra the insurance companies dont kno about doesnt hurt them.

before anyone says anythin my buckets, wheels, springs, exhaust are all declared!!!

Mark, it's usually the ones that involve big money that matter, if you hurt somebody for instance the insurance company might be due to pay out a couple of mill, if they can wriggle out of it (which would be fair enough if you were underinsured) you could find yourself in a civil court case and eventually bankrupted.

i see you're point.

On the subject of them conning us or not, they are. Being totally honest, what difference does a changing an air filter do to the car - is it going to be a contributing factor in an accident.. no. What about better brakes.. surely thats safer? Well, no - that'll put your insurance up.
Whats going on is sterotyping, younger drivers do these mods to cars - and some drive like knobs. That pushes our premiums up. That, i'd say is the contributing factor to our high insurance costs - not so much uninsured drivers. It'd be nice if companies would understand that just because someone has modded a car, they're not going to drive like a knob. I dare say most of us drive more carefully than drivers of standard cars because of the money we've ploughed into our cars - we don't want to damage them!

Stuart DemonD said:

That is assuming you can walk away from the prang - do not fob off insurance companies, it will only come back at you big time.....

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Thats exactly what i was thinking. I will return it to standard to be on the safe side, i dont think it will make a huge difference to performance. i had to remove my wonderfully bodged on XR3i back box and replace it with a standard exhaust back in september because my last insurance company didnt like it.

I suppose inflexibility is the price you pay for cheap insurance.

Phil

Sorry if I was unclear, of course the main problem is that as you say, inexperienced young drivers are most likely to make a claim etc. But still, a big cost to our insurance is proven to be for the central kitty.

What difference do they make? As you say, nothing (although K&N would like to claim they do) and brakes as you say SHOULD if done properly, make the car safer. However, how do you easily quantify it? You can't, some people do it properly others don't, sadly they have to stick everybody into the same boat. Insurance companies don't see customers as worth enough to bother with looking into your case personally, they want your money like most companies. If you want to do these things you will have to find a more expert insurance company who handles these things day in day out. There are plenty.

Now, as you say, we're paying for dickheads to crash but how in the world can you account for this? I class myself like most as a good and most of all, safe driver yet I paid £900 for my uno and £760 for the Laguna. How can they justify this? Easy.....on average that's how much they have to charge to make a profit after covering costs. Trust me, if it didn't cost that much for them to insure us it wouldn't. Why? Because you would have a few insurance companies offering you have price cover, of course none do this because it's impossible to make a profit doing so.

It's all mathematics at the end of the day and insurance uses some of the best maths brains in the world to make sure money in > money out. They get it wrong and they lose money, they need to charge you for the risk they take.....

The only way I can see it ever improving is through a stricter test, refresh testing after xmonths after passing, retests y years throughout your life and a much harder theory test at the beginning of it all.

Bigger brakes will only make the insurance company think you'll drive faster, I haven't added a mod to my car becuase it made it safer, these were just a bonus.

Best declaring all cos if you prang a 50k car and it's a write off then they invalidate your insurance, your in a world of hurt!!

Liam

the actual mod doesnt make a blind bit of difference really to the insurance company. the reason they can hike up prices and get away with it is becasue if you decide to add any thing to your car your showing you are not just using your car to get from A to B.
its exactly the same as insurance groups, even tho id be more careful driving a porsche 911 (insurance group 20) than a fiat uno (group 1) insurance dont see it that way. driving differant types of cars i.e sporty or performance cars suggests your using them to the full of their abilty not for their slick lines and comfort.

When you apply for a quote your details are fed into the computer and you go through a process called 'Rating'. This basically involves the system looking at a series of predefined tables to find a multiplication factor to apply to a base premium.

Things like age, modifications, location, whether you use the car for work, what work you do etc all contribute to the final outcome.

However, different companies setup their rating tables differently, which is why you can get huge variations in premiums.

As an example, I was looking around at the weekend for insurance for my standard Sei sporting. 28yo in London, 9yrs NCB 1 no fault accident. Everywhere wanted about £550 - except the AA who quoted £387.

Now for the 16v I went to a brokers call Graham Sykes who placed me with NIG on a specialist car club policy with limited mileage - all mods declared including the roll cage and the throttle bodies - premium is £378.

Conditions are though that I don't smoke, am a member of a car club and do no more than 3000 miles a year. They factor that being a member of a car club makes me more inclined to look after my car and drive sensibly.

But you're right in the sense that insurance companies are loaded, but that's not a bad thing since it means they can afford to buy my companies software and that pays my wage

Wow, quoted 3 times - I am impressed

its still a con how much we pay and most people dont get satisfactory payouts if at all

i know a few instances to prove it

A lad had his car fully insured all mods declared and a stupid bint drove in the side of his car smacking it into a kerb denting driver rear quarter, arch, fancy lights and trashing passenger side alloy as it was smacked into the kerb other driver was uninsured and police helped her to get off with it even though she left the scene straight away and had to be traced the only way he could of got it sorted was to claim of his own insurance paying his excess to never get it back and have expensive insurance for years to come

another lad had a nice mini insured for a £1000 when wrote off one nite he tried to claim and was assed to be valued at £430 his excess was pathetic at £450 so he would of owed them £20 so he had to just sell it cheap for parts.

that is just a case of a valuer workin against u instead of for u.

prime example of wat happens when it works for u.

my abarth was bought for 1500 in 2003
when it got hit in 2004 the assessor came and told me it would b a write off, to get a value for the payment he asked how much i bought it for, (and yes i told him the truth!) and took about 10% off for deprecation and offered me £1300 settlement, then took into account the salvage value which was £82, so i ended up with a pay out of £1222, plus a whole abarth cinq. and when u consider parkers only value a 1996 N reg with average mileage of 80,000 (mine had 95,000) at £570 for a good condition private sale i think i got an awesome deal!!!

sometimes it works out well. My mates car (mk3 smart car) was ill when it was written off. It needed at least £1k spending on it. (blown the turbo seals running it at 2bar.. oops, and a few other bits'n'bobs - it had had a small fire in the wiring loom thanks to a stupid ICE installer). He got given £3k for it from the payout. Then bought a 2 years newer mk5 for £2800 that was in mint condition, had a custom paint job and decent alloys and decent rubber.

The younger modder said:

A lad had his car fully insured all mods declared and a stupid bint drove in the side of his car smacking it into a kerb denting driver rear quarter, arch, fancy lights and trashing passenger side alloy as it was smacked into the kerb other driver was uninsured and police helped her to get off with it even though she left the scene straight away and had to be traced the only way he could of got it sorted was to claim of his own insurance paying his excess to never get it back and have expensive insurance for years to come

another lad had a nice mini insured for a £1000 when wrote off one nite he tried to claim and was assed to be valued at £430 his excess was pathetic at £450 so he would of owed them £20 so he had to just sell it cheap for parts.

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Agreed value policies are a must especially for classic cars or heavily modded ones !! At the end of the day, if you've spent a fortune modding your car, then get it insured properly. If you can't afford to get it insured properly then if you get a crap payout in the event of an accident you can't complain.