Leading on from the insurance cancelled thread, do you have to declare improved consumables to your insurance company?

By consumables I mean brake pads (even discs?)or tyres.

I told my insurance out of honesty that I'd put BD discs with EBC pads on after Ford OEM gear wore out and they whacked £40 on the premium!!

Steve

blimey that seems harsh.

Brakes are hardly a performance improvement (if you know what I mean..the car isn't going to go faster- though it may go quicker)

More of a safety improvement, therefore less likely to crash!

Maybe they amended your details and the £40 is for "admin charge" or other such rhubarb.

Pants http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/frown.gif, i never thought about brake pads, i have just renewed my insurance, and upgraded my pads. Mind you it's pretty difficult to get std pads 4 my car!!

Adrian Flux, where more that willing to let me put up-rated brakes on my scoob. No penalty.

Dan

Pads as a direct replacement i.e. with standard discs, should be no problem.

Replacement (bigger) brakes - both a safety mod and a performance enhancement - with bigger brakes you are going to be going in to corners faster - you can work the rest out yourselves.....so MAY carry an additional premium , or not, or a refusal to cover - depends on the Ins co, the individual and their record.

I think that i would probably say that i replace my air filter more often than my tyres, yet it seems that i can fit what ever tyres i want and not have to declare it (even if they are 'performance tyres'), but if i replace my air filter with a 'performance air filter' watch the premium spiral...

Insurance is a bizzare and unfairly expensive (?) world...

Mods carry premium loadings for two key reasons...

...as an individual who modifies a car you may have the potential carry out your driving in a riskier fashion - this is a MAY, but what is important is that it takes you out of a normal risk profile and puts you in a group where experience shows there is a higher propensity to risk...


...secondly, non-OEM parts on a car have less statistics in terms of risk performance. For example, standard Ford Focus brakes are a well known quantity backed up by experience on thousands of cars, and so insurers are comfortable with the risk profile.

A specific aftermarket combination has no such known risk profile and so is not a well known combination and so carries an 'unknown' risk premium.


Motor insurance IS expensive, but it is debateable whether this is unfair as only a very small handful of (and certainly not the big players) make any profit at all from the motor insurance book.

Ironically, one of the insurers that does make a profit, also carries a specialist book of Subaru Impreza business and is regarded as one of the best value insurance on this board.

Work that one out!

R

Rannoch

Thats easy Tom's guys never have prangs http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/wink.gif

Si

...except for Tom of course http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/redface.gif

Sorry couldn't resist that one!

R http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/wink.gif