OT: Insurance company trying to fleece me?!

Maybe they were mixing it up with the Christian Fish symbol often seen displayed on the back of a car, for some reason like a wearing a Trilby hat it seems to disable the brain of drivers of such vehicles. Premiums should be higher for such people as they are a menace.

G.Harman

First of all, thank you to everyone for your responses.

I called them today and I am pleased to say it was a relatively pain free process.

I confirmed that no modifications had been carried out and told them I had only obtained a quote with modifications included out of curiosity. They were apologetic and have stopped any money being taken from my (debit) card. I also asked for confirmation of this by email & post - email has been received.

Phew! Good result. As you may have seen in my most recent post, I can see why insurance companies might just act on suspicion in the case of chipping as some chip modifications are user removable rendering a vehicle inspection pointless.

Tim

Yep I can see why. If anyone is interested, I found out from a colleague who does have a car which is remapped that Admiral will not cover your car if it is remapped but they will cover it if is chipped. I am not entirely sure why this is. I guess they only way they could check if a vehicle was remapped is by doing some sort of rolling road test.

Because Admiral are a bunch of wuckfits?

Would somebody be so kind as to explain the difference to me?

I suspect you are a latent psycho - can I kill you in self defence?

when organisinga motor rally some 40 years ago, one entrant declared "Bodywork modified by Stone Walls of Cornwall"

That is very arguable, particularly with stuff like parking tickets.

Its far from clear that we do pay increased premiums to cover their mistakes. And they are welcome to compare notes on insurance claims actually made and work out who is a higher risk for whatever reason that way.

If you don?t watch out, you can end up with the completely stupid yankee system where even being slow to pay your utility bills because you are currently between jobs can see your insurance premiums hiked and those between jobs can end up imploding financially very quickly indeed.

Because not all convictions are equal, most obviously with parking fines with people like Adam who spend a lot of time in all sorts of different places where it may not always be easy to find somewhere to park that?s close enough to be useful for the job.

Why should those be paying higher insurance premiums that they just pass on to their customers in the higher fees they have to charge that we all end up paying for when we use them ?

And why should those who happen to work where its trivially easy to park for free get lower insurance premiums thru no specific action of their own ?

In both cases it's the other way around, the ear to ear dog shit sees them wear the Trilby and have the fish sticker on their cars.

Summary execution is a lot more effective.

I have one of these on my car...

I do not think that any insurance company would load your premium for parking tickets, do those have points on your licence?. Speeding, DUI, DWDC, no insurance, no mot, those are the sort of things they need to know. Fwits that are the sort to keep quiet about convictions are not likely to be the most careful drivers, any prang is likely to cost more than their premium, therefore everyone else pays for their selfish action.

I was expecting that to be one of these (Flying Spaghetti Monster).

I've never been convinced that speeding tickets say much useful about how likely that driver is to have an accident. And you have the inevitable problem that those who have to drive a lot for their work are much more likely to have speeding tickets than someone who doesn?t drive at all for their work. Why should those have to pay a higher insurance premium ?

There are a lot of humourous "Xtian fish" variants:

If its from a gatso then it shows that the driver can't see a big yellow camera stuck on a pole and that he needs to wear glasses.

They don't. Professional drivers have a lower risk than most in the first place.

Nothing these days, but back in the day people actually did pull the EPROMS, I suppose. Same result, though, so I think your first answer applies....

Firmware checksum? Boost values from OBD?

I suspect the real answer is the insurance co will accept his word- after all, we could all be driving around with undeclared mods. If he has a claim, they'll be all over it like a rash *then*.

I had a particular reason for wanting the Darwin one. As some readers will know...

Its all a bit meaningless anyway given that many cars do a certain amount of automatic remapping to adjust to variables like fuel quality and driving style anyway. (I appreciate you can push this much further with manual intervention, but it does away with the idea of a "standard" mapping)