Just been playing with insurance for a superb now that it looks like Alison's job is safe.

Nearly £700 on insurance if you decide to mod it is a hell of a lot of dosh. I know that you live in the city, but even so that seems extortionate. Living in a relatively pikey area, with car (2.0 petrol primera) parked on the street, with broadly similar stats to you, although slightly younger driver, I am paying £220/year with one named driver and no voluntary excess; I'm sure you should be able to do better.

As an aside, do you really need to mod the suspension for your commuter hack? Anything you do to improve the roll dynamics, without radically redesigning the suspension geometry, is likely to reduce the quality of the ride.

I reckon you should look at getting a Xantia TD in decent nick. Make sure it has the bosch pump, run it on 50% filtered chip shop oil. Tuning the XUDT is easy and DIYable. Fairly serious tuning is quite doable with not too much expendature. Suspension tweaks are as easy as it gets - both changing the damping and the ride height are pretty trivial, at minimal cost. In stock form you get something fairly oddball with good ride comfort, and giving you something around 45mpg on your daily grind. You should have change from £1200 even for the cleanest example you can lay your hands on. You could get a HDi for not much more if you want ~50mpg and no chip-shop mess. PSA diesels are well respected for their reliability - not for nothing is the 406 HDi the taxi drivers car of choice! As an added bonus the handling and braking performance is essentially load independent, so it won't wallow around the place or be underbraked, even when stacked to the roof with servers.

That's more than I pay for 50k business miles an the 156, with 6 points declared. (3 active, another 3 still within 5 years)

I'd say you need to move somewhere less pikey ;-)

Having just looked I'd say he needs to look at a different insurer. Even I'm being quoted 375 quid, and I definitely live somewhere less pikey. (I'm paying around 100 quid/year for insurance at the moment).

I did a Tesco compare on the Superb a couple of weeks ago. Best quote I got was £362 with Swinton, but has courtesy, but no legal. Most of the other lower quotes like that, either one, the other but not both. It wasn't until I got upto Virgin Money @ £458, Lloyds TSB @ £493, AA @ £512, and Admiral @ £531.79 that both were included.

My Saab is not much less for a 15 year old banger at the moment, somewhere in the high £300's. Even the 2.0 Octavia basic spec and 4 years old was nearly £300. The Celsior was £500.

my BMW 328 was only £470 or so a year! my mini is only £300 a year and thats with 6 points and a 56day ban!

Every car I've had I've never seemed to get decent quotes for, even when I shop arround.

But mileage was estimated, and no estimate for class one business.

I know the quote seems crap, we are apparently in an average postcode, I'm 40 this year and with a totally clean record. But I just can't seem to find decent insurance quotes, just a lot cheaper than some people.

Even though you're from Essex, it's still less pikey than the Warrington area :-P

i know and not far from boy racer southend land either and not far from dodgy old basildon too.

try calling the insurance companies instead, i rang admiral and actually got a cheaper quote which i thought was a bit strange. my excess is only £150 but i do have 6-7 years NCB i think which i guess helps.

Most places I call once I get the lowest internet quote, even those who guarantee to beat any quote come up with "can't beat that sorry, try next year".

If it's any consolation, my insurance on both the Vee and the R27 (seperately of course) was more than that :-) The Vee was group 20, or 20B, or 20R - depending where you look.

I rang Churchill during my renewal time, and asked them to do what they promise on their advert and beat my quote. So they did, by £1.00. One whole Great British pound. I was like, well, why would I bother to change for a quid? The guy kept saying "Ah but the level of cover..." is exactly the same as my renewal quote, so, what other benefits are there? He kept going back to harping on about levels of cover and I kept telling him they were the same. By the end I was just like, if you beat the quotes by like, £50 or something, or maybe 10/15% etc then it would almost be worth peoples time to change - as it is, it's just not at all worth while. I mean, he was perfectly polite when I was mocking their promise and stuff, and at the end he still gave me a cheerful good by and "Have a great day!".........

Whenever I had reason to ring Admiral they were always nice an polite too, and I usually got geordies or scottish people to talk to, which was good cos those accents don't confuse me hehe. Although when I rang up to change it the 197, it was up on the Vee anyway, and when they gave me the new premium, I said "That's a bit pricey, I better shop around...." and the guy just asked me to hold for a bit - then came back and knocked £100 off :-)