TF Remap Insurance

How would any insurance assessor possibly determine that a ECU had been remapped ?

Laurence J wrote:

How would any insurance assessor possibly determine that a ECU had been remapped ?
 

My thoughts exactly.........what they don't know wont disturb them!!

Regarding how would an insurance assessor establish if the ECU had been re mapped.
How would you do it?
My expectation would be that they would plug in a tool such as pscan and find out. Alternatively send the ECU to a company such as K maps and ask them to interrogate it and establish if it was standard or not. At the point of purchasing insurance from a distance of course if it is not declared they will not know.

An insurance company has share holders. The assessor or in the case of an incident the loss adjuster or similar should be invited to investigate and see if his company is liable to pay out on the claim.
Is that risk of not declaring the modification worth it?
Why did you want the mod? Presumably to improve performance. Why do we seek more performance? At some point it has consequences for risk.
Greater risk equals higher premiums.

With F/TF values where they are it would cost an insurer nearly as much to interrogate an ECU as the cars value. They would just pay up if the damage did not involve personal injury.

You're attributing them with knowledge and mystical powers they don't have!
They certainly won't be carrying a Pscan with them!
They wouldn't even know that a Pscan exists, let along buy one to drag about on the off chance they might be able to catch a MGF/TF owner out on a remapped ECU.
How many claims would they get on our cars, I wager not that many and then of that small number how many will have had their ECU remapped......the answer is buggerall!
They'll be looking for more obvious modifications like that sneaky turbocharger, the big block Chevy V8 conversion or the 20" wheels and the pair of Jato rocket boosters bolted to the bootlid!
They wouldn't get enough claims to justify the cost not only of the Pscan but the time buggerising about with it.
Insurance is a numbers game, time is money and the less time spent is less money spent, the assessor would probably spend less than 5 min actually looking at the car, he would spend more time going over the quote!

neilpinleeds wrote:

With F/TF values where they are it would cost an insurer nearly as much to interrogate an ECU as the cars value. They would just pay up if the damage did not involve personal injury.

It's not the cars value that might determine an investigation but other consequences. One of my sons had it explained to him after writing off two cars within five months of his seventeenth birthday. His insurance company was facing a claim after a car a car hit and killed a man on a push bike. Assuming the man might be married and had children they immediately set aside ten million pounds for a liability claim. Within a few  days they discovered the young man was not married and had no children to support and the ten million was reduced to one million. Over the next few weeks various witnesses confirmed that the young man had been drinking in a local pub, blood tests obtained showed that he was well over the legal limit and other witnesses gave evidence that he was cycling all over the road, within weeks the claim had gone from ten million to zero. However this was twenty three years ago and those amounts would have increased substantially. It's not about the value of your car it's the cost of a third party settlement.
The answer is to shop around for insurance,  we were considering having my wife's car remapped and went onto the various comparison websites and some of them actually have an ability to list all of the modifications and get a quote, in the end we gave up due to the power increase being too high to fit the criteria. Not long afterwards I was in a small garage that caters for a lot of young lads with modified MX%'s having the TF's hub bearings pushed out, one of these young lads was in there and I asked about insurance for them. His reply was very simple find a broker that deals with young drivers and modified cars, very often a car that has had modified brakes, wheels, a remap and a spoiler etc can be accepted as a kit car. His insurance was less than mine (less than £200) for a heavily modified MX5
 

Mate I've had a panel shop, I've never seen an insurance assessor spend more than a few minutes looking at the car, and when it comes to it they sometimes don't bother coming in they just get you to take some happy snaps to send in with the quote. They have better more cost effective tried and tested ways of not paying you!
Smart arse lawyers, fine print of full of mumbojumbo legalise and bully boy legal threat tactics are their go to.

In the case of fatality it's the accident investigation cops that get involved they will look for the obvious, failing that they might take a closer look if there is no other explanation.
They look for drunk or drugged drivers first, then things like speed,  were the road rules obeyed etc. and other factors like road and weather conditions. They will drag the car back to their lair and check safety items like brakes, steering etc. Whist their at it they will keep an eye out for obvious modifications. and investigate further if they find them.
They will have a fairly well equipped workshop and be reasonably skilled, but when it comes to oddball cars like ours they probably wouldn't know all that much about what is standard fitment, (at least here in Oz the authorities wouldn't have a clue, maybe some of the older blokes in the UK that might've been about when the cars were new, might know something about our cars but most the younger ones wouldn't) but not even the coppers are going to have a Pscan, let alone know what a standard map compared to a remap looks like for our cars.
And the coppers are only interested in the law, so unless they can attribute to modifications a contributing factor in the crash then they aren't going to waste their time and budget doing the dirty on the insurance companies behalf. After all insurance is a civil matter.

In the case mentioned above, the bloke was pissed, that's all the insurance company needed to wiggle their way out of coughing up....and that's all insurance companies want is an easy way out to avoid paying a claim.

I have had two cars written off in the last five or six years, the first one was where my 17 year old "go to work/mobile skip" VW Polo had someone reverse into while parked, not even the body shop looked at it and the insurance company  offered £1250 which I grabbed because I only paid half that for it, I continued to drive it with the cracked bumper for a couple more years. The second was where another driver cut across me on a roundabout and damaged the front bumper and upset the tracking, again no inspection but written off just from photo's supplied by me, again we were very pleased with the pay
out that was in my bank account less than two weeks after the collision. The car was due to have had over £1500 of work (major service/water pump etc) on the following Wednesday and if you added that to the settlement figure we got within £500 of what we paid for the car five years and 76,000 miles previously.

Getting back to the original post, and without knowing who the insurance company is. Both owners clubs (MGOC & MGCC) have insurance schemes that might be more sympathetic to a modified car.

I am insured with Cherished Insurance (MGCC) no problems with ECU, Brake and wheel upgrades. However it was at circa £300 a lot more than we pay for either of our other two cars, although since it was an additional car it had no NCB

It’s using your NCD on another car that chucks a Spaniard in the mechanism.
Sorry Spaniards, if we have any on board, I’m sure your workings are splendid in all criteria & to be admired from afar.
(Do you think I got away with it)?
M

Thanks for all your replies.
Yep, aware that the probability of an insurance company finding out is low but the consequence of that possibility is pretty eye-watering.
Our current insurer is a well-known name in the market for daily drivers and other irritations have led to a long and frustrating "discussion" and it was them that declined.
Still waiting for a non-fault claim on our Mrs g_d's car when it was parked and that was Feb 2023.

I had raised this post because I did not want to waste time.looking around for a specialist insurer who has already covered a contributor on here.
I will follow up Cherished (thanks MGB281) and also Adrian Flux who are the MGOC partners as soon as the claim is closed (should be this week).