Insurance quote has doubled for declaring a spoiler. Help?

[kushty]

I've got a new car, below, and am having to guess what 'modifications' it has for my insurance.
The car is a 2004 SL 350.
I think the alloys and rear 'spoiler' must be custom, because I can't find anything from the factory with them. These are the cheapest quotes I got online:

1. With spoiler and alloys: £1505
2. With alloys: £950
3. Without spoiler and alloys: £936

The extra cost for the spoiler seems unreasonable. Does anyone have any recommendations to get the quote down, legally?[url]
|https://thumbsnap.com/o37Ya3tn[/url]

[Ninja59]

Are you sure it is not factory? Can you get a build sheet for it?

Additionally, I suspect some of the issue is that the spoiler will fall under body modifications as opposed to just a spoiler eith that area ticked you are just getting an increase reflective of it.

[Monkeylegend]

Who are you insured with ?

I was paying £245 for 3k miles a year with A Plan with standard wheels and no spoiler two years ago.

Probably increased a little bit since then but Go Compare used to give gave me several quotes all under £300 for the six years I owned it.

At double the increase I would personally remove the spoiler, it does nothing to improve the looks IMO.

[Marcellus]

kushty said:

I
The extra cost for the spoiler seems unreasonable. Does anyone have any recommendations to get the quote down, legally?

Remove the spoiler?

[lizardbrain]

I once queried a price increase for similar, and was told the price of the item was irrelevant, it was just that people who had item claimed more on average

[fiesta_STage3]

change underwriters - yours doesn’t want you.
For comparison, i declared a list of mods as long as your arm, and almost twice the bhp, and i paid less on a specialist modified policy than i did on the standard car.

[sticks090460]

Use a broker.

[InitialDave]

kushty said:

I've got a new car, below, and am having to guess what 'modifications' it has for my insurance.

It seems the correct answer to "is the car modified?" would be "I don't know".

[Chromegrill]

I wonder how many people would have bought a car like that from a dealer and insured it as standard, without for a moment realising it had a host of declarable modifications? If you hadn't said so, I wouldn't have even noticed from the photo that it had a spoiler and would have thought it was just the way the boot lip looked.

Take a remap as another example. If in good faith you bought a car that you genuinely weren't aware had been modified by a previous owner in a way that required notification to the insurer and you subsequently needed to claim, what would happen? Not everyone who buys a 20 year old car has a beard and can recognise factory standard from subsequent modification from a mile away.

[B'stard Child]

Marcellus said:

Remove the spoiler?

And the wheels - they look awful - Sorry OP

[aturnick54]

Chromegrill said:

I wonder how many people would have bought a car like that from a dealer and insured it as standard, without for a moment realising it had a host of declarable modifications? If you hadn't said so, I wouldn't have even noticed from the photo that it had a spoiler and would have thought it was just the way the boot lip looked.

Take a remap as another example. If in good faith you bought a car that you genuinely weren't aware had been modified by a previous owner in a way that required notification to the insurer and you subsequently needed to claim, what would happen? Not everyone who buys a 20 year old car has a beard and can recognise factory standard from subsequent modification from a mile away.

I've always thought the same, but I'm sure the 'declare your mods' police would tell you that ignorance is no excuse and that you should try and find every single mod when you buy a new car just in case it may or may not have any so that your insurers can't find another way to shaft money out of you.

[SAS Tom]

Try Brentacre, they do modified insurance where it only goes up if the mods increase power.

[Ninja59]

Chromegrill said:

I wonder how many people would have bought a car like that from a dealer and insured it as standard, without for a moment realising it had a host of declarable modifications? If you hadn't said so, I wouldn't have even noticed from the photo that it had a spoiler and would have thought it was just the way the boot lip looked.

Take a remap as another example. If in good faith you bought a car that you genuinely weren't aware had been modified by a previous owner in a way that required notification to the insurer and you subsequently needed to claim, what would happen? Not everyone who buys a 20 year old car has a beard and can recognise factory standard from subsequent modification from a mile away.

All comes down to whether:
1) it was deliberate
2) it was negligent
3) innocent

[W00DY]

I bet the spoiler is just stuck on with 3M tape. Just rip it off.

[mattyprice4004]

I might be missing the point, but is one of the quotes a typo?
It’s a fair old bump, but it’s quite a way off double

[kushty]

Thanks all for the replies.

I managed to get a quote with someone else for £510 in the end.

2 of the things that helped me get it down were:

• bought it to start 21 days from now
• declared my No Claims Bonus as 2 years (it was at 4 years before a claim I started a few weeks ago, and I had incorrectly thought that it would be gone completely, when actually it just gets reduced)

And yes matty, that 'double' claim was appalling maths from me in the original post!