coldel

I couldnt imagine driving anything as ugly and as boring as a one series BMW one point eight diesel I know I am going to get slated for it and I do have a hatred of BMW cars that have been built over the last 6-7 years but I just have to get that out in the open - my names Col and I am a BMW hater

Or for £7k an Astra 2.0T goes like a bullet and is practical. You might even find some VXRs dropping into that price range now?

You could do a lot worse than watch old clips of blue peter They invented the 'heres how to make something' video

I didn't mean that you should buy a car which is a colour your don't like, but that you should not purchase a dog car which is a colour you do like just because there are not many of that colour around...patience is key.

Smoke him out

As much as it is tempting to prioritise by colour it can be detrimental to your purchase. I wanted black, nothing else, got one, paid a bit more for it but it meant I didn't get the most 'looked after' Zed and has since needed a few bits done to it. I did a little analysis of AutoTrader classifieds a few months back - silver is everywhere at the sub £10k level and even more so at around £8k. There are simply so many of them that the price drops for them due to supply. I think out of something like 100 cars priced 10k or less only 6 or 7 were black. That said, everyone knows Black is the fastest.

I have been having a go at this sort of thing as well. Make sure you have ordered plenty so if you make mistakes you have no fear of just ripping it off and starting again. I managed to do the drivers door grab quite easily, just be aware if you have paint coming off, even if there is only a half mm edge to it the vinyl will show it up. So surface has to be flat and utterly clean (even a small speck of dust will cause a bump which will show up) to make sure a nice flat surface to the wrap. A good part to practice on is the ashtray, just whip that out and try wrap the top, you will get a nice easy success out of that and get used to handling the vinyl. I managed to wrap the bottom half of my centre console and given I am a complete no-hoper at practical stuff shows it is quite doable even for the amateur. I just used a hair dryer on mine, it helps to soften the vinyl but also I presume helps with adhesion. Oh and don't just default to 3M, Hexis do some fantastic vinyl options and by all accounts is much easier to use.

Sometimes the simple stuff is the best stuff. I was watching TV a few months back when we had spokespersons for Insurers pleading hard times and that insurers claimed they had been running a loss for so many years that the big hike is simply to cover these bogus injury claims and to bring themselves in line with what they should be charging. As I said previously, if they didnt sell claims details to lawyers (which is downright illegal anyway) then they wouldnt be claimed against - the short sightedness of whoever instilled that practice is nothing short of moronic. In addition, I seriously call into doubt that an industry like insurance which has such low personable relationships with its customers (in effect we are just numbers in a vast database) can claim that for years it was taking a financial hit just for us. You can't just hike it up 40% and give those sorts of excuses and expect to get away with it.

I posted on another thread a similar story in marketingweek Ironic isn't it, that insurance companies sell to lawyers the personal details of people who are injured in an accident, those lawyers then sue and the insurers have to pay out. Only one loser in that mix I think and your average driver is it - I for one have no sympathy for insurers who bleat on about these injury claims.

Almost on cue... http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/sectors/automotives/oft-begins-scrutiny-of-rising-car-insurance-premiums/3029946.article

I would love to know the stats behind that one!

£30 for both belts from Alex Yep can use the same it seems (according to Opie) although you can get specialised oil for each also.

I am pretty sure I was on admiral when I was under 25 as well - something like £850 for a 1.2L fiesta, and that was 15 years ago!

+1 Got all my bits off Alex and oil from Opie as their sale prices are pretty competitive at the moment.

Just going to put mine into service next week, I spoke with Opie and they recommended a Fuchs engine oil which is going at about £30 for 5L in the sale. You need I think 2.5L for gear and 1.7L for Diff - anyway it comes out to 4.2L in total I think - no more than 5L though. I also got some denso iridium sparkies, nissan oil filter and some new drive belts. Have you checked brake pads?

I had a 1.2L rusting Fiesta when I was 21...could have bought an XR2 or something but insurance was just mental. Without sounding harsh and not being personal but going after such a high performance car so young you are just asking to be hammered on insurance. As soon as I hit 25 along came the bigger engined cars

Had my rear end sprayed a month or so ago - was gone for three days and seemed like an eternity. Looks miles better now sure you will be happy with the result!

I want to replace my front bumper, it is shot to pieces, so my options are: Shine replicas, pros are they fit cons are that they are pretty pricey once you start adding spraying and fitting on - £600+ for just a front bumper RTPerformance, they are putting together a good fitting front bumper but availability date for it shifts back as often as the iPhone 5 launch EPRacing, I see them on here as a trader, havent seen anything in the way of negative threads and do replicas at a more reasonable price of circa £220 but do they fit?

For 1900bhp in a stripped out lorry...it kinda didnt go quite as rapid as I was expecting actually Still very bizarre watching it rattle along like that!

Indeed, why? They wont, because they hide any data from the consumer - if they were so confident of it then they would share it - but they are not. I don't mind paying insurance to whatever level is correct, but I want to pay it because I am confident in what they are charging. At the moment, I have no confidence in it thus I am not going to blindly agree with it because of some spokesman who just says 'statistics say so'.

Probably helps if I could spell...Bayesia http://www.bayesia.com/ PS I don't work for these people! They use Bayesian networks - its a self learning tool, you literally can preprompt it with hypothesis and it finds its own way. When I was consulting at a previous research company they trialed it alongside a few of your standard approaches like structural equation modelling etc - always came up with fewer drivers and a more accurate model. I am now in another part of research, I only 'dabbled' in that area for a while so wont be chasing up these insurance companies...my premium is still pretty good They should put more effort in though, or at least make more transparent these databases.

I would bet on the latter too. As you know working in stats, its costs a hell of a lot of money to come up with working logic for this stuff. To build and train a nerual network would cost far more than they would get back from having accurate risk models. And they would need a lot of good clean data to drive it and allow it to learn and adapt. Its not even just the pure number of claims they'd need to run the model, its the breadth of information about each claim too. It makes far more sense to have a crude and rudamentry system that keeps their quote about the same as the competition based on a few basic facts and have a bit of wiggle room that should someone want to be price matched, they can easily do it. In other words, laziness £20k on a Baysia licence, two weeks time with a decent marketing scientist with access to their database and they would have a much better model...although one which probably means debunking a lot of the nonsense we see on 'important information' sections of insurance premiums nowadays.

I thought that I read somewhere there are already moves in place to cut back on personal injury claims and in particular whiplash claims.

Why would it be more likely? One act is surely independant of the other therfore not a valid driver (scuse the pun) for increasing insurance premium charges. If you are young, male and new to the road then these are clear drivers of the likelihood of an accident - being hit by someone else I don't think is, causality vs coincidence. I think it should be made law that consumers can see these all conquering databases, they can be made to say what you want them to say, I am sure there are attribute sets in there which are hidden which if were included would have an reducing impact (twice, scuse the pun). I know that's the reason they give Ekona, but i'd bet that the statistics only show what they show because certain areas are very accident prone and people who drive a lot of miles in these areas are likely to be involved in more incidents. So while this will show that people who get crashed into will also crash into other people, the causeof that is actually the area and annual mileage, which are already accounted for in the premium. So basically they're double weighting the policy for the same thing. I will lick the inside of my exhaust pipe if anyone can come up with stats which show that given two identical drivers, in the same area, car, profession, and driving the same annual mileage the one who got crashed into is more likely to then have a crash based solely on that fact. DB +1 It would be good to hear a view on the level of sophistication from the Insurers on here. Although I suspect they all come from a central database and they are literally drip fed the numbers and have little insight into the analysis? I do have this awful feeling they are just using out of date 'stats' that thirty years ago Mr Dave Admiral sat down with a pen and back of fag packet and put together...

It's more likely because that's what the statistics say. I've no idea of the real logic or reason behind it, but them's the facts and that's life. Maybe it's because people who have a non-fault then drive their car before it gets fixed in a slightly more care-free manner, leading to them causing an accident? I dunno, just a guess. My point I was trying to make is that any statistic will not indicate causality. Having done a stats degree and spent a decade working with databases in my job I am continuely shocked at the level, or lack of it, of proper analysis of it. I wonder how many of these insurance companies have done the numbers properly, do they for instance use multidimensinal driver models maybe even neural networks to properly evaulate 'what makes things happen' or do they get lists of numbers and literally get some 'stats' from them by looking at averages/correlations/standard deviations which for the purposes of creating an algorithm/model for individuals insurance premiums is literally useless? I would wager a full british pound its the latter. ...as for stats - be careful to quote so easily.