GMB

No mention of any IS models? Thankfully.🤔

churchill refused to renew insurance on my ISF ( underwriters had banned them- no idea why? ) and cover cost was up from 470 to 670 pounds. I am keeping an eye on prices ready for going back on the road after SORN for winter. We will see if prices continue to rise.

Anyone here remember the sound of the bog standard Morris Minor exhaust. It had an awful toneless deep rasp followed by the loud belch on the overrun. I had a 1966 1098cc AH sprite that had a bit of tuning and a straight through exhaust. It was known at work as the farting pig. My boss knew I was a good timekeeper as he could always hear me coming from about half a mile away.

I lost 20 years NCB when I moved back to the UK. Quote " We do not accept NCB earned in another country". So back to Zero on three vehicles. Thanks UK insurers. Nothing I could do. Funny thing is that one company said they could accept it and their costs were higher than the ones who would not. Odd!

Yes they do have a strong defence nowadays, very true and absolutely necessary. I have a couple of funny, or not so funny stories - in brief: I went to a very large bank HQ for an appointment with their head of IT. I walked in the building and the security guard was busy with someone else so I passed by someone coming out who held the door open for me! I walked up to the server room where his office was. He was not in his office. He was in the bullet-proof air-conditioned glass square construction that held the main servers. I tapped on the glass and someone let me in. I stood next to the IT chief until he spotted me. You should have seen his face. He could not believe how anyone could get in. I know it was cheeky of me but I could not resist the experiment. Crazy times! Second true story: Big manufacturing company had a ransomware attack and rightly refused to pay. Worst case scenario is lose a full day's transactions ( which had an audit trail on a separate network isolated server system anyway ) and back up from a "Ghost" image and re-instate all the data from the daily back-up. The daily back-up was a series of physical tapes which were recorded and saved in rotation every night starting at 6pm. This boring repetitive task was given to a junior member of the IT team. They were very disappointed when the non-existant back-up was found on an empty tape. It had never backed up and was never tested. He just did not understand why he got an error message and thought it was just an information pop-up. Thankfully we have better ways of doing things now.🤭.

Nurses are also punished when trying to park their cars at their workplace and charged and fined for the privilege. One friend has racked up over £500 in fines for parking at the hospital. They, and others are refusing to pay.

Well girls, it's all about fair play and proportional increases based on reality and not based on greed. We all know that prices have to go up, but it seems the insurance industry are being excessive. If you ran a business and saw all your competitors getting away with "too high" price increases you may be tempted to join in the gold rush. The possible silver lining could be that more equitable insurance companies may see an opportunity to offer a better value product, gain customers and make money. Where are they?

I thought it was endoscopy?😖. What a pain in the butt.

Wow! Is that complicated or what? It looks like the Tuba section of an orchestra on steroids. I googled this system and it sounds nice but not much different from any other aftermarket system really. Big price difference from the H&S catback system which sounds very nice. I wonder if you get a performance benefit as well as the nice sound? I think the H&S gives a couple of extra horses by breathing better, but not a lot . BTW - where's the rust?

If you know a friendly garage owner I think it would be a good idea to get it on the ramp and do the usual checks on brake and suspension components. We are lucky we have a good local chap who will do something like this for free. Just a quick telephone call to check if the ramp is free and 10 mins for a look see.

It's actually designed to work that way, that change in sound is normal for the ISF. With the H&S exhaust the note goes from deep musical burble to howling banshee trumpets at about 3500rpm. Lovely!

Believe this or not. I tell you this is what I was told when I queried the ridiculous price increase and that I would be going elsewhere to buy my insurance:- They actually said " But wood has gone up 200% in price. We cannot reduce the offer. I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

This reminds me of the situation where you buy a used car and the insurance ask about modifications and you answer None. Then they find something like this and use it as an excuse not to pay out. At one time you could say - " To the best of my knowledge" but that escape clause seems to have disappeared. For example how would anyone know if the car had been remapped without checking all the possible permutations. Or the car could have a sports cam in it and you would not know. Crazy.

All my insurance has gone up between 35 and 50% - car house etc. Have I done something awful? I don't think so. Can anyone recommend an insurer? I have tried the usual suspects - go compare moneysupermarket and even Adrian Flux but they all want the big increases despite no claims and an extra yrs NCB. Hastings Admiral and Bennetts for the bike seem to be the "best" or should I say least bad value bearing in mind the ridiculous increases.

Tried go compare and money supermarket and the cheapest I can find is £670 with Admiral - 5 yrs no claims and HS exhaust mod only. Did not qualify for multicar but cannot see that making much difference 10% maybe? Last year was £470 for the same car with 4 yrs NCB

If it happens when you go over ridges, speed bumps etc then have a look at the boot lid. Mine was/is badly adjusted and the boot lid was lightly banging against the body/bumper area. I have temporarily fixed it with a bit of draught excluder. Worth a look anyway? There is no adjustment on the bump stops and I cannot find any longer ones so maybe Lexus can adjust it at the next service for a princely sum?

ISF £735. It's not just the Insurance companies that are robbing us. BTW What a useless budget - Still worse off.

I had a car with Avon tyres all round and it pulled to the left or the camber drop very severely. Changed the Avons for Pirellis and the problem went away.

I think we would all agree that prices have to rise, but at a fair rate and reflecting the TRUE situation. The insurance companies are bumping up prices way too far so that they can crow about their profits and dividends to their shareholders at year end. Meanwhile us mugs can go and moan about it. Sledgehammer to crack a nut anyone. The only recourse that we have is to place our business elsewhere, and I think that's what most folk are now doing anyway.

I posted a similar mail yesterday. My home insurance has gone up 35% plus a massive excess for no reason. They are having a laugh at our expense. I don't know how or why they can get away with robbing us all. What can we do? We need insurance and there seems to be nobody who cares about the rip-offs.

Me neither 😒 🤐 Here's a less puerile and less facetious very basic answer for you -- Companies like to use fancy words to make their products sound expensive and good quality. A BUS is a simple term for a network backbone or in other words connecting wires The CAN bit is another way of saying that things connected to this bus can send and receive signals to controlled devices. Dead simple really innit? But google it and you will get a load of techno bumf that talks about the sizzle and not the sausage - know what I mean?

Good question - I will try to explain for you. We have dustbins for recycling tin cans and plastic. To save the planet we re-use these materials to make cars from the tin/steel/aluminium cans. The plastic makes the faux leather and other cheapo bits. So the CAN bus is a description of what your SUV or BUS like vehicle actually is - which is a bus made out of cans. Hence CANbus - QED.😉

When we were there the menu was €9.50 but that's inflation for you. Another local place - Olargues - Fresh trout from the river Orb with salad and chips for €7.50. Another place - set dinner - no choice, you get what you get but is usually duck breast or chicken or guinea fowl or bavette steak all beautifully done with gratin dauphinois potatoes and mange tout peas including wine quarter litre and dessert all for €11.50 - Restaurant Lou Castel in Nages. Just checked tripadvisor and they have gone up market and charge about €20 now for a choice of dishes.

The company I worked for had a 24/7 contract. On call any time of day or night. A worldwide private VPN for all our network traffic use and full monitoring of all their/our remote devices. We were 100% logged in to the servers at all times or nothing worked. If we did not accept those terms ( and their decent salary ) then we were free to leave anytime. Maybe today this could be seen as intrusive but we accepted that basically it was good practice and very safe. We had a " demilitarised" network zone available to outsiders and all the servers were virtual machines that had no physical presence and no way to get at the base systems from outside.. It may help to know that the servers were based in Tel Aviv and were under attack most of the time, so go figure why the security was so absolute. We all learned a lot from these practices.😇. I just wish our banks were half as good as this lot.👮‍♂️

Talking about quality and value for money - This is from a local restaurant in the South of France near where we lived, from their website recently. Includes a quarter litre of GOOD local house wine. You would be lucky to get away with the equivalent of €20 over here and that would not be fresh local food but would include a glass of the most awful mass produced plonk.