Insurance
 

Now that I have a boat load of money invested in my Z, I'm concerned about it's insured value.

Most car insurance will only cover the base car (if you are lucky) and not any of the added upgrades. The only thing that Geico will cover are the new wheels.

I've been shopping around to see if I can get my car insured for an agreed value but I'm not having much luck. Most of the insurance companies will insure the car but they basically don't want you to drive it.

I only put around 5K miles a year on the car but why build up the car to not drive it?

Anyone have a solution?

I just went through this a few months ago.

Progressive will allow you to add up to 5k in aftermarket parts coverage.

IIRC Travelers and/or Liberty Mutual will sell like 10k or 15k in additional coverage for aftermarket parts - but one of them will only insure you at all if all of it has been installed by a certified mechanic.

esurance has a partnership with Haggerty for custom and modified cars that I was looking into, but Haggerty has awful reviews.

I ended up going with MetLife, which does not have anything to offer for aftermarket parts coverage aside from a "We'll do our best to make it right" from the sales girl... which, to me, means no coverage... but in my case, the cost/year was almost $1500 less than other options so I chose to gamble on it.

edit: Sorry I could not be more specific on some of this, its off the top of my memory and I disposed of all of my notes that I used at the time.

Some companies offer "riders" to pay some coverage for add-on items. Like our home-owners insurance won't cover any high-dollar jewelry, electronics, so they let you pay more (rider) to cover the items not normally covered. Don't know how the car insurance companies do this...

Haggerty Insurance. You and their agent agree on a dollar value of the car and they price your insurance from there. I had my STI SEMA show car insured with them for $80K. You will pay for it thou.

They won't insure it if you used the car. Only as a collector car.

Correct. Their comp & collision coverage does and will only cover up to 1k in aftermarket parts so 6k total is possible. Anything over 5k they have to include the total value of the vehicle.

Side note: I get a kick out of how they describe some of parts that they use as examples. 'speakers, sub & light systems, stereos and TV equipment, navigation systems, phones, custom grilles and spoilers, and custom paint

Yeah I had problems with them also. They didn't want to go more than 5k over book value. I had to go with collector car insurance and ended pay out the butt for it!

It seems insurance co are not on the modded car/agreed value business anymore. Went thru this a year or two ago. No insurance co would do agreed value or a rider. Haggerty would grudgingly do it but said we'd be limited to 3k miles per year (needed 5-6k).

Agreed value track event coverage is a snap ironically.

I tried going through Grundy and they took three weeks of my time and never did come through with a policy. Next was Hagerty and they basically won't let you drive your car more than about 1K miles a year.

GEICO now has collector car insurance but you can't drive it very much. They did offer a rider to cover my wheels but that is all. I'm currently with GEICO with my fleet of vehicles, five of them.

I may go back and see what I can work up with Grundy, they have a MPV program that actually allows you to drive your car. They were helpful on the phone but their internet portal sucks. I found out that you really just need to call them.

Thanks for all of the responses.

Just paid my 6 month car insurance and was able to keep it under $600. Keeps going up on a 9 yr old car? Raised the comp to $1000 deduct and kept the collision at $500. Was going to to get rid of U3 something to the effect of paying disability but kept it. State farm raises rate like health insurance. :ugh2:

Definitely speak personally with each ins co. You look into. I also looked into grundy b/c of MVP program. Def double check with them but iirc the dealbreaker was that if you wanted agreed value on , for us our streetable trck car, we needed to put ALL our vehicles, or at least a coulple under their MVP daily driver program. We only had 3 vehicles at the time, we would have lost multi policy disount for home /auto and multi vehicle discount with "regular" ins co when all we needed was agreed value coverage for the damn track car.

Also, s much as alll the "regular" ins companies suck a sweaty ballsack, if all your vehicles are under a boutique ins co. Would you feel as covered and as well protected?

In the end, wife and I decided the car modding is a hobby and treat it like a sunk cost. I.e. If your thing is going out to eat at fancy restaurants all the time, that money is gone. If your modded car gets wrecked, well that money's gone same way except your odds of something bad are lower since it's not guaranteed you'll lose your modded car

Or to put succinctly, don't play if you can't afford to pay.

As in the above:

"In the end I decided that car modding is a hobby and treat it like a sunk cost. Or to put succinctly, don't play if you can't afford to pay.[/QUOTE]"

:iagree:

Agree whole heartily! I've always looked at car modding as the cost of entertainment. it is just that I have never gone this far in so I was looking to see if someone knew a secret handshake.........

I look at car modding like I do when buying a new car, you start off with a butt load of money invested and a couple of years later it has lost quite a bit of value. Not much difference than putting a bunch of money into mods.

The story I told my wife, which is mostly true, is that when I purchased my Mazda MX3 many years ago and then later traded it in on a RX-7 Turbo I lost a bunch of money but had a great time with the MX3. It was lightly modded. Later on I purchased a 1977 Fiat Spider and did about $6K of restoration and mods to it. That got me a car that was worth about what I had invested in it but I didn't care because it was my play car at the time. That was 18 years ago and today it is still worth about $6K. It is covered with collector car insurance through GEICO simply because it has no "book" value if something bad happened to it. It is really cheap too at about $120 a year for full coverage. But, I don't drive it except in the spring and fall. I'm spoiled with the comfort of AC......

It seems to me that we should be able to get insurance on a limited use vehicle that has been modified ($$). The insurance companies won't tell you what the limit is now, they ask you how many miles you drive it yearly and then say that it is too much.

Insurance companies SUCK! They also report record profits every year.........