Tempest2

In principle you may be right, but there's one big problem with this: Big car companies can pay the big fees to have their stuff approved. Because they're looking at knocking out large quantities of their cars, they only need to slap on a few pence per car to recover the approval costs. Modding is usually aimed at a much smaller, individualist market, where the quantities sold of any item are much much smaller. But the cost to pay to have such a tuning item approved is roughly the same as for big car companies parts/items. Small modding / tuning companies have to spread the high approval cost over much smaller quantities of items sold, and hence each item will need to have lotsa pounds, not pence, per unit slapped on, making it unaffordable for us, the modding-enthusiast. Hence the company does its sums, and cancels production, and even goes out of business, if their main source of income is development and sales of tuning items (eg. Rieger, Seidl, ATS etc.). Modding companies normally don't have the mega-budgets that big car companies have. Even the smaller car companies will struggle and are struggling with all this legislation. You can see where this will lead to: We're all driving the same mass-produced sh*t, a monoculture of sh*t cars. We have no modding possibilities other than possibly using whatever the big car companies offer them themselves, making the modded cars all look the same again. this defeats the object of modding, which is all about individuality. The car is one of the most important items that humans (well, enthusiasts anyway) use to express their individuality. Tempest

Hate to burst the bubble, but in Germany they already have those powers. Certificates of conformity for certain tuning parts are no longer unlimited, e.g. if new regulations come in, existing certificates can be declared void and hence any car sporting such tuning parts becomes non-road-worthy, and can be taken off the road by the cops. This has happened already in Germany !!! Sorry to disappoint, but it's the cops that will be able to force your car to the nearest MOT station instead (I know of a recent case where exactly this has happened: Severely modded gorgeous looking Audi RS4 in Germany drove to a local meet, plod turns up, looks at all the cars, and declares the RS4 non-road-worthy, as the suspension in plod's opinion is too low, owner shows certificates of MOT approval, plod says owner has to immediately take vehicle to their own appointed MOT station, until then the vehicle cannot be driven!!! The owner at that point risked losing everything as he started telling the plod what he thought of them. Anyway, upon bringing his car to the plod-appointed MOT station his car suspension was declared illegal despite his own certificates of approval!!! That's Germany, it's a dictatorship, if you ask me!). Tempest

3 Karmann coupes (Mk1 and Mk2 Rocco, Mk3 Rocco aka Rado), all on SORN at the moment (wintertime), all 3 now only used when it's sunny or going to meets. Daily hack are my legs, as I fotunately live close enough to work to be able to walk each day. At work I drive an Escort van :shock: Tempest

Best wishes to you and family, Andy. Be proud of yourself that you managed to pull something off like that in your Dad's last weeks. Tempest

More and more taxes, so that these politicians can increase their wages :-( Tempest

Just read an interesting article in a German VW Tuning mag, where it discusses the impending new regulations that those useless politians in Brussels have have been dreaming up recently (instead of dealing with far more pressing issues like job creation in the face of threats from China et al). Highlights: In the future we may only be able to run vehicle manufacturer approved alloys in approved wheel sizes and tyres sizes, no more things like spacers, fatter wheels or stretched tyres. The German ABE (Allgemeine Betriebserlaubnis = general permission for usage) system, whereby you need to have every single non-standard item on your car approved by the manufacturer (document supplied with the item) or else it needs to be single-approved on your car (=expensive, if at all possible). Some of these issues have been discussed and written down by (of course non car-enthusiasts, i.e. not people like you and me, but rather politicians) here: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/automotive/pagesbackground/spare_parts/hearing/index.htm What it says in the EU document is that safety relevant tuning parts (e.g. coilover suspension kits, bonnets, i.e. this new fangled pedestrian front crash directive - I mena, if a bloody pedestrian can't see and simply walks onto the road, blind people excepted, than sorry, but he/she deserves to get hit - Darwin award anyone?) need testing for type approval, something that only the bigger car companies can afford. As testing fees will be several thousand Euros, it means it's a few cents per car for the likes of VW, but not for the likes of Rieger, who will only sell a few hundred of a particular spoiler/bumper/coilie kit or whatever. Testing is reuqired for a spoiler bumper like on my Mk1 Rocco, but for each car make and model!!! You can see that the likes of Rieger are artificially being killed off by this proposal from Brussels. Much to the pleasure of the big car companies, as they apparently never liked the tuning scene, they often find that their cars are made to look worse by our modding efforts. They also, given the sales crisis in the automotive sector across the EU, want a slice of the modding scene action ... The only hope we have is the http://www.e-t-o.org, an organisation to fight for the interests of the tuning / modding industry, as no-one will listen to us, the car enthusiasts :-( Apart from that the German mag calls us for action, yes, us, we who are at the base of a democracy. We can still approach the relevant people in British politics (any car enthusiasts there? No, don't mean the boring hoards of chauffeur-driven Jag-morons, real people who'll drive a Rocco with a loud zorst on weekends). I'm not familiar with who to write to in this country, but you guys might be ;-) Tempest