Can someone walk me through how someone would steal a car left running unattended due to a turbo timer correctly installed?

How they'd get around the locked doors, steering lock, and not being able to lower the handbrake or touch the brake pedal?

I just thought of something even better - if your car has cruise you can wire it up to the clutch position sensor - so they can't touch the clutch either...

All a thief can do is steal the car contents, which is not the turbo timer's fault

Can someone walk me through how someone would steal a car left running unattended due to a turbo timer correctly installed?

How they'd get around the locked doors, steering lock, and not being able to lower the handbrake or touch the brake pedal?

I just thought of something even better - if your car has cruise you can wire it up to the clutch position sensor - so they can't touch the clutch either...

All a thief can do is steal the car contents, which is not the turbo timer's fault

I can't, but I can tell you that this crap country, idiots who would see a car running whilst unattened and still make a right mess trying to nick it. Then when they can't would gladly damage it a bit more just to thank you for not letting them nick your car.

Therefore british insurance would see this as a massive risk and therefore probably chose not to insure it with the timer installed.

Your lucky(ish)you live in a country where capital punishment is still used and people still have some ounce of respect for other peoples property.

Never seen the point in fitting a turbo timer to the 1.8T IMO they're gizmos for the jap boys. If you've got a remapped 1.8T and have been thrashing it then let it idle for a couple of minutes before you turn it off and leave the car. Is your time really that valuable that you have to abandon the car with the engine running? As Fatty said it may not be nickable but it is inviting thieves to have a go, smash windows etc. For a standard car, if there was a danger of cooking oil onto the turbo bearings, why didn't Skoda put a paragraph in the manual about idling the car after thrashing it?

Also the 1.8T (at least the AUQ version) doesn't have an EGT sensor so how would the turbo timer know how hot the turbo was and how long to idle the engine for?

Mine is equipped with a car alarm system which also acts as a turbo-timer (I suppose most of them do). There's no temp sensor on a turbo but the system uses some sophisticated algorhythms to calculate the time needed to cool it down - so when I rev it hard, after I take off the key and the doors are locked the motor still works about 4 minutes (you may set the limit by yourself), and if I drive those last miles really slow not raising rpms over 2000, the motor stops almost instantly.

I see from your discussion that the insuranse laws differ very significantly 'cause in Russia they don't even care about mods installed neither it's a turbo-timer nor bigger turbo or a chip. You have an alarm system - it's ok to go, that's it. The alarm system itself doesn't have anything to do with the car immo - it's still as functional as it was in stock, except for the time it receives the engine start signal from remote, then the alarm system "shows" the key to the ECU to allow starting the engine. I haven't heard of cases when turbo timer or remote start system was used for stealing a car - it's quite easier and much cheaper for the bad guys to "evacuate" one to some hideaway and deal with this there in a plenty of time and almost no risk of being caught in action.

The insurers over here are very fussy about everything - basically if they can avoid paying out they will. I think a lot of it has to do with the rise in the amount of personal injury claims etc. in the UK in the last 10-20 years. Car insurers are under pressure by their underwriters to increase the premiums they charge and reduce the claims they pay out.

fair enough i suppose ...

... but the benefits are there. Just because this mod is more popular amongst Japanese cars doesn't mean that european cars need it any less. a turbo is a turbo, whether it's on an SR20 or a 1.8T - gets red hot, has oil and water circulating through, and that stops when the engine is turned off. oil and water sits in the red hot turbo, oil degrades and turbo, over time, suffers from a higher level of thermal cycling.

Is it worth losing an insurance payout and "asking" thieves to try to nick your car? depends where you live. remember it is a very simple part if you want to be careful you could just cut the wires and remove the timer if you have to claim. And don't tell me that's fraud..