Not a mechanic or a shark from the industry as one other poster appears to be. I bought a renault scenic - high mileage, 3 years old - 4 star cover supposedly covering everything under the sun with the proviso of ..wear and tear. A few months later a knocking on maneuver revealed the steering rack needed replacing. VGS (of Warranty Management Services) initially seemed OK - send it to the garage, have them check, we'll sign it off etc etc. Later though this changed and they started talking about 'potentially needing' to send someone to inspect once the rack was stripped out (inconvenient as I use a small local garage who cannot have a car lying in parts for days on the off chance that an inspection is required). When we actually got the car to the garage everything just fell apart - the best price or the rack was for renault but they wanted the old one in exchange to keep the price down by £100 - OK but VGS now decided that they want the rack shipped to an 'independent' assessor who would strip it down and decide if it had failed or was broken due to wear and tear. This leaves me in the situation whereby I either pay out my self or take a gamble that the assessor may decide the rack of a 100k car has broken due to failure as opposed to wear and tear - assuming they said yes it failed I would still need to pay carriage and the fee for checking the rack, if they say it was wear and tear I would not only loose this money but also the £100 for the renault trade in. Is this a gamble I can take - course not - looking at it rationally - how likely is it that the warranty company would retain the services of assessing company that found in favour with the claimants over their client? and (though I know this is in support of the sharks) how likely is it that you could successfully argue pretty much any component failure in a 100k car was down to part failure not induced by wear and tear - realistically it wont happen unless you have just had a new part fitted at a relatively recent time period/mileage and can prove that. In summary then - myself and my mechanic have no doubt that there would not be a payout and in fairness to the warranty company I can understand why this might, even legitimately be the case. The action - I may try and get the warranty fee back as I have a warranty for a car that in theory exceeds the required maximum mileage but in future I would not bother to obtain one of these as realistically it is unlikely (at least in my mind) that you would ever obtain a simple and stress free resolution by way of a private warranty service on a high (or even low reading these posts) mileage car. I should also add that when dealing with these people on the telephone I have heard nothing that would disway me from this view - it may be harsh to judge a character from a few words on the end of a phone line but to me the term 'Arthur Dailies with attitude' would be a good summary.