Bothered by a local idiot in a whamed-up chav-mobile who thinks it's clever to wake your kids at 2am every night by doing 60mph up a residential street in 2nd gear with a cheap bean-can silencer?

Simple solution if you live in the UK and know the registration of the offending vehicle...… Go to askMID.com (the Motor Insurance Database), pay £4.50 to run a search on that reg number, and you'll receive the details of the insurance company and the policy number related to that vehicle.

Now one thing to note is that askMID states that you SHOULD be enquiring about that registration number as the result of an ACCIDENT, and that you may otherwise be committing an offence by obtaining said information contrary to Section 170 of the Data Protection Act. HOWEVER, what it doesn't state is that a motorist who regularly disturbs your right to a peaceful life is therefore causing you loss. If you subsequently make an askMID enquiry in order to pursue some recompense for this, or to report a offence to the driver's insurance company then you DO have the right to make this enquiry and are NOT committing an offence under the Data Protection Act.

But why would you want the insurance details of a vehicle owner who has a noisy exhaust?... Simple, the legal limit in the EU is 74db and anything above 90db is considered a nuisance. Furthermore, it is also an offence for a vehicle owner to modify their exhaust system to make it exceed the db level stated by the manufacturer when that vehicle was given its type approval. This essentially covers all (or very close to all) after-market 'performance' systems.

So to get to the point.... If you have a local boy-racer who regularly disturbs your right to a peaceful life through an excessively loud exhaust system, you can pay £4.50 to askMID, get the details of his/her insurance policy, then write a letter to that insurer pointing out that the owner is driving an illegally modified vehicle and committing an offence by doing so, and that you're surprised that the company is insuring an illegal vehicle. The insurance company then have no choice but to contact their insured to (a) cancel their policy; (b) order their insured to make the vehicle compliant with the law or their policy will be revoked.