My car's EM light came on a couple of weeks ago - AA said it was a DPF issue. Tried regeneration the DPF myself but no joy, so took it to the garage.

You can only do a regen yourself if the warning light is DPF specific and then you must drive between certain revs hoping the light extinguishes. Its a pointless excercise if you are just guessing.

However, I am fully comp insured, so technically I think I could claim for the damage. But as I haven't reported the prang yet, would I still be covered? Also, I just took it to my regular garage - would an insurance company cover repairs carried out by a garage not appointed by them?

Your insurers may refuse to cover the incident since it was several weeks ago and some of the damage is consequential. By that I mean continueing to use the car has made it worse thus you have not complied with the T & C's and minimised the losses. At best you could hope to get paid for tahe damaged intercooler but not the turbo or DPF.

Insurers do allow you to use garages other than their approved ones but there is normally extra excess to pay. Whatever happens they will need to inspect the daamge before any works takes place otherwise they will refuse to pay out.

I hope the DPF issue will clear up once the intercooler is replaced.

I have no idea how much these things cost - not expecting them to be cheap!

If you continue driving and a fault means the DPF fails to regenerate the DPF will quickly block up with soot. Once blocked it will need replacing and that will cost lots of ££££'s. At a dealer it could be well over a £1000 for intercooler and DPF with a turbo adding even more.

According to the garage the turbo is OK and the DPF will clear once a new intercooler is fitted, so there's unlikely to be any consequential damage due to me not noticing the problem immediately.

So I guess my only concern is if the insurance co get funny about be not reporting the shunt when it happened. Garage agree I could not have expected to have caused the damage. It did go through an MOT with them and they didn't notice anything.

They are very confident that it will be fine. They have the same software Nissan use to force a regen, although they are certain the reason it didn't do it by itself is because of the damaged intercooler.

Anyway, claim has gone in to insurance as the cost of replacement parts is eye-watering!