Recently switched to Progressive. Although do not like the idea of being tracked went with their Snapshot because saved about $400 every six months. Can do by phone or plug in to OBD. The Progressive phone rep told me the phone app knows where you are even if not driving. I have a sister-in-law who is the head of negotiating contracts including insurance for a large event organizer. She told me Progressive sells the data of the demographics of Snapshot users (not name of the users) to other business included info on those who enter their business. I called Progressive to get the plug in. Progressive said would work on my wife's GMC, my daughter's Toyota, but not my 02 XJ8, 02 XK8 and 03 XJR. I told them made no sense because the Jags have an OBD plug. Response was no Jag regardless of year was approved for the plug in Snapshot.

 

Could very well be their device is incompatible based on how the Jaguar OBD port is pinned out; with earlier Jags there is an SCP bus broken out along side the CAN. In later models with multi-CAN networks, there is more than one CAN BUS broken out at the port. What this means is their OBD dongle may have unintended consequences with other systems in the vehicle.

If you've ever read reviews on those $10-20 OBD adapters, 90% work, and 10% have disastrous results due to this (any manufacturer). Even a premium unit may cause this; I had issues with several Land Rovers of the 2000's with the dongle causing faults on neighboring networks, even though the OBD functionality was fine.

Depending on how you've wired the LS car, you'd either get no comms from the ECM or it would pop up as a Camaro. If those dongles are solely GPS based and using the port just for convenient power source, then that's a different story.

 

It's much more likely they do not want to insure Jaguars.

 

My decent Foxwell code reader can't auto detect my XJR when plugged in, I have to manually select Jag. Maybe a dongle like you're describing tries the same auto-detect & fails in the same way.

 

A cheap-o Elm 327 detects the Jags nicely, although you have to be
frugal about which iphone or android app you use with it.

 

It is not their position to refuse to insure Jaguars, their position is the brand is ineligible for the Snapshot program, likely due to the technical reasons provided.

 

I've had no issues insuring either of my XJRs with Progressive, or any other weird car I've owned. First the '00 XJR (pre-LS swap) and then added the '01 XJR. Still have the '00 LS-swapped XJR with Progressive. Only car I didn't get quote from them for is my '76 Cadillac Fleetwood, because the value of the engine far exceeds that of the car if there were to be a payout by them. Hagerty collector policy for $300/year has me covered there.

And it's a "Hell no!" for any of those driving monitors to provide discounts on insurance, whether GPS only or one that captures rapid acceleration, abrupt braking, etc. Not going to happen for me - ever.

 

Yep...that could be, however, if a cheap-o Elm-327 can connect without issue.
it would seem odd to me that a more technologically enabled one cannot.

 

I'd suspect the more advanced one has more encoding options & the car can't respond correctly to the more complicated query when the dongle says 'what language do you speak?'.
You'd think it'd then have a failback to an earlier set of protocols though.