To DeCAT or not to DeCAT

[CAL-85]

Looking for opinions here.  Have a pretty standard 350 at the moment and thinking about an exhaust.  I happen to live pretty close to someone who is amazing at custom exhausts so will be looking at this rather than off the shelf. 

 

My question is if i get a full custom with decat, is this likely to limit the resale of the car or are these kind of things expected?  Although i have somewhere that will get it through the MOT that's not always going to be the case with potential future buyers, and from what I read on here is becoming a bit of a problem with current owners as well.

 

I'm not sure what my plans for the car are at the moment, whether i will keep long term or sell within a year or so, so although i want to have something louder, and if decat would release more power, i'm still not sure what would be the best option? 

 

Cal 

[Ponsonby]

Is it worth the decat just to release a little more power? Why not change to cat back custom made (they can get the sound you want) and keep your old exhaust.

My car is completely original apart from the exhaust, but I have the original exhaust in case a future buyer wants to go back to 100% stock.

[Jack94]

Why not get the gains and keep your car MOT friendly with some HFCs, best of both worlds 

 

Personally if I was a potential buyer decats would put me off because I don't know any friendly testers so would have to factor in the cost of sourcing some cats & swapping them over then back again come MOT time. 

[GMballistic]

When I had my 350Z I did eventually get De-Cats on mine but that was more of a necessity than anything else because mine was supercharged with over 430Bhp so if I had used Sports Cats or normal Cats it wouldn't have taken long before I'd have damaged the insides of them. 

 

One big problem with De-Cats is that they're not road legal so will undoubtedly void your car insurance should the worse happen and they find out in the event of a claim. 

 

Performance wise imho there isn't a lot of difference between a De-Cat and a good performance Sports Cat.

The real difference is always in the price with a good Sports Cat usually being double the cost of a De-Cat which I think is the deciding factor for a lot of people in reality when choosing their mods.

 

Personally I'd say if you can stretch to Sports Cats (HFC's) with your new full exhaust system then do that otherwise just get a good Cat to back exhaust system and talk to the exhaust fabricator about your preferences. They can make sure it is plenty loud enough even with running the OEM Cats.