Thatcham, the insurer-funded Motor Insurance Repair Research Centre, has made changes to the online Thatcham Parts Guide related to the derivative match feature, a function that allows searching for selected parts across different vehicle models sold by a given manufacturer.

Now this function can search for duplication of parts across all the different manufacturers, so that should a repairer be searching for the details of an ignition coil for a Volkswagen Bora, it will be found that the very same part also fits cars such as the Audi 2.7 Quattro, Seat Leon and Skoda Octavia – among others.

Unlike with previous versions of TPG users can undertake both a manufacturer and cross-manufacturer derivative search from the 'Find Part By Vehicle' screen.The changes also mean that Acrobat Reader is no longer required, as the new TPG will use the same document viewer as eScribe. The TPG dataset has also been reduced from 500MB to under 250MB so parts searches should be quicker.

Thatcham's electronic parts catalogue covers 34 car manufacturers and an average of 700 mechanical, crash and service parts prices per model derivative.