Safe Speed Forums

Daily Telegraph

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

Related thread here:

MOT Petition

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Sorry I didn't notice that, could someone tag this on to the end of that thread?

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

it is quite worring as it said on the news because of the rising cost of motoring many people put off repairs untill they have no choice (i.e the MOT). I have been behind cars with one working brake light. I have been driving two and a half years. I have seen TWO cars with no working rear lights at night, one on an unlit motorway. The other on an unlit A road. Everyday I see many cars with defective lights, if their owners cannot rectify these easily spotted faults what about the not so easily seen ones?

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Oct 11 Birmingham Half Marathon. I am running for the British Heart Foundation.
http://www.justgiving.com/Rob-Taylor

Bastards just stung me £27 for a motorcycle MOT...its a rip-off

I have NEVER had a bike fail an MOT so I resent paying out for nothing.

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Speed camera policy Kills

I could understand the 4 year wait, since cars are more reliable nowadays than in the past. But if 30 percent of cars are failing, that shows that it's needed..

You could test at 4, 6, and 8 years and then once a year afterwards; you have to be careful of people buying an old car that only just passed it's last MOT, and running it into the ground until the MOT runs out - a lot of things could be going wrong towards the end of 2 years.

(Oh, Gizmo - you're paying out to make sure that the Muppet in the car coming up behind you at the lights has had his brakes checked during the last year. )

Ever two years after the inital period from new, er I think 1 year is spot on as it is.

If it was two I would not have know about the splitting brake hose on my car that actally popped on the brake test on its MOT in January.

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Anti Road Charging Forum

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It depends why they fail the MOT.

A broken number plate bulb would fail you an MOT but is not exactly a safety issue.


I would like to see the stats on what the most common MOT failure is against car age before a pass judgement.

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Speed camera policy Kills

This push for two year MOTs will be down to fleet buyers whining about having to keep their vehicles road worthy. Servicing has become extended to 20k so they will be wanting to reduce costs even further. A lot of new cars fail their first MOT so I think it is down right irresponsible not to have annual MOTs for all cars. If you have your car well serviced and cared for by a competant garage then you can probably not even need an MOT as they'll always keep on top of things. Most people don't bother and with main dealers charging obscene amounts then I can see vehicles being far more dangerous. A lot of people only service and check their car at MOT time so there will be even more dangerous vehicles on the road.

I have also seen little discussion on how MOT garages will now have to survive on half the income. There will also be a massive dip as 3 year old cars will suddenly not need an MOT for another year just when the whole car stock as now got a two year wait for the next one rather than being a year wait.

I think it should be like the dentist system - high use & poor condition vehicles should be MOT'd yearly (or even more often if 20k+ mileage) and low use/well maintained cars (5k & under) should probably have two year MOTs but with some other inspection at the one year point to make sure the car is still ok. Some cheap £20 make sure it isn't dropping to bits for piece of mind test might be a reasonable compromise rather than a complete abandonment.

They won't exactly be on half income when you look at how much the MOT prices have shot up. I havn't needed an MOT for a few years but took my car for it's first last week £45.00

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

Interesting bit about the fleets -Tb.

Company i work for now - all vehicles are lease, all are serviced on schedule and still some are wrecks. All are in service though - we regularly get descended on by blokes in overalls, checking service records/mileage and sometimes under the bonnet/chassis.-so even with a high mileage our vehicles are in decent nick.-mechanically
Some years ago - different story - my regular vehicle was in for a service and i was given the "relief" vehicle(exhaust hanging off, indicators iffy, tyres legal but showing signs of poor tracking) - At that time VW had names for Golfs - Driver etc.Some wag suggested that the reason we didn't get Golfs was that after a visit to our garage they'd all be putters.All right saying don't drive it -i did -to the tyre and exhaust place

Till this sort of firm is driven out of business what better than a yearly MOT.

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

I do think that there is some room for relaxation on this. I remember the days of the old Ford Escort (amongst others) that were failing the 3rd year MOT because of body rot! We've come a long way, thankfully since then and most looked after 10yr old cars are pretty good if serviced.

Perhaps a 2yr MOT period from 3 to say 6 yrs or so followed by an annual inspection?

Maybe MILEAGE should play a part?

My 7yr old 30,000 mile garaged Jag is still like new, and many much smaller cars these days are the same......


Dare I suggest that a "league table" of reliability for different makes of car needing MOT's at different times depending on failure results might have a beneficial affect on build quality?

Or an inspection at 3 years by a Government owned station --to determine the periodicity of testing - as is done to us after some medical problem/operation.



Perhaps some way linked into the above idea.



All the above done by a Government dept --- but then we'd need a government department with no axe to grind.

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

.............or funds to raise.


This is true.....................

In electrical installation periodic testing the maximum recomended interval is 10 years (on a domestic property) but the tester will recommend the next test date depending on the condition, usage, age and test values.

how about the MOT examiner makes a recomendation of between 6 and 24 months based on the condition of the car? ie you bring a sound car to him with loads of brake pad meat, sound bodwork etc etc he will give you a long test, you bring a banger with everything "on the limit" he'll give you 6 months.

unfortunantly it does have the downside of disciminating against those with the least, ie evan if their car is roadworthy they will run the brake pads to the absolute limit due to financial constraints.

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

Has the govenment published these statistics anywhere? With the new computerised MOT system, they should have all the required data, and it'd be interesting to see what the common failures are.

There are 30% of the cars on the road more than 10 years old.

According to the statistics shown above only 12% of cars over 3 years old (30%-18%) fail an MOT. That’s pretty impressive to me considering 3 year old cars account for 18% and I would imagine the vast majority of these have a full service history and are still under warranty.

Something about these statistics does not stack up.

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Speed camera policy Kills

No, I think it means:

30% of all MOT tests fail
18% of first MOT tests fail

The 30% figure is the overall average, which includes the 18% for new cars, meaning that older cars presumably have a figure more like 40% to give an overall average of 30.

Got old ones HERE I cannot imagine much has changed. top fail is lights of course, surprising how many people do not know that even ONE number plate light out is a fail. Followed by steering, I think. Check the fail rate for trucks, and the roadside check fail rate for same....