MoT and vehicle safety checks
With the rolling 40-year MoT and tax exemption, how many times have you seen or heard of Buses that have been imported, registered and are now being driven without ever having a safety check? If you’re anything like us, you’ll have spotted this quite a lot and it’s not especially smart, is it?
Even if you’re good with the spanners / welder / paint gun yourself and feel you know your way around a VW blindfolded, if you don’t know the MoT manual inside and out and have access to a brake roller, the correct apparatus to check headlamp beam patterns or windscreen damage, etc. then you really aren’t fully qualified to be able to say if your Bus is genuinely roadworthy.
Although MoT exemption is relatively new, there are already far too many people abusing the system and driving vehicles that haven’t been checked over recently, or have rust issues that would fail the MoT if it was put through one.
You may be of the opinion that this is all well and good if you ’get away with it’, but what if you’re in an accident or get stopped by VOSA for a random road worthiness check?
It’s your responsibility to keep your Bus roadworthy, so if you’re stopped and it blatantly isn’t, or you cause an accident, are you ready to accept the consequences? Even more so if your insurance is invalidated. Have you even checked if you still need an MoT for your insurance company to cover you? And what about driving or selling a vehicle abroad? It’s all a very grey area.
Whatever your viewpoint on MoT exemption, here’s a guide to checking your Bus is roadworthy; call it a pre-MoT if you will. Regardless of whether you decide to MoT your Bus or not, running through these checks on a six-monthly basis should keep you on the right side of the law.
01 Give it a clean
Whether you plan to put your Bus through an MoT or not, you can’t check anything properly if everything is caked in dirt. We’ve heard of some MoT testers refusing to test a dirty vehicle, so it’s worth taking your Bus to a jet wash and blasting the bodywork and underside, as well as ensuring certain parts of the running gear – brakes, suspension, etc aren’t caked in grease or mud. It’s probably worth throwing some cardboard under your Bus and spending a productive hour with a stiff brush underneath; if you clean off the suspension/brakes and lower body/chassis, you’ll not only help to stop
