MOT

[laserblazer]

The father of an ex-pupil does most of our car servicing and gets the MOT done at a local garage. It works well, we leave the keys at the office, he collects and returns the car, which is brilliant for the teaching staff. Anyway, my car was returned with a new MOT certificate plus the service documents. I've just noticed that it failed the first time because the satnav holder was attached to the windscreen. I mount it right down in the right hand corner. So, presumably they failed the MOT, took the holder off and then passed it.

[EduTech]

If I remember correctly I thought that the Sat Nav holder was not allowed to be in the center of the windscreen anymore, but it could be on the right handside?... not sure why it failed. :/

[hit]

My garage yanks it off every year, and I forget every year! Apparently you can't have anything attached to the windscreen which will obstruct your field of view that is larger than 10mm diameter in zone A and 40mm elsewhere. Most satnav suckers are bigger than this.

 

So to make sure they are abiding by the rules, they have to fail you, they then opt to remedy the fault for free and as its a minor fault re-test the fault for free. If they didn't do this and the vehicle was a spot check by VOSA they could lose their testing license.

[laserblazer]

I don't think my satnav holder is any bigger than the tax disc holder.

[hit]

I think there's something else about official documents such as tax discs, official parking permits and taxi licences being exempt to some degree, but they must not seriously affect the field of vision.

[hit]

Just found this as well, UKMOT.com MOT Manual 6.1 Windscreens/Drivers View of the road

 

The vehicle presenter should be advised of and given the opportunity to remove any item likely to fail under Reason for Rejection 4b or 4e before a Notification of Refusal is issued.

 

Which I take as because your not there they can't give you the chance to remove the item.

[Edu-IT]

Never knew of this before now! Interesting.

[m25man]

Anything within the sweep of the wipers counts and this has been the case since I held a testers license 30 years ago.

 

Almost every year VoSA seem to adjust the rules slightly and much of the interpretation of them is still down to the tester themselves.

In the given example shown area A of the drivers swept area is quite obvious but this is not always the case in many European/US cars like a Merc that has a single wiper adapted from its LHD variant?

These cover a much larger single sweep and brings many of these "queries" such as stone chips, cracks and scratches into question as the main cleaning area tends to be central and passenger side orientated.

 

As no tester or garage wants to loose their testing license over something as obvious as a Sat Nav sucker I think the removal of such items from the Dash area should be pretty routine before they start the test but the question is, should the garage really be expected to clean up before hand?

 

With all things safety related, we wouldn't need half the rules and regs if people used some common sense.

 

If you think our rules are hard to follow google the Californian Windshield Mounting Laws you can see where a lot of our crazy interpretations must come from!