Driving car with no MoT for repairs to advisory items?

[daklone]

I wonder if anyone knows the rules around driving a car that has no current MoT in order to take it for repairs to ADVISORY items?

I can't seem to find anything about it online.

[zx]

The short answer is no.

If you're not within 10 days of an MOT fail or have passed your MOT and driven home, you cannot drive it around. You would need to tax and insure the car to carry out any repairs whether they were advisories or not.

If you have no MOT then you'd need to book one and either fail for your 10 days or pass, then tax, then go to garage.

If you failed an MOT and you're within your 10 days, you can take the car to a place of repair for fails and advisories. This is still a grey area though as the law doesn't define a distance or what repairs can be done. I've always used a common sense approach and never had any issues. A split boot is unlikely to upset the police if pulled over. A bald tyre and leaky brake line...probably going to land you in trouble!

[daklone]

Apr 29, 2018 21:35:15 GMT zx said:

If you failed an MOT and you're within your 10 days, you can take the car to a place of repair for fails and advisories. This is still a grey area though as the law doesn't define a distance or what repairs can be done. I've always used a common sense approach and never had any issues. A split boot is unlikely to upset the police if pulled over. A bald tyre and leaky brake line...probably going to land you in trouble!

Thanks zx

I've never seen anything that mentions advisories; they only seem to talk about failed items. On what basis do you include advisories in that statement?

[zx]

It would be on the basis that you had failure items too.

Lets say you wanted a 'clean sheet' on a car that would definitely pass an MOT. The easiest way to sort this would be to book an MOT and make sure it failed. Remove a headlight bulb for example. Then you drive from the MOT station to your garage, replace the bulb, fix the advisories and return for your re-test within 10 days. That is legal. Obviously take your paperwork with you and have insurance.

[taurus]

You can drive a car with no MOT to a garage where it is booked in for a MOT so long as it is insured. It may be taxed or you may be unable to tax it due to having no MOT. Either way you can drive it to a pre-booked MOT with insurance.

If the police stop you they will ring the garage and check the car is booked in.

Obviously this doesn't give you carte blanche to go round with bald tyres or missing bits of bodywork.

So if you're taking to a garage for repairs to advisories, get them to book it in for MOT, you can drive then drive it there. If they're sensible they can cancel the MOT booking once you've arrived, after all they're getting the work to do and presumably you'll get them to do the MOT once the advisories are fixed.

[daklone]

So here's a real-world example:

A car fails on rusty sills and has advisories for tyres too. So as far as I understand it you could drive it to the welder's and back, fine, but can you also drive it to the tyre place and back?

[colnerov]

Hi, Advisories are not failures, they are something that has been spotted that will need addressing in the future but are not a failure right now. So in your example get the welding done and re-present for MOT, then get your tyres done afterwards.

Colin

[daklone]

So you couldn't, in theory, get the advisory for the tyres taken off then?

[Deleted]

Apr 30, 2018 9:01:15 GMT daklone said:

So here's a real-world example:

A car fails on rusty sills and has advisories for tyres too. So as far as I understand it you could drive it to the welder's and back, fine, but can you also drive it to the tyre place and back?

As far as I've ever understood it. You would be allowed to drive it to a garage for a pre-booked MOT only. The garage would then be able to organise the welding (and change the tyres if you wished them to)... but you might incur the cost of vehicle towing/transport if the garage can't do the welding work themselves. You would not legally be able to drive it to a welder and a tyre fitter yourself without an MOT on the car.

So really you'd need to choose a combo MOT testing centre and garage workshop with the means of doing the welding to your satisfaction.

[daklone]

That's not right Quatermass.

You can definitely drive the car to/from pre-arranged repairs for FAILED items (with insurance, of course). So if the tyres in my example were a FAIL, then it would be fine to drive to/from the welder and then to/from the tyre place.

I like to think that this rule was brought in to stop unscrupulous garages from holding your car hostage and charging whatever they like for repairs, knowing that you are unlikely to pay for a tow truck to move it.

[Deleted]

Oh right... that's good to know!

[taurus]

At the risk of sounding pedantic...you can drive after a MOT to fix problems if you've submitted it for testing before the current one runs out. But only so long as the failed items don't render it unroadworthy. Now therein lies a can of worms since it's a matter of opinion if a MOT failure is thereby deemed to be unroadworthy.

But there's a difference between say a faulty washer jet and tyres. I suspect a tyre that has failed the MOT does indeed render the car undriveable. Advisories are ok but a tyre that fails a test probably means it's below the legal limit or showing signs of carcass damage. In which case it's not possible to be driven to the tyre shop.

I guess that's just a bad example to use in this case but if question is can a car be driven to get faults fixed then there's a whole raft of circumstances which change the answer.

[ChasR]

This is clarified with the new testing method.

There are three categories with the current MOT which are known and self explanatory:
-Fail;
-Advisory
-Pass

This is changing to a new way on the 22nd May

Failure Methods
-Dangerous; It will actually be illegal to drive a car with this category against it. If you are taking it home, or even if taking it to a place of repair you can be fined £1000 if you are caught.
-Major;This is the same as the old failure. Thus it can be driven to a place of repair

Advisory methods
-Minor; This signifies work that isn't a failure but can soon become it. So a split gaitor that not yet leaking, tyres that are close to the limit, a leaky exhasut, that kind of stuff.
-AdvisoryThis will be more for things the tester wants to put down. So if he can put down "Cover obsuring components" if he can't check the brake fluid or fully inspect the brake lines as a result, or "Child seat fitted" to say that he can't test the seatbelt mechanism, or commenting on a noisy exhaust etc.

That is how I understand the rules from what I've been told and what I've read up. I'll let mk2cossie inform us.

[daklone]

That's interesting ChasR.

So somewhere like JustMoT will have to inform people that they'll have to have their vehicles towed home/for repair if they have a failure classified as dangerous then?

[zx]

If your real world example is what you're dealing with, you could have a mobile tyre fitter pop round and replace the tyres on your driveway. No need to worry about driving it.

[duggers]

I'm sure if you went to the .gov site you'd get the way it is but:
You can currently take a vehicle to a place of repair from an MOT fail.
You can drive a vehicle to a pre-arranged MOT without MOT or VED but it must be both insured and roadworthy.
If you take a vehicle to an MOT before the current one runs out and it fails, it no longer has an MOT. The old one does not continue under the computerized system, conversely if you submit a vehicle for an MOT a month before it is due and it passes you can get a 13 month MOT.
As stated by others advisories are just that.

www.gov.uk/getting-an-mot

[daklone]

Apr 30, 2018 21:13:57 GMT duggers said:

If you take a vehicle to an MOT before the current one runs out and it fails, it no longer has an MOT. The old one does not continue under the computerized system, conversely if you submit a vehicle for an MOT a month before it is due and it passes you can get a 13 month MOT.

I don't think that is correct Duggers. Are you able to provide a link to .gov or something to back that up?

We talked about this at quite some length on another thread and I don't believe there is a way to "invalidate" or "cancel" a current MoT certificate. Just having another test certainly doesn't, computerised or not.

You run the risk of possible prosecution if your vehicle fails to meet the standards of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations and Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations, MoT or not, any time it is being driven on the road (whether you know about any failings or not).

There is no mention of ADVISORY items anywhere, so I'm concluding that no, you cannot drive the car on the road without an MoT to get ADVISORY items repaired.

[Deleted]

May 1, 2018 8:37:12 GMT daklone said:

You run the risk of possible prosecution if your vehicle fails to meet the standards of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations and Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations, MoT or not, any time it is being driven on the road (whether you know about any failings or not).

I think that's the point though... if you go for an early MOT and it fails on something (properly fails not advisories) your old MOT may not have been cancelled out by the new one (I have no idea if it does or not) but there is now documentary proof that you're driving an unroadworthy vehicle on the road. Even with a valid MOT this is illegal, so the old MOT is technically invalidated by the condition of the vehicle anyway, and you can't even claim to be unaware of it if the system now has it on file that you've just failed an MOT and been handed a fail certificate upon collection of the vehicle.

[daklone]

It is an apparently contradictory situation, I agree.

We had a long discussion about the whole issue a while ago when some of the gutter press started spreading untrue scare stories about the police using the MoT database to target people whose vehicles had recently failed an MoT: forum.retro-rides.org/post/2317278/thread

Sadly I've also heard garage owners spreading this false information in an attempt to scare people into leaving their vehicles with the for repairs rather than taking them away.

[daklone]

Apr 30, 2018 17:08:13 GMT ChasR said:

This is clarified with the new testing method.

There are three categories with the current MOT which are known and self explanatory:
-Fail;
-Advisory
-Pass

This is changing to a new way on the 22nd May

Failure Methods
-Dangerous; It will actually be illegal to drive a car with this category against it. If you are taking it home, or even if taking it to a place of repair you can be fined £1000 if you are caught.
-Major;This is the same as the old failure. Thus it can be driven to a place of repair

Advisory methods
-Minor; This signifies work that isn't a failure but can soon become it. So a split gaitor that not yet leaking, tyres that are close to the limit, a leaky exhasut, that kind of stuff.
-AdvisoryThis will be more for things the tester wants to put down. So if he can put down "Cover obsuring components" if he can't check the brake fluid or fully inspect the brake lines as a result, or "Child seat fitted" to say that he can't test the seatbelt mechanism, or commenting on a noisy exhaust etc.

That is how I understand the rules from what I've been told and what I've read up. I'll let mk2cossie inform us.

Yes, this should clarify the position nicely.