Is your car really safe to drive? Substandard MOT tests leave cars that should fail on UK roads

According to the DVSA, substantial numbers of cars are passing their MOT that really shouldn’t.

Taking your car for an MOT can be an enormously stressful experience.

It can also be costly if the various assessments that your car goes through uncover certain underlying issues that need to be put right immediately. 

It’s a crucial element of owning a car though, as the MOT ensures that your motor is fit to be on the roads. It’s a fundamental part of getting car insurance too ‒ you won’t be able to get cover if your motor has failed its tests.

Which is why it’s so troubling that research suggests substantial numbers of vehicles are passing their MOT which really shouldn’t be.

How did I pass?

The results of a Freedom of Information request submitted to the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) by WhatCar? makes for pretty troubling reading. It found that around one in seven vehicles that passed the MOT should actually have failed.

That suggests that thousands, if not millions of cars on the roads are actually not safe to be there.

As part of its MOT Compliance Survey, a team of expert examiners from the DVA randomly selected a sample of almost 1,700 vehicles that had undergone the MOT, to assess whether the correct testing standards were being applied.

Test outcomes were disagreed with by the DVSA in around 17% of cases, with around 3% of cars that were failed actually deemed worthy of passing.

In a massive 70% of cases, the DVSA found at least one defect with the vehicle which had been incorrectly recorded or missed entirely, while it disagreed with three or more defects that were picked out in more than half of the vehicles.

These aren’t small issues being missed either.

The brakes and suspension tended to be subject to the biggest variance between the MOT testers’ assessments and that of the DVSA, with brakes subject to the highest number of wrongly assessed defects at 18%.

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A problem for owners

Clearly, there are some big potential impacts for all of us if there are so many cars on the roads that aren’t really safe.

First, let’s consider the people who own those risky motors.

If I take my car to a garage for its MOT, it’s not my fault if they aren’t testing it properly.

And if they aren’t spotting those potential issues, it just means that I am at greater risk of ending up by the side of the road after breaking down or even worse having been involved in an accident, because of a substandard assessment.

Along similar lines, if I am buying a second-hand car, then one of the first things I will want to check is its MOT record, as a way of establishing what sort of condition it’s in.

Buying a motor that actually has a few skeletons under the hood is likely to mean costly, unexpected trips to the garage to put those issues right as and when those problems fully emerge.

Why this impacts all road users

It’s not just the owners of those cars who can get caught up in this though.

Other road users are also put at risk through sub-par MOT assessments; if my car’s brakes fail because they weren’t checked properly, then there’s a decent chance that I’m going to go into the back of the car in front, not only damaging their car but potentially injuring the occupants as well.

Even if you aren’t unfortunate enough to be caught up in an accident that results from one of those substandard MOTs, if you’re a road user you will still pay the price financially for it. 

After all, a big factor in the premiums we have to pay for our car insurance is how likely you are to be caught up in an accident.

And so if there are more accidents as a result of unsafe motors passing their MOTs, then that will eventually mean higher premiums for all of us.

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