It's not just your area suffering from one-eyed car syndrome this time of year. New government statistics show that lighting and signalling is the single biggest cause of MoT failure. “It's usually just down to a blown bulb," says MoT tester Emma Dunbar of Clapham North MoT centre in south London. "A lot of people do ignore it."
One in five cars fail due to lighting, according to the most recent statistics from the Department for Transport spanning 2012/13. The next biggest cause, suspension problems, is cited in one in eight failures while dodgy brakes affect one in 10. You can of course get pulled by police for having a headlight out, but those MoT statistics show that it's only really getting spotted when owners go in for the annual test.
Bulbs among the easier electronics to fix
Dunbar at the Clapham center reckons owners are aware they're lacking a full set of lights, but just leave it. "A lot of people think it's something more technical. They think it's a harder job than it is."
Some cars do make it difficult to change a bulb. Tester Ash Gaynor at the same centre singles out the previous model Renault Megane as being one of the worst, needing the front bumper off if the headlight seals have hardened, but he reckons on most non-Xenon cars it's a five-minute job at most.
The requirement from March last year to check warning lights is failing a lot of cars for lit airbag lights, we're told. "We've had loads of those," says Dunbar. However a loose connection in the steering wheel is usually to blame, she reckons. Those figures have yet to appear in the statistics supplied by VOSA (now the DVSA after the recent merger with the Driving Standards Agency).
Still to come are requirements to fail a car on a lit engine management light and also to fail diesels if a factory-fitted particulate filter has been removed. This comes into force next month and might scupper anyone who's had theirs whipped out by any of the companies offering removal service and ECU reflash. However you might get away with it if the job's a clean one. A spokesman for the DVSA told us that rather than check via computer whether the car was fitted with a DPF it's "a visual inspection of the exhaust system".
At the moment only five per cent of MoT failures are for fuel and exhaust, behind tyres and cracked windscreens.