Vehicles not fit for the road

[cce427]

I see this was discussed here some time ago but even more common today. As a retired mechanic I see so many vehicles EVERY DAY that are not fit for the road due to under inflated tyres, no brake lights, missing rear wiper blades, unreadable number plates, missing door mirrors, missing bumpers, failed headlights, badly aligned headlights and that was just this morning, drives my wife mad :-) If I see under inflated tyres I try and make the driver aware. all these offences are normaly dealt with by a caution and a chance to rectify but with no traffic cops in my area they just get more and more common. I think there should be an online app that we can report to and it simply sends the owner a letter and a period to rectify.

And before you start I am not a grass just concerned for the safety of others

[cce427]

Dingu said:

Leaving the possible exaggeration to one side. I’m not sure allowing the public the ability to report these things triggering a letter with a deadline is a particularly good idea as:
- How would compliance be verified?
- How would the accuracy of reports be verified?
- Without point 2 it seems primed for being abused; or
- whilst you may be able to tell these things the majority aren’t, this is unlikely to stop an appreciable proportion thinking they can tell and reporting anyway

As an aside the rear wiper isn’t a requirement is it?

Well I have seen all of those in the last three days so not much of an exaggeration ! I have dash cam footage of four of them so compliance and accuracy of reports gets easier by the day as more people have dash cams

If someone is not aware there is an issue with another vehicle they would not report it surely ?

When I used to take cars for an MOT if something is fitted to a vehicle it has to work, like a spare tyre, if it is missing it is fine, if you have one and it is bald its a fail. Rear wipers are the same unless the law has changed.

[cce427]

coldel said:

The idea of having a function to report things like tyres that are low on pressure to etc. really is quite impossible. It would take a huge department to deal with that sort of information throughput ... checking individual dashcam footage if you say received just 5000 a day is just (given there are tens of millions of cars in the UK) completely unimplementable. And I suspect it will be abused.

Ultimately it comes down to how many cases of injury and/or death occur due to these issues? Are we talking significant numbers or is it literally it annoys people?

If its worthwhile, we could have a decent marketing campaign by the government to educate people and the general public instead of being sanctimonious to others and just being kind and helpful could solve the problem themselves.

Again it is down to money and how many people are killed, just part of the lawless society it seems to be coming. Personaly I would not report low pressure tyres, I knock on car windows and tell them or leave a note on the windscreen if I can. I was on a Motorway awareness course a couple of years ago and the tutor asked how many people checked their car with a quick walk around and I was the only one, also so many Highway code changes nobody including me knew about so maybe a government awareness campain is the way to go, as a qualified electrician I had to re qualify regularly as do gas engineers maybe driver need to update their knowledge ;-)

[cce427]

Shaw Tarse said:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/car-par...

Agreed, only going by experience, I used three MOT centres over the years and all failed for inoperative rear wiper and bald spare tyre so I stand, or sit corrected