SV650.org - SV650 & Gladius 650 Forum - View Single Post - British Bureaucracy, the MOT and my Pilot Light's gone out.

01-05-09, 08:47 PM

'ere we go...

I do know one end of a spanner from t'other and used to do ground-up restoration for show-winning classic cars. However I don't have a fully equiped garage at my disposal anymore and I don't have any of the specialist tools. I don't actually have a great deal of money at all, hence why I'm driving a beat up 10 year 20,000 mile SV. I service the bike myself and will do simple stuff but outside of that it's impossible. Also, working on bikes ain't like working on cars, as with cars there's a greater safety net if you get something wrong whereas with bikes it more easily could be fatal so I'd rather have a Suzuki-approved garage work on the bike. I'm not whining about paying good money to have good work done, I'm aggrieved about the fact that the work is being driven by a flawed system that purports to safety but doesn't really work. I'm not against an MOT system, and I too want all vehicles to be safe but checking them once a year clearly doesn't cut it, does it.

The MOT lacks credibility. You'd need to do it every month or have regular spot checks (like weigh-stations for lorries) on roads up and down the country to really begin to say that you're on top of the safety aspect. How many bikers do you know who put things on and take things off their bike specifically to get it through the MOT and then reverse it all 10 minutes later? You don't think that makes it a bit of a joke? As I said, the MOT also doesn't guarantee any kind of safety as the interval is so long before the next test that anything could happen.

I said to the guy that if I bought the bike back in an hour, with that little light fixed, would he just sign it off? He of course said no, quite rightly so, he shouldn't risk his MOT cert and anything could happen even if I only live half a mile from the test station. So fair play to him I say. But if his point is that the integrity of the MOT could be compromised in that hour, (i.e. all the things he's already checked, could theoretically fail drastically and thus be dangerous), then why is it alright to then leave it a YEAR after he's re-checked it?

That's all I'm saying.

01-05-09, 08:47 PM	#9
Feldspar Guest Posts: n/a	Re: British Bureaucracy, the MOT and my Pilot Light's gone out... 'ere we go... I do know one end of a spanner from t'other and used to do ground-up restoration for show-winning classic cars. However I don't have a fully equiped garage at my disposal anymore and I don't have any of the specialist tools. I don't actually have a great deal of money at all, hence why I'm driving a beat up 10 year 20,000 mile SV. I service the bike myself and will do simple stuff but outside of that it's impossible. Also, working on bikes ain't like working on cars, as with cars there's a greater safety net if you get something wrong whereas with bikes it more easily could be fatal so I'd rather have a Suzuki-approved garage work on the bike. I'm not whining about paying good money to have good work done, I'm aggrieved about the fact that the work is being driven by a flawed system that purports to safety but doesn't really work. I'm not against an MOT system, and I too want all vehicles to be safe but checking them once a year clearly doesn't cut it, does it. The MOT lacks credibility. You'd need to do it every month or have regular spot checks (like weigh-stations for lorries) on roads up and down the country to really begin to say that you're on top of the safety aspect. How many bikers do you know who put things on and take things off their bike specifically to get it through the MOT and then reverse it all 10 minutes later? You don't think that makes it a bit of a joke? As I said, the MOT also doesn't guarantee any kind of safety as the interval is so long before the next test that anything could happen. I said to the guy that if I bought the bike back in an hour, with that little light fixed, would he just sign it off? He of course said no, quite rightly so, he shouldn't risk his MOT cert and anything could happen even if I only live half a mile from the test station. So fair play to him I say. But if his point is that the integrity of the MOT could be compromised in that hour, (i.e. all the things he's already checked, could theoretically fail drastically and thus be dangerous), then why is it alright to then leave it a YEAR after he's re-checked it? That's all I'm saying.