MoT every two years?

The idea has been tossed around Government offices for a while, but a report is due soon and the Retail Motor Industry Association is worried. The suggestion, a surprising one from a government keen to extract every last pound from motorists, is that a car should have its first MoT at four years old and be re-tested every two years after that, instead of at three years and every year thereafter. That's how it is done in some European countries, and tidy-minded bureaucrats think it would be good if it was the same here. All of which sounds like good news for car owners, but the truth is a little different. With modern cars as reliable as they mainly are, it could mean that many cars would see a garage mechanic only once in two years because the incentive to have the annual service performed, at MoT time, would be lost. So all kinds of faults, some safety-related such as worn brakes, would go undetected. It would also mean that with about half as many MoTs to perform, some garages would no longer find the MoT business viable and would cease to be testing stations. And the many that rely on MoTs for a hefty slice of their turnover might go out of business altogether. That would be bad news for the garages and bad news for the customers, who might lose the little local garages they have come to know and trust. 'Much of the MoT test sector could disappear within a year if the Government extends MoT test intervals,' says Stephen Coles, Head of MoT Operations for the RMIF. 'With less custom coming through their doors, we will see thousands of MoT testing stations forced to shut down, and many thousands of qualified testers made redundant, perhaps half of all the testers in the UK.'