Tread a mile in your shoes?

In an appropriate conclusion considering the number of wheels on most cars, Gareth Banks brings his four-part look at tyres to a close with their relation to the MOT

Published: 02 June, 2020

We have arrived at the fourth final part on the subject of tyres. This month, the focus is on the MOT, regarding tyres and tread depths. I’m hoping the manual hasn’t changed by the time this is published, (the MOT manual is, after all, changing all the time). As I write this, it states that the legal limit for a passenger car with no more than eight seats excluding the drivers seat used on or after 3 January 1933 is 1.6mm around the whole circumference of the tyre across the central three-quarters of the tread area.

Therefore, if a car was to come to me for a MOT with one or more of its tyres measuring 1.6mm, I would be forced to pass the car with just advisories on the tyres in question. This is a shame as you wouldn’t want to send a car out of your depot with a tyre on the legal limit and 100% worn, would you? The owner could quite easily travel 100 miles or so in the next few hours and their tyres may very well be then deemed illegal If stopped by the police.

“But officer! My car passed its MOT earlier today" may well be their perfidious reply. I suppose all that matters is how the car was presented at the time of test. From a tester’s point of view though, you cannot try and pre-empt what may or may not happen after the test. The car maybe stored in a garage for months at a time for all we know. It may only do 200 miles a year. Regardless of what we think may happen, by following the guidelines and rules set out in the manual you can’t go wrong. As long as the customer in question is made fully aware of the situation and you’ve made the best judgement call you can, then you have done your part and can you sleep at night.

Measurements
Here are some measurements to get your head around regarding tread wear: 8mm-0% worn; 7mm-16% worn; 6mm-31% worn; 5mm-47% worn; 4mm-63% worn; 3mm- 78% worn; 2mm-94% worn. Obviously 1.6mm would be 100% worn. However, as I mentioned, it still passes an MOT as an advisory. A tyre on 2mm also passes but certainly with advisory notice. Me, I give an advisory notice for a 3mm tyre. To me when something is 78% worn, it’s almost had it. If you were to wear a pair of shoes that were 78% worn, I would think that somewhere along the line someone may advise you to replace them too, as they’d look pretty shabby.

The garage I work in receives tyre bookings all the time from cars that have been for an MOT elsewhere, a lot of the time, at a main dealer. For some reason they have advised tyres on 4-5mm tread readings. I’m not sure why, as a 4mm tyre still has some life left in it, and a 5mm tyre certainly shouldn’t be classed as worn. Maybe the testers are overzealous. They should take their tread depth gauge and make sure its calibrated. There was me thinking I was being cautious advising on 3mm! I like to think I’m firm but fair when it comes to testing. I’d like to think others are too. Lastly, don’t forget, the next time you’re out walking in bad conditions and keep falling over, check the tread depth on your shoes, it maybe time to replace them.

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To save money and raise efficiency, the DVSA has turned to automation. They no longer need an army of Vehicle Examiners wandering from MOT bay to MOT bay. Instead they are collecting data all the time.

Let’s say I am the boss and my business is low on revenue. I beat up the manager and he in turn influences the tester to fail everything coming through the door. The customer is now stuck with no MOT and I have some simple high yield repairs.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The DVSA computer is monitoring individual tester behaviour and looking at averages. The pattern is really easy for a computer at the DVSA to see because it’s just not possible that lots of cars fail on the same items every day. The DVSA’s fix is to target garages where data shows they are hunting for work and send in a VE to crosscheck. He needs only to wait nearby until our tester issues his favourite fails and then arrive to retest the car.

We all, as testers, now have access to our TQI. Lots of testers that I speak to have the sentiment that this data is all rubbish but, here is the rub. The DVSA have a team of very capable data processors looking at this data and writing algorithms that alert them to trends that need investigation.

Take my example of one of my longest-serving testers and allow the DVSA computer to tell me every car that he has tested in the last two weeks of November for the last seven years and add in that we only want to know about cars tested after 4:30pm. We find only one car; a Y reg (2001) BMW 320i convertible, always tested after 5pm with a longest test time of thirty-two minutes and shortest of twenty-seven. Guess what, it’s my guy’s brother-in-law’s car!

For me the horror is that the car has never failed an MOT. It’s also never been in the workshop for any repairs. It looks absolutely dogged out and is on around 180,000 miles. Worst still my guy has never once even advised anything on this car. The VE would assume Barry’s guy is prepared to let things slide at the end of the day, so maybe he plans to visit me after 5pm on a Thursday.

Conflicting vehicle locations
This is a fun story from a close and trusted friend. My guy is at a DVSA IVA check and overhears a conversation by a couple of Vehicle Examiners. It goes like this; VE no.1 is suspicious of an MOT bay offering fraudulent MOT tests. He parks down the road from an MOT bay in Kent and checks which vehicle is logged on and being tested. He takes the registration number of the vehicle in question and calls the DVLA, identifies himself and asks if the vehicle has been seen on the DVLA camera system anywhere in the last half hour. The car was last seen on the M25 twelve minutes ago near Watford in Hertfordshire over 70 miles away.

So, our VE is in Kent and the car is in Hertfordshire. If this works today in a manual sense how long will it be before computers can do this to every single test? Talk about an easy way to stop fraudulent MOTs, just using computers that the government already own.