Why now is the time to have your say on MoT testing

THERE is less than a week left to have your say about proposed laws which could spell the end of the MoT if - like me - you've got a car made before 1988.

Over a pint last night I spent a good twenty minutes trying to explain the implications of the European Roadworthiness Directive to my tame mechanics, who for the crime of being classic car specialists get the dubious honour of rescuing both my MGB and my MX-5 from their various mechanical maladies. It left me a bit worried - if two classic car mechanics aren't quite up to scratch with what the British Government are currently consulting over, what chance do the rest of us petrolheads have?

Unpeel the proposals from the EU bumph however, and it's fairly simple; in the plainest Northern English possible, the British Government has agreed to implement some form of MoT exemption for cars over 30 years old, as long as - and here's the tricky bit - they haven't had "substantial changes".

As it's a directive from Brussells rather than a fully-fledged law, however, it's entirely up to the boffins at Whitehall to work out exactly what substantial change is, which is why the Department for Transport is currently carrying out a consultation on the issue (albeit one that's not exactly been massively publicised).

It is a hugely divisive issue in the classic car world. I've always been of the opinion that ALL cars should have to go through an MOT (and I was definitely against pre-1960 cars being given MoT exemption) but I know plenty of people who reckon it's a good idea to exempt 30-year-old cars too, plenty of people who'd like classic cars to be tested every two years instead, and plenty of people who just want the European Union to get off our back and let us deal with our own motoring matters ourselves.

Whatever happens though, the important thing is to go on the consultation and get your thoughts across sooner rather than later - the consultation ends next Friday (24 October), so time's of the essence.

Hopefully, someone in Westminster or Whitehall will take note.

Road resurfacing is an annoying but effective way to slow drivers down

IT WAS the ping-ping of my Mazda’s paintwork being repeatedly bombarded which made me realise it. Sefton’s powers-that-be have inadvertently won the war on speed!

I can’t have been the only motorist left last week in the peculiar position of struggling to keep within a 20mph speed limit but unwilling to venture above the pace of any half-decent cyclist on the Formby Bypass. A strategy of having every major road resurfaced almost simultaneously turned seeing friends and family into a game of rat-running roadworks and crawling along temporary surfaces, listening to the crackle of my MX-5’s surfaces being chinked and chipped away by the stones being chucked up.

It is, of course, better than the alternative – a North West criss-crossed with roads so badly potholed they’re suitable only for the Lunar Rovers last deployed on NASA’s Moon missions. However, I still pondered which clot had signed off resurfacing the Coastal Road in Ainsdale, stretches of the Formby Bypass, Altcar Road in Formby, and several of Southport’s more important thoroughfares almost simultaneously. Surely redoing ALL of them wasn’t a particularly bright idea?

Then it hit me. The combined threat of destroying the paintwork on your pride and joy and skidding to a fiery death if you drove one of these resurfaced roads at speed had succeeded in reducing the average pace – even on a dual carriageway – to the sort of speeds I normally do on my mountain bike. The roadworks have succeeded where that favourite strategy of the Speed Kills lobby – 20mph speed limits – failed.

Not convinced? Well, nationwide research by the Institute of Advanced Motorists into the effects of dropping 30mph limits by a third showed that the number of accidents actually went up by over a quarter, with less severe accidents increasing by 17%. Logically, you’d reason that the nation’s go-faster drivers are utterly unmoved by a lower speed limit, but I bet they’d think twice about ruining the optional metallic paint on their Audi A4s.

I’m sure I can’t be the only person a bit peeved with the policy of redoing roads with noisy, slow, paint-removing substances en-masse, but you can’t deny it got even the most ardent of speed freaks to back off for a change.

The conclusion’s a simple one. A rubbish road is a safe one.

Meanwhile in Russia sets a dangerous UK precedent

HOPE you’ve enjoyed a pleasant week’s motoring, bereft of bumps and scratches. Meanwhile, in Russia, footage of a fishtailing Lada has been uploaded to YouTube for your evening entertainment.

You can’t have failed to notice the sheer quantity of clips being uploaded to YouTube of Russians crashing things, badly filmed by dashcams of family saloons slogging their way through a snowdrift somewhere in Siberia. This compelling concoction of spins, rolls and crashes – think of it as sort of You’ve Been Framed meets Police Camera Action, with added Moscowprofanity – has proven so popular that petrolheads over here now happily use #meanwhileinrussia as a hashtag on Twitter.

If you don’t know what a hashtag is, get your children to fire up YouTube and enjoy someone else’s motoring misfortune to while away a few idle minutes. It is weirdly compelling for the same reason that you’ll always slow down on the motorway to gawp at a car crash.

Yet what worries me isn’t these clips’ weirdly addictive edge. It’s that the things which make them possible – those crude, dashboard-mounted cameras – are becoming increasingly fashionable over here too.

Already I know of one court case which involved a lorry driver whose dashboard camera proved an unfortunate meeting between his cab and motorcyclist wasn’t his fault. As a result of this and the increasing appetite for the insurance companies to have our every movement monitored – black boxes, anyone – dashboard camera sales are booming in the UK. You might even get one under the tree this Christmas.

While the idea behind them has an appeal – film your drive to work, so you can prove it was the prat in the Audi A3 who drove into your front bumper at 40mph – I can’t help but wonder if we’re unintentionally creating Channel Four’s next comedy series for them, free of charge.

At the moment at least, there’s precious little to prevent these clips escaping into cyberspace, where spotty teenagers will be able to compile them into amusing ten minute videos, which will amuse office workers in Moscow endlessly. The clips will be just as morbidly compelling, but with fewer errant Ladas involved. Being involved in a crash, for whatever reason, is frightening enough, but knowing it’ll sit on YouTube for the rest of eternity or be forever repeated on Britain’s Best Car Crashes is something else altogether.

Meanwhile in Russia, for now, has a certain crude ring to it, but Meanwhile in Formby is a scarier prospect altogether.

Top safety ratings for four new cars

FOUR new arrivals at showrooms across the north west have all been given a coveted European safety rating.

Crash test experts at the Euro NCAP programme have confirmed the new Jeep Cherokee, Mercedes-Benz CLA, Suzuki SX-4 and Peugeot 2008 have all been awarded its highest rating of five stars – good news for anyone thinking of buying one.

To find out how your car performed in the tests go to to the Euro NCAP website.

Qoros leads the way for safer Chinese cars

A GROUP of European safety experts have awarded their highest accolade to a Chinese-built car for the first time.

These days a five star rating from Euro NCAP is a big selling point on new cars, so Qoros will be delighted that its latest saloon, the 3, passed the safety tests with flying colours. Euro NCAP also gave Kia its latest five-star rating, after the Carens people carrier impressed the testers.

If you want to know how your car performed go to www.euroncap.com

VW's electronic nannying makes me want to rage against the machine

IT’S a debate that 21st century philosophers ought to be debating. Is it right to reprimanded by your car?

I was thinking this last weekend, when – having successfully navigated 65 miles across two different counties – the electronic brain of the Volkswagen Polo I’d borrowed decided to give me some help with parking. Help, incidentally, that I hadn’t asked it for.

“LOOK!” the digital readout on the dashboard screamed. “SAFE TO MOVE?”

The Polo might have gained a bit of girth over its 40 year career, admittedly, but it’s still what I’d call a small car. Even Maureen from Driving School could master it. Yet the Polo’s electronic brain, in its better wisdom, decided it needed to remind me anyway that I need to look before I back into a parking space.

It gets worse. Germany’s supermini of choice also decided that the last thing I needed while backing up a small hatchback was music distracting me from the job in hand, so it automatically turned the radio down and steadfastly refused to let me turn back up again.

Katy Perry’s roar, it insisted, would be a distant hum for the duration of the parking. Drivers with tasks as dangerous as a bay park deserve not the dulcet tones of Russell Brand’s ex-wife!

I got out of the Polo a bit peeved, wondering whether I’d somehow annoyed it earlier on with a fluffed gearchange or a cheeky overtake, and it’d decided I was an idiot and therefore needed all the help I could get. Despite it being a sturdily-built, family-friendly package that’s blessed with tidy handling and restrained good looks, my overall verdict on the Polo is that it’s never good for a car to be patronising.

True, drivers too stupid to put on their seatbelts deserve the book – and some safety beeps bonging out of the dashboard – thrown at them, and even I’ll grudgingly admit the high pitched whine almost every modern motor makes when you forget to turn the lights off has saved me the occasional flat battery. When I’m driving, however, I’m the boss and I’ll reverse however I choose to. If I prang an L-reg Fiesta in the process – and, in five years of driving, I’ve never yet come close – then that’s my lookout.

I suspect that, hundreds of miles away, in a bunker in deepest Wolfsburg, some VW engineers decided to instil the Polo with its annoying Nanny State tendencies in a bid to avoid Polo owners going to Claims Direct in about ten years’ time because they’ve reversed into pedestrians. Maybe it’ll become compulsory in the distant future, and for someone who takes pride in how they drive, that worries me.

Given the choice between cars which constantly tell you what to do, and Katy Perry, I know which I’d pick.

The sun sets on another summer of motoring fun

COULDN'T resist sharing this shot of the MX-5 bathed in evening sunlight, which I took by the beach at Southport a couple of days ago.

With the nights drawing in, the air getting chillier and the wet British summer set to turn into an even wetter British winter, it's probably one of the last times I'll be able to snap a nice, summer-esque photo of the bargain ragtop. From Sunday onwards, driving around after about five-ish is firmly a night time, lights on affair.

All of which neatly brings me to one charity's calls for us all to stop becoming accident statistics at this time of year.

Road safety charity Brake have said they're keen to help combat the annual trend of road accident numbers rising during the winter months by urging drivers to take extra caution when behind the wheel due to the lack of daylight during evening commuting.

Ellen Booth, the charity's senior campaigns officer, said: “We can all help to reduce terrible and needless road deaths and injuries in winter darkness, and drivers in particular can make big a difference by committing to slow down.

"Slowing down to 20mph in communities gives you time to stop quickly should you need to: particularly vital when visibility is low."

She also urged walkers, cyclists and joggers to help themselves avoid becoming part of the accident statistics, by wearing hi-vis clothing to help make it easier for motorists to see them.

Consider the advice noted. I might just go for one more roof-down blast before the clocks go back...

Mr Honda Concerto ought to agree with my take on rural speed

THE Honda's rear haunches have never looked so frustrating. Even though it was the crack of dawn on a dry weekend morning, Mr Concerto was dawdling.

Bikers among this column's readers will already know why the Cat and Fiddle road, between Macclesfield and Buxton, is worth seeking out - and why it's such a regular visitor to all those accident statistic surveys as a result. It is, carefully driven, a stunning route across the Pennines well worth seeking out. If you've brought a car - and not a superbike - the 50mph speed limit is plenty, but Mr Concerto was having none of it. He was determined I'd be doing 28mph, and not one measly mile an hour more. A great drive ruined by someone dangerously determined not to be overtaken.

Anyway, it was all part of my quest to answer a question I left hanging a couple of weeks back - is it better to head somewhere the fun way or the quick one? The answer, unless you're absolutely insistent that every journey must go via the Buttertubs Pass in the Yorkshire Dales, is emphatically the quick one. On a really long drive motorways are infinitely preferable to getting lost in Mansfield's one way system.

Besides, little country lanes are going to get slower still if the Coalition gets its way; successive governments have struggled to deal with rural accident rates, and now Cameron and Clegg (which, by the way, sounds like a dodgy estate agent) have hit on a solution. Rather than a blanket reduction, they're considering making it easier for local authorities to lower limits as they choose. It is The Big Society versus speed.

For what it's worth, I reckon it's a good idea - there are far too many winding lanes which you could technically shoot down at sixty, but to try would be lethally dangerous, and chances are your local council knows more about accident hotspots than Whitehall does. Great power, however, comes with great responsibility.

If I head to somewhere like Lincolnshire or Yorkshire behind the wheel of something sporty, it'd comfort me greatly to know that the speed limit's been considered locally by folk who know the roads. What I emphatically wouldn't want - and what a lot of the nationals reported last weekend - is a blanket lowering of rural limits to 40mph from the current sixty.

I'm not a speed freak - a proper petrolhead values good handling over doing a million miles an hour anyway - but what I reckon motorists want is education rather than punishment. We want to know people are actually thinking about road safety rather than just blindly and blanketly laying down the law.

Hopefully, Mr Concerto agrees with me.

I couldn't agree more with traffic calming, but are speed bumps really the answer?

I KNOW it's a victory for safety but it's a crashing defeat for my suspension and - by proxy - my spine. The council has ruined one of my favourite roads.

If, like me, you ever travel between Churchtown and Crossens you'll know what I'm on about. Where once there was smooth tarmac there are now rows of humps, right the way between these two charming parts of Southport, and they haven't succeeded in slowing me down. They've made me stop using it altogether.

“A-ha!” I can hear the council's road safety boffins retort in response, Alan Partridge style. Where once souped-up Saxos and Corsas screamed along this stretch of road they're now having to brake before each and every bump; that or face the prospect of either breaking their backs or damaging their shock absorbers. I'm sure, in a year's time, the stats will show the council's mission of reducing the speeds along Bankfield Lane and Rufford Road will have been easily accomplished.

Don't think for a moment that I'm demanding the right to drive down it like a man who's late for the birth of his first child - I couldn't agree more with the need to slow people down along some roads (and everybody's got at least one in mind). There are, for instance, far too many single track roads I know which you can legally do 60mph on, but to even attempt it would be insane. 30mph too fast for Bankfield Lane? Yep, at quite a few times of day I'd go along with that.


Bankfield Lane is one of my favourite roads for a very simple reason - more often that not, it connects where I live with where I want to go. I know that plenty of motorists took the mickey a bit with it, and on some tragic occasions with fatal results. As a motorist I loved it, but as a Crossens chap I couldn't agree more something needed to be done to slow people down.

But did it really need an endless series of enormous speed humps to cure the problem? Couldn't chicanes have done the trick? Or lowering the speed limit? Or even - and I know this is dangerously avantgarde thinking - road safety cameras? I have a particular hatred reserved for speed bumps because while they slow down the dangerous minority (who'll only find a different road to strut their stuff on anyway), it's the majority of motorists who have to pay the price of the additional wear and tear.

The irony is that it's those who live locally - the ones who called for traffic calming in the first place - who'll suffer the most.