My Brother juts bought a car from a dealer and the car came with a new MOT..
I took the car for a service with the garage that has done all my cars and they found that the rear brake shoes were totally shot and one of the rear wheel needed a wheel bearing..
Surely those are things that would have been an MOT failure??
The only thing i can think of is that the dealer and the tester are mates so the tester just lets these things through..
Get straight on the phone to the dealer that sold him the car and ask what they intend to do about it.
WipeOut ( snipped-for-privacy@here.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Shoes would imply drum brakes, but it's not a huge difference - the MOT tester can not dismantle anything - so he can't look at the condition of the friction material. All he can test the brakes on is their efficiency.
As for the wheel bearing - was there play in it, or just noise? Again - no road test, so no way to pick up on noise. The wheel should have been wiggled and wobbled to try to pick up on play.
Again, if you think it's unfair - appeal. There is a "My car's passed and shouldn't have" procedure for exactly this.
IMHO, this is more serious than "It's failed and shouldn't have".
The message from WipeOut contains these words:
Yes.
Sadly, quite likely. The difficulty arises when you try to prove that the defects were apparent when the test was conducted. Brake shoe lining thickness is not tested unless there's an open window for the meat to be visible through. Which is rare. Even then I'm not sure if they do.
Wheel bearings may or may not fail an MOT - if they're noisy then there's often play, sufficient to fail. However, it's not /always/ the case, sometimes they're noisy with no appreciable play.
Talk to the dealer first and if that fails, Trading Standards. And best of luck.
Unless you can see the rear shoes or hear a grinding noise, then as long as they work they'll pass.
My Rover has passed the last two MOTs with a noisy wheelbearing.
wheel bearings can be noisy and still pass, the failure criteria is " Excessive roughness or tightness or excessive play indicating severe maladjustment or wear "
unfortunately as other posters have said, dismantling isn't allowed during an MOT test, ive had cars pass the brake test with no problems only later to find that the rear shoes had come un-bonded from their backing.
Thanks for the replies everyone..
I do plan to pull the dealer up on some other issues that he blatantly lied about but not too concerned about the MOT issue, that is unless he start to get funny then I will hit him with that as well..
Worryingly, a lot of pepole think a yearly mot is all they have to do to their car, then just fix things that go wrong through the year till the next mot.
The message from "jOn" contains these words:
Judging by the one I saw a few weeks ago in a car park that's not far off. It was a Ka with both front tyres bristling like hedgehogs with wires sticking out and back tyres smooth. From the plate and guessing from the tax disc it wasn't due an MOT for nearly two years.
Beautifully clean inside and out - gleaming - but bald as a coot.
How the hell did they wear out tyres on a Ka in a year? - especially the rears.
Something not quite right about that.
The message from snipped-for-privacy@italiancar.co.uk (SteveH) contains these words:
Dunno - probably doing loads of Kroozin-type things. There's one or two roads round here where the tarmac is all but invisible under a layer of rubber.
Yes - Maestros and Montegos were famous for having noisy front wheel bearings without any play, so therefore a pass.
MoT simply tests the worthiness of the car at the time of the test; hence boy racers borrowing tyres for the test and then putting back the knackered ones afterward. An MoT is no guarentee of a cars condition at all. If you want to check a cars condition then you need a orper inspection done ( which will not visibly chaeck the brake shoe condition either by the way. )
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