Our car failed its annual road worthy inspection. It wasn’t a surprise as the exhaust has been extremely loud over recent weeks and there was no way it would pass like that. We’d expected it to fail last year and it passed, so we were prepared for it to fail this year.
The ITV test – which is the equivalent of the MOT – is very different here and with an extremely old car, one we very much appreciate.
The test is completely objective – it’s a drive through test at official centres, with different tests done as you drive through. At the end you either pass – or it fails they give you a list of things that need attention before retaking. You have so many weeks to get the repairs done and then the items if failed on are retested and (hopefully) the car passes for another year. There isn’t a charge for the retake.
The good thing about this is that if you fail the test you get a list of what needs doing without needing to ‘guess’ at what may or may not pass before going in. And there’s no need to go to a garage for a checkup before the test. Saying that, I think if a car fails because it is dangerous ie didn’t have any breaks, it would not be allowed back on the road until fixed.
So Ian took the car to the centre and it failed as we expected, and we now have a shopping list of repairs. The car is in the garage now where they will do some of the repairs, others Ian will do to save money.
We’ve been in this situation before and it always prompts the question of is it worth paying $$ to keep the car on the road – but we keep coming back to the fact that it runs and is reliable for what we want. We could end up buying another car which has more serious problems. It’s rare that we travel further than Burela (6km) or San Cibrao (3km), perhaps if we did longer journeys it would be a different matter.