MoT proposals slammed

Date: Monday, April 26, 2010

Suggestions that Class 7 light commercials ie those grossing at from 3.0 to 3.5 tonnes should be subjected to an annual MoT from their date of first registration have been rejected by Mercedes-Benz’s UK commercial vehicles managing director, Ian Jones. “We do not support this idea,” he states.

The move would help make 3.0 rather than 3.5 tonnes the industry’s new key commercial vehicle threshold. Jones believes this would be a retrograde step.

All the additional equipment fitted to vehicles these days increases their unladen weight, he points out. As a consequence operators struggle to achieve the sort of payload on a 3.5-tonner that they might have been able to achieve 20 years ago. Pushing them down to 3.0 tonnes by changing the testing regime would make their lives even more difficult.

Vehicles fitted with alternative fuel technology — hybrids, for instance — would suffer in particular because they tend to have an even-lower payload capacity than their conventionally-powered rivals. “So far as they are concerned we are lobbying to have the threshold raised from 3.5 to 3.9 or even 4.0 tonnes; not lowered,” he says.

Increasing the threshold before annual testing, O licensing and tachographs comes into force to nearer 4.0 tonnes would grant them more leeway so far as payload is concerned without catching them in a tighter regulatory net. That might help to offset their higher initial cost.

Calls to make annual testing from first registration mandatory at above 3.0 tonnes have come in the wake of figures from the Vehicle & Operator Services Agency (VOSA) that reveal worryingly high first-time MoT failure rates for Class 7 vehicles.

While advocated on the grounds of safety, such a move would also increase operating costs at a time when the economy is still in the doldrums. It might also encourage the introduction of some form of O licence at 3.0 tonnes too; an idea that has already been discussed in the European Parliament.

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