Preparing for your HGV MOT: the week before

Presentation is a condition of the test, not a courtesy

An examiner cannot inspect what he cannot see. A chassis carrying a winter’s worth of road film, an axle assembly packed with mud, brake components hidden under grease — that is not a tidy vehicle waiting to be assessed, it is a vehicle that may not be examined at all. A refusal on presentation grounds is the most expensive result available: you have paid for the slot, occupied the lane, and learned nothing about the vehicle.

Jet or steam wash the underside as well as the bodywork, and pay attention to the places somebody has to put a lamp on — around the axles, the suspension mountings, the brake chambers, the identification plate and the chassis number. Do it early enough in the week that the vehicle is dry and you can walk it properly afterwards.

Present it at a weight the brakes can be measured at

Braking performance is measured on rollers, and a measurement taken on a vehicle or trailer carrying nothing does not tell anybody very much. There are requirements about the weight a vehicle should be presented at for the brake test to give a usable result, and they depend on the vehicle, the trailer and the method being used. Those requirements are DVSA’s rather than ours and they are not something to guess at — tell us what you are bringing when you book and we will tell you what to arrive with.

If loading is awkward, we can load trailers here for a charge added to the test. For most operators that is cheaper and considerably less trouble than sourcing ballast, securing it properly and hauling it across the county — and it removes the risk of arriving with a load that turns out not to be suitable.

Weight carried purely as ballast is still a load, and it will be looked at as one. Restrain it as you would restrain anything you were paid to move.

Paperwork, plates and identification

The test has to be recorded against the right asset, so the asset has to be identifiable. Check that the chassis or trailer identification number is present and readable rather than lost under paint, filler or corrosion, that the plate is still on the vehicle and legible, and that what you are bringing matches what you booked. A trailer needs its own identity for exactly this reason — it is tested in its own right, not as part of the unit.

Gather the rest the week before rather than the morning of: your booking confirmation, the previous certificate, any DVSA correspondence about the vehicle, and the details of anything fitted that an examiner will want to see recorded. If something does not match — a replacement plate, a repaired chassis rail, a trailer that has changed identity — ring us before you set off. Most of it is solvable in advance and none of it on the lane.

A pre-test inspection, far enough ahead to act on it

The value of a pre-test inspection is not in the inspection. It is in the gap between the inspection and the test date. A list produced the afternoon before is a list of things you are about to fail on, which is information you could have had for nothing by turning up.

Leave enough of a gap to get a part. Lamps, susies, brake chambers, air bags and adjusters are ordinary stock; a particular ABS module, a suspension component for an older trailer or anything on a vehicle whose manufacturer has moved on may not be sitting on a shelf anywhere near you. The awkward parts are exactly the ones a pre-test inspection is worth having for.

When we do the inspection, the fitters who would carry out the repair are the ones doing the looking, and the workshop is in the same building as the lane. We are an authorised service centre for WABCO, Knorr-Bremse and SAF and we handle Haldex ABS and EBS, so the braking and axle faults most likely to stop a test do not have to go anywhere else to be put right.

The rejections that waste a slot

Almost every wasted slot we see falls into a short list. A vehicle too dirty to be examined. Identification that cannot be read, or that does not match the booking. A vehicle or trailer presented at a weight that will not produce a meaningful brake measurement. A defect so obvious on arrival that the vehicle should not have been driven in. A tail lift, cab tilt or engine cover that will not operate, so part of the vehicle simply cannot be reached. Ballast carried loose.

And arriving late. A lane runs to a timetable and the examiner’s day is booked out; a slot missed is a slot gone, and the next one is not necessarily this week. Build the journey around traffic rather than hoping.

None of that is about mechanical condition. The vehicle can be in fine order and still lose the day.

What the week actually looks like

Early in the week: wash it, inside and underneath, then walk it while it is clean. Get the pre-test inspection done with time to order what it finds. Check identification, gather the paperwork and confirm what weight to present at. Then fix what you found, and leave yourself slack at the end so a late part does not become a cancelled test.

If you are not sure what your vehicle or trailer needs to arrive with, ring 01527 870400 and tell us what you are bringing. We would far rather sort it out on the phone than on the lane.