A Tale of Four Garages (plus 1 motorhome, 2 very frustrated owners and too much government intervention).
With apologies to Shakespeare and those of you who have already been on the receiving end of this tale….
So, it was time to get Horatio through his MOT and to throw in a service, in an attempt to stop unforeseen bits falling off in Europe. We called Garage 1 – a local establishment which had done a spot of work on him 6 months before. However, the government, in the shape of VOSA, had intervened and following an inspection informed Garage 1 that their inspection pit was one inch (yes one inch) too shallow. I would like to say unbelievable, but in the light of many recent bonkers “health and safety” rulings we were not that surprised.
They duly recommended Garage 2 – another local business, so we rang them to book a date. We had to wait another week, so that the test was now on the day that the existing MOT expired. (Yes, we had left things a bit late). On MOT day I drove B over to the barn when Horatio resides and left him to drive to Garage 2 while I went to work. B was to call his work sidekick was to pick him up and take him to work. Good plan – we thought.
Half an hour after arriving at work I looked up to see Horatio in the car park. Mmm. It turned out B had left his backpack, complete with phone, in my car and only realised when he was nearly at Garage 2. Oops. Then he had to go home to collect the keys to the property where they were going to work. (Keys are another whole subject, not to be discussed here). Given where we live that’s not an easy ask, but B was not to be deterred by narrow lanes and parked cars so tried to drive Horatio up to our house. Personally, I would have chickened out and left him parked on the main road. Turned out that B should have too, as an entire walking club had just arrived for their pre-lunch hike and there were cars everywhere!
After sweating a lot, just managing to turn it round and narrowly missing our pub landlords car (never saw it guv!), B finally headed off for Garage 2, only to find that access to that was only marginally better than our lane. He dropped off Horatio with instructions for a good check over in addition to the MOT.
An hour or so later the phone rang.
We can’t MOT this!
Err, why not?
Well there’s a ramp for a scooter in the garage
Yes…..
You put a scooter in there
Yes! (not rocket science and anyway why are they in the garage, surely thats not part of an MOT?)
What weight is the vehicle?
3.2 tons unladen, 4 tons plated weight
So that’s over 3.5 tons and you have a ramp so we can’t do Class 4 MOT on it
Why?
At this point, I will try to summarise as otherwise readers may lose the will to live. We nearly did. Apparently there is a ruling designed to stop owners of commercial vehicles customising them and re-classifying them as motorhomes. This is apparently particularly prevalent amongst motocross riders who therefore have ramps and workshops in their vehicles garages. No amount of persuasion could convince the garage MOT officer (recently re-trained – more government intervention) that we were no way using the vehicle commercially and could have a Private Heavy Goods – Class 4 – MOT. He promised me a copy of the relevant Department of Transport paragraph to prove the point.
We can take out the ramp, MOT it and write an advisory not to put it back, they said! Not exactly helpful, we said, and got on the phone to the dealer who had sold us the motorhome, with MOT the year before.
Similarly bemused, they recommended Garage 3 – in Poole. I rang them and they said that they actually farm out the MOT testing itself to Garage 4. I explained our difficulties to someone called Steve and he was also surprised and immediately called Garage 4. The story came back that it is a grey area but that in our case they could not see the problem and yes they could do it. Phew!
We booked him in, then went to retrieve Horatio from the clutches of Garage 2, who immediately asked where we were going to get the MOT done so they could report them! I managed to stay polite, just. They also handed over a copy of the offending DoT paragraph. I read it. It made perfect sense to me that our vehicle qualified for the Class 4 Private Heavy Goods MOT. I told them so but they refused to agree with me. After 20 minutes of fruitless and frustrating discussion I paid for the service work and left, wishing I had suggested that their next training course was one in the English language.
The following week B took Horatio to Garage 3. In theory, Garage 2 had done everything we needed for the MOT so he was going to wait while they sent it to Garage 4 for the test. Horatio promptly failed the test on something not flagged by Garage 2. Garage 3 did not have enough time to fix the issues that day so B had to get a taxi and train home. Aaaagh.
Following a 2 day business trip which gave us time to lower our blood pressures, we went back to Poole to collect Horatio, with his new MOT. We arrived to be told that another motorhome client had managed to drive into our rear bumper, which was now damaged, as was the adjacent light cluster! We could not leave him there for the repair as we were booked for our “shakedown” weekend the following day. So there was no option but to bring him back to Poole the following week for repairs. As I was away, this involved another train and taxi journey for B. Not the best value MOT we could have had…. or was it?….
The good news was that B had previously damaged exactly the same area of the bumper and done a temporary fix after being told by a friend that a new bumper would cost the best part of £3000. So he was absolutely chuffed that we were now getting a proper job done at someone else’s expense – As We Like It! (more apologies).
Serendipity.