Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

There was a few useful tips in the most recent email from MoneySavingExpert to help you save money when getting the MOT done on your car.

The first, an obvious one, is to make sure that you look after your car and keep it well maintained. This clearly isn’t for everyone, as we’re not all petrolheads, able to strip down and rebuild our cars in an evening, but apparently 20% of cars fail their MOTs because of a dead bulb, so even being able to do a very basic task such as changing the bulbs can help your car sail through its MOT at the first attempt and avoid costly repairs.

The second more interesting tip was to look for a council run MOT test centre, and book your car in for its MOT there. There are a number of these centres around the country (there’s a list of them on the MoneySavingExpert website), and they are predominantly used for testing council vehicles, but they must also test the general publics’ cars too.

But why should you use a council test centre? Well, they don’t do repairs, so, whereas your local garage might be more likely to fail your car in the hope that you’ll then use them to do the repairs, the council MOT centres don’t have that incentive, so although there’s no stats, the pass rate from them should be higher.

Of course, taking your car to a council MOT centre doesn’t mean they’ll pass your old banger with bald tyres and a cracked windscreen, but on borderline cases you might stand more of a chance of getting it through. However, if they do fail the car, and it needs repairs, you’ll then have the annoyance of getting it moved, repaired and then retested somewhere else – it won’t get fixed there and then.

If you’re really daring (or desperate) you could try the trick my Grandad allegedly used to try – “accidently” leaving a bottle of Scotch on the passenger seat as an “incentive” for the mechanic should the car pass.

photo credit: andrewasmith