Stephen Flaherty
Over the last number of weeks, farmers across the country have condemned the plans to introduce a new compulsory NCT test on vehicles capable of travelling at or over 40 kilometres per hour. They say it would add a new major cost factor to consider, that would ultimately be borne by farmers. Any of us who regularly drive, or in fact rely, on our cars to get us around will surely empathise with anything that will result in a rise in costs.
When the postman delivers that letter or an email zooms into your inbox reminding you of that annoyingly annual (at least if your car is over ten years old) NCT test, it is always the bane of every driver’s life. Tax, insurance and petrol are already expensive costs associated with owning a car without the added expense of an NCT test, not to mention the costs of getting the car serviced prior to the test on top of that. So, the last thing you want is for the car to fail requiring you to fork out more money on a retest.
And going on figures published by the Road Safety Authority recently, around 50% of all cars booked in for testing in the last two years have come away from it with a fail. Given that the overall results haven’t changed much between 2015 and 2016, it would be easy to be sceptical and ask: Are testers looking to pass and fail an almost equal number of cars each year, regardless of road worthiness? But perhaps you’ve also wondered if living in certain areas of the country mean that you are more likely to receive a pass or a fail when it comes to getting your car tested. If we look at the data presented by the Road Safety Authority we can see some interesting points emerging.
A total of 1,465,702 cars were tested in Ireland in 2016, compared with 1,492,179 in 2015, an overall drop of 26,477 cars. Of these, 692,107 of those passed in 2016 compared with 762,937 failures, including 5,789 cars that were deemed to have dangerous faults. By contrast, the 2015 numbers are made up of 718,164 passes and 756,433 fails, inclusive of 5,432 dangerous fault failures. As the graphs above show, the numbers between both years are strikingly similar, and it would certainly add fuel to the fire started by those who are critical of the NCT service, and regularly condemn it. Is it purely coincidental that the numbers are this similar, or is the service simply a money-making racket, with test results already decided before a car has even entered the testing centre? If not, should we be worried that potentially 50% of the cars on our roads aren’t fully fit for purpose? While there is no concrete evidence to support these theories, there may be evidence that the location of your testing centre could play a part in determining whether you pass or fail your NCT.
2016
2015
Looking at the bar graphs above we can see that there is very little difference between the top ten testing centres for pass results in the country in 2016 when compared with the previous year. Of the top ten, only Little Island in Cork has dropped out of the top tier and been replaced by Carndonagh in 2016. The population the areas that these centres service would naturally be considered when trying to determine whether living in a particular area is of benefit; if there are more cars to test in an area, like in Deansgrange in Dublin for example, it could be argued that there is a greater chance of getting a higher proportion of cars being passed than an area with a smaller testing pool.
2016
2015
By contrast, we can see that there is some difference between the top ten testing centres for failures between the two years. Four centres: Letterkenny, Galway, Carlow and Mullingar, dropped off the top ten in 2016. However, Clifden and Monaghan remain at the top of the list for both years, signifying that perhaps those areas are not the best when it comes to car testing. If we take Clifden as an example, we see that it only had 4,517 cars tested in 2016 with over 60% of the cars failing the test. This could be potentially worrying, as it begs the question: why are cars in these areas testing negatively year on year? Or are there issues with the way in which tests are being conducted? More research would likely need to be carried out, considering data from more years before making a definitive claim, but it is something to think about.
2016
2015
One section of the data released by the RSA that would likely surprise the public, and perhaps provoke concern, is the number of vehicles being failed for dangerous faults. The number of cars that received this failure rose from 5,432 in 2015 to 5,789 in 2016. Enniscorthy featured in the top ten centres producing dangerous failure results in 2015 and went on to top the list in 2016, an even more worrying trend given that it is the only centre in the top ten in 2015 to feature again in 2016. The RSA deems any vehicle to receive the dangerous failure result as any vehicle with “a defect that constitutes a direct and immediate risk to road safety, and the vehicle should not be used on the road under any circumstances”. Such vehicles are also not allowed to be driven away from the test centre and must employ special transporting. It’s likely to be a frightening thought to the public that almost 6,000 cars are on the road each year that have series safety faults prior to being discovered at an NCT testing centre. So, the message should be loud and clear about getting a car regularly serviced to be safe and save money.
Overall, if we were to go off these results, we could conclude that living in certain areas of the country mean you are more likely to pass or fail. But in order to get a more definitive answer, more years would likely have to be looked at. The number of dangerous faults being recorded is also a cause for concern given that there was a rise between the two years, especially in areas such as Enniscorthy, where it appears to be consistently high.