WOF choke point looms
About half the country’s car owners could end up trying to get their cars warranted all at once each and every October if the New Zealand Transport Agency doesn’t rethink a coronavirus rule change, the Motor Trade Association has warned.
The transport agency is giving people extra time to get their warrants of fitness (WOFS), because of the pandemic. Car owners whose WOFS expired after January 1 this year might be given until October 10 to get that done, the agency has advised on its website.
Motor Trade Association strategy manager Grieg Epps said such a long extension would cause problems for service stations, which are used to performing a steady stream of about 500,000 WOFS every month.
If all car owners whose WOFS were due after April 1 left the checks until October, that could mean about half of the 6 million WOF checks conducted each year would need to be done in early spring.
Currently, about 41 per cent of vehicles fail their WOF at their annual check, he said.
Some service stations derive twothirds of their work from WOF checks and subsequent repairs, so a lumpy workload would not be manageable, he feared.
Epps said that if the delayed WOF certificates were issued for a full year, the problem could then repeat itself every year thereafter, with no WOFS expiring in and after April 2021 until another flood the following October.
The transport agency had set up a project team to look at the issue, he said. But the industry and motorists would need clarity sooner rather than later, as the flow of work was already becoming distorted, he said.
‘‘We are worried we have gone into level three and more people are thinking about getting their WOFS done now. As well as the industry needing to know what is going on, we need to tell drivers.’’
WOF checks can be carried out at level three, if social distancing rules are observed.
But unless the expiry-date issue was addressed, motorists would not be encouraged to come in, he said.
‘‘We are already getting people telling us they had heard an announcement that everything was ‘OK until October’ so they are not going to come in until then.’’
Transport Agency spokesman Andy Knackstedt said October 10 was the ‘‘maximum’’ grace period and the date had been named to ensure the agency had enough time to make decisions without going back to the Cabinet.
‘‘This was particularly important given the high level of uncertainty at the time on how long disruption caused by Covid-19 would last,’’ he said.
The Transport Agency was conscious of the impact of extensions on the industry and that was a key consideration in determining new expiry dates, he said.