NZTA urged to issue ‘red cards’ on WOF failures
The motoring industry says the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) needs to behave like a proper referee and start handing out ‘‘red cards’’ to substandard warrant of fitness certifiers.
Motor Trade Association (MTA) chief executive Craig Pomare said it was appalling that Dargaville Diesel Specialists had continued issuing warrants despite longstanding agency concerns about its operations.
Even after a fatal January crash where a passenger died when a seat belt failed in a recently warranted car, it was late August before NZTA stopped the company doing WOF inspections.
‘‘For too long NZTA has been standing on the sidelines, they need to be out on the pitch handing out red cards,’’ said Pomare.
‘‘You can’t be a nice referee because you’re dealing with a safety issue. In this case they had been on NZTA’s radar since 2011 for not having done inspections properly, and they let them continue.’’
Pomare said the Dargaville testing service was not among MTA’s 3700 members, and although he did not think faulty warrants were a major issue, it was impossible to know.
MTA had talked to NZTA about improving its auditing procedures and in the last 12 months the association had put 1500 inspectors through a WOF training programme to ensure their skills were up to speed.
‘‘There are 6 million WOF inspections annually and you only need one that results in a loss of life – every day these inspectors are making life and death decisions about cars.’’
Pomare said that over the past six years national WOF failure rates had risen 3 per cent to 38 per cent.
Although that sounded like a small increase, it was equivalent to an additional 180,000 vehicles failing warrants. Lights were by far the most common reason for inspectors to refuse warrants, followed by tyres, then steering and suspension.
‘‘There are still a lot of cars that fail their WOF but don’t come back for a recheck, so they’re sitting in the fleet with those safety issues exposed.’’
In the Dargaville case, NZTA wrote to almost 2000 vehicle owners urging them to get their cars re-certified at its cost and with WOFs costing about $50 on average, the bill is likely to be substantial.
Of the 741 re-checked to date, 63 per cent failed their first reinspection, and in 58 cases faults were found in seatbelts.
Pomare said owners had a responsibility to properly maintain their vehicles because a warrant only reflected the state of the vehicle at the time it was done.