A good while back, I worked in production management, firstly, in footwear manufacturing and later in the timber industry.
In those days, the New Zealand Institute of Management was where you did courses to qualify.
I was, and still am, a "gearhead" and things that rotated and made a loud noise were my main interest in life, but that fitted well with production management. For this reason, an anecdote from the course stuck in my mind when changes were recently mooted for vehicle inspection and licensing.
"A young American, in management for one of the large railway companies, was walking through the train yard when he heard a sharp tapping noise.
"Curious, he followed the sound to an elderly man going around the yard tapping the wheels of the rolling stock. The man said that he was a wheel-tapper and he was checking wheels for fatigue cracks. He explained that he’d done this for many years and that wheels made a different sound if they had cracks in them. Intrigued, the young man followed up about this aspect of safety inspection. He discovered that this practice originated in the days of cast iron railway wheels and that the advent of steel wheels and better testing technologies had long since made wheel-tapping obsolete."
The anecdote was given to us to illustrate that industrial practices can persist beyond the time when they have been made redundant by technological change.
I have a classic car project on the go, so I was naturally interested in the recent relaxation of warrant of fitness times, from six to 12 months, for a class of classic vehicles that do low mileages.
This brought that anecdote to mind and I wondered how we actually arrived at six months for older vehicles in the first place.
My motoring memory stretches back more than 60 years and my recall of the argument for six-monthly warrants for everything, at that time, was that we had an ageing vehicle fleet and that justified the caution.
The flaw in the argument was that time, not mileage, was the criterion used.
Compare this with the logic for the class of aircraft I pilot, where inspections are required at 100 hours or one year — whichever comes first. Time in service or newness didn’t count for cars. It was a one-size-fits-all approach.
But things have changed; new vehicles have longer inspection periods, although the actual mileage is still not officially taken into account. Notwithstanding that, your friendly vehicle inspector does likely have a closer look at a very high mileage vehicle.
Working in the UK and Germany as a young man, my memory was that New Zealand’s six-monthly inspection was a bit of an outlier, with 12 months being more common. A bit of research has revealed that New Zealand is not alone in persisting with six months for older vehicles into the modern era.
Despite advances in automative technology, China, Israel and Romania also have six-month inspections for cars older than, variously, 15 years and 10 years, but it’s a pretty exclusive club.
Personally, I have owned a couple of vehicles that went past 300,000km without failing a warrant for a mechanical or body defect. This begs the question of how we arrive at our inspection intervals? Is it evidence based?
Well, yes it is, but rather tentatively. The Ministry of Transport has done a couple of, so called, "proactive releases" of documents relating to this. They are thorough in looking at the various options and their impacts, but the statistical data is not all that strong.
This is acknowledged in these releases. The nature and quantity of the data available for statistical processing doesn’t make it easy to say, definitively, how cause and effect should relate to inspection periods. However, this work is ongoing and further consultative processes have been initiated.
I and others will submit on this topic, but what’s my "gearhead" point of view?
My gut reaction is to opine that there must be something wrong with our inspection system if we need to stick with six-month inspections. In fact, our inspection system is quite stringent already, farcically so in some respects, but I do sympathise with the need to err on the side of caution.
Interestingly, from August 26 this year, the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) has much simplified and rationalised the processes for repair and licensing of older vehicles. My friends in the UK tell me that the main stimulus was nightmare difficulties in retro-electrifying vehicles in the UK, but that there has also been a recognition that the rules around modifying, repairing, replicating and relicensing older vehicles had become unworkable for all but the very wealthy.
My interest is, admittedly, self-serving, but I hope that further rounds of consultation and change in the vehicle licensing and inspection domain will reflect a desire to rationalise, simplify and ease requirements to more achievable levels; always having an eye to safety, of course.
I, for example, would be happy to have a 90km speed limit for my old banger, in exchange for a few rational changes to licensing and inspection.
• Glen Morgan is a Dunedin "gearhead".
