Slack car maintenance blamed for poor WOF recall response

Thursday, 17 January 2019

Each year more than 4 million warrant of fitness inspections are carried out by 8000 inspectors. VINZ Christchurch site manager Billy Green explains a WOF check. (File video first published in 2019)

The Motor Trade Association says the poor response to a huge warrant of fitness recall reflects Kiwis' slack attitudes to car maintenance.

MTA chief executive Craig Pomare said it was disappointing, but not surprising, that only 4000 of the nearly 25,000 vehicle owners urged to get potentially dodgy warrants replaced free of charge had bothered to do so.

'New Zealanders in general have a very, very lax approach to vehicle safety, it's the 'she'll be right approach.''

He said that was a concern because light vehicle faults contributed to 9 per cent of fatal crashes in 2017 (the latest data available), up from 5 per cent four years earlier, and it was time the public, politicians and transport authorities took more notice of those statistics.

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Motor Trade Association chief executive Craig Pomare says there needs to be more emphasis on the number of fatal crashes where vehicle faults are a factor - for the last two years where datas is available, they have sat around 10 per cent, compared with 13 per cent for road factors, and 28 per cent for loss of control.

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'All the talk among the officials is around the road and the driver, but if the vehicle has doubled in terms of its contribution to death rates, they have to get serious about vehicle safety and the national conversation can't just continue to be 'road' and 'driver.''

The NZ Transport Agency offered free WOF retests for owners caught up in a crack down on substandard work by garages and vehicle inspectors who did not do proper checks of basics such as brakes, seat belts and lights, and 60 per cent of vehicles failed their first re-inspection.

The transport agency had done its best to track down affected owners, but it could not force them to get WOFs redone, an issue that could be addressed in a review of the agency's enforcement role, Pomare said.

'For the general population, those that are told to come back [after failing a warrant], typically about 10 to 15 per cent don't ever get around to having their vehicle retested.

'Either they they know they're going to fail again, so they don't bother, or they just wait to be ticketed because they know it's highly unlikely, that's the laissez faire attitude.'

The response to the WOF retests mirrored uptake of the recent Takata airbag recall - 'people have had five, six, seven notices of recall and they failed to respond,' said Pomare.

An internal review of NZTA's enforcement was launched in mid October after concerns it was failing to properly maintain safety standards and Transport Minister Phil Twyford also ordered his ministry to do an external review of agency operations.

In November the agency revealed it had taken months to suspend a Dargaville garage after it warranted a car involved in a fatal crash where a front seat belt failed and 65-year-old passenger William Ball died.