Low mileage & the NCT

punchthedog

My car is due for its first NCT as it is now four years old. Despite being four years old, it only has 16,000 kilometres on the clock. I work from home and I live beside a shopping centre, so I rarely use the car.

Is the NCT requirement based solely on time or are there any allowances made for low kilometre-age cars? Something like 4 years or >60,000 km.

If it is just time, that would mean I could get a brand new car delivered to my door, park it in my garage for four years and not drive it, and then after four years has passed, it would be required to take a roadworthiness test, despite the fact it has never been driven.

Tigger

But Irish people would simply clock their cars so they didn't have to nct

johnos1984

Car condition deteriorates regardless of if it's driven or not

punchthedog

johnos1984 wrote: »

Car condition deteriorates regardless of if it's driven or not

Yes but nowhere near as fast as a car that is in daily use.

Kid Nothing

Pay the €50 and be done with it. There's no way around it.

Carstuck

If the car has low milage and is looked after I wouldn't worry one bit about the test. If it was going by milage who would NCT their car as they would have no right way of finding out

johnos1984

punchthedog wrote: »

johnos1984 wrote: »

Car condition deteriorates regardless of if it's driven or not

Yes but nowhere near as fast as a car that is in daily use.

You'd be surprised. Anything rubber will deteriorate quickly from lack of use

punchthedog

punchthedog wrote: »

Yes but nowhere near as fast as a car that is in daily use.

Well, no.
If you don't drive a car for four years, it'll more likely have more issues that if you drove it for the same period of time.

CiniO

punchthedog wrote: »

My car is due for its first NCT as it is now four years old. Despite being four years old, it only has 16,000 kilometres on the clock. I work from home and I live beside a shopping centre, so I rarely use the car.

Is the NCT requirement based solely on time or are there any allowances made for low kilometre-age cars? Something like 4 years or >60,000 km.

If it is just time, that would mean I could get a brand new car delivered to my door, park it in my garage for four years and not drive it, and then after four years has passed, it would be required to take a roadworthiness test, despite the fact it has never been driven.

I would go even further, and say that brand new car which was parked and never used for 4 year, would fail it's NCT. I could even bet

Your car had only 16k kms, which makes average of 4k per year.
Did you service it regularly every year?
If not, I wouldn't be acutally sure if your car will pass NCT.

bazz26

Well if the car gets very little use and is in good shape then it should fly through the NCT so I don't see where the issue is.

Bannasidhe

My mother's car is 11 years old and has less then 70k on it. She just got it NCT'd in Jan and will have to get it done again next Jan - by which point it still won't have 70k on it unless she loses the run of herself and takes off on an around the country drive.