Do you see the NCT as an inconvenience?

Yes for people who keep.their car right, it doesn't serve a purpose really. But for the 90 percent of car owners who don't properly look after their cars, it serves a useful purpose.

Too many don't even look at the their tyres other than nct time so.that alone is saving lives.

It also takes a number of death traps permanently off the road every year whether it be due to brakes, suspension, rust etc.

In short, if.you.keep.your car right, it's a couple of hours out of your year. No big deal.

The concept is good, the execution is very poor.

It's a nuisance in its current form where the waiting time is up to 6 months, considering you can only book 3 months in advnace and it's illegal to drive without it. Bare in mind they were already in trouble back in 2019 when the ramps were unsafe and they were doing "partial tests"

The 55 euro charge for a mandatory test is also steep, seeing as there's no more than 15 mins work per car. The NCT shouldn't be used as a profit making exercise (even though I know the current shower aren't even making a profit)

Finally the test method itself is poor, and I could pick apart the many reasons why limits don't make sense. The test doesn't "prove" anything. There are many ways to put an unsafe car through the test, and even the nonsense you hear of people temporarily fitting someone's good tires to the car, or people who fail on a blown bulb swap in the bulb on the other side.

I also think it's made cars more disposable. Plenty of good, safe cars failed the NCT on some arbitrary issue, and the owners scrapped them instead of fixing them since few will buy a car out of NCT.

On the wait time, I bought a car at auction on 9th April, got it home, checked & fully NCT'd less than 2 weeks after it landed at my door.

I do not really think the test times are always as bad as made out.

Agreed what has been said by above posters ,but i think it time to take contract away from this lot and let garages [main dealer and indie ] do the tests ,While were at it does any folk know off how many new tecticnians coming into the business of servising all the elcty yokes on the road .

I booked an NCT on the Monday bank holiday after Paddy's day for the Thursday of the next week for my mother.

It wasn't the closest centre to me but it was under 30 mins away.

No way should garages or main dealers be allowed to do it.

Plenty of places, not all it must be said, already quote and suggest totally unnecessary work - and you'd then be legally required to have it done. No way.

And on the other hand, I personally know someone who had their UK car MOT'd by a garage who had never seen the car. Payment on Revolut and a few pictures of the VIN.

The best part about the NCT is that it independent.

What center?

Nct is better than nothing. But really has been a shambles how it's being managed..

Just go to the website and check your nearest ones. I checked Deansgrange a few weeks ago for my Mother's car and there was a test the next day with lots of slots available over the next few weeks, plenty of times available at the other test centres that they showed.

Most of the Jap imports have a spare set of wheels fitted for the test and they get swapped back over afterwards to use on the next car because usually the tyres don’t have E Marks. They are usually good brands like Dunlop Michelin or Pirelli with perfect thread but will still fail. There are very few dealers actually replacing these tyres.

Was going to say that, I was young but the nct took a lot of horribly maintained cars off the road and forces the average driver to make some attempt at maintenance.

This year my car (Toyota CH-R hybrid) is due its NCT July. It had 3 years free servicing, but that benefit had run out. I’m disabled and now find limes of NCT an extra chore, eg doing the little things I used to to help it pass I can no longer do. Trade-in value is good with Toyota hybrids so I decided in doing that and skip the NCT issue. But overall I approve of the concept of car checks as the number of defective bangers on the road used to be a major hazard to the safety of all and sundry.

It was never impossible. People were just lazy/misinformed. If you requested to be put on the cancellation list you would get a test date within a few weeks. It was repeated over and over on the main NCT thread.

Yeah same. Car gets regular serviced on schedule regardless of NCT

No NCT/MOT equivalent in a lot of states in the US I believe

I’ve bought plenty of UK cars with advisory free MOT’s. And I’ve done dozens of checks on cars that have advisory free MOT’s. So basically what your saying is that every single one of them was because of a bribe to the MOT tester. Obviously not true.

The annual check for 10 year old cars is too often. Most 10year old cars that are regularly serviced/repaired are just as safe as new cars. Its not the 1970s when cars rusted away after a few years. It should be two years for all cars.

I used to dread the NCT when I ran old bangers, but now see them as a great opportunity to catch things I might have missed. There were plenty of real deathtraps before the NCT and it's great to see them driven off the road.

I wonder at this stage should the emissions part of the test be scrapped? That could speed things up a bit and is not really safety related.

One experience really annoyed me a couple years ago. I take pride in my car and look after it very well, but I had my car in for its NCT and as I watched it go through the different stations through the waiting room window, the tester reversed my car out and parked it again in the waiting area after only progressing through a handful of stations. It sat there for another 10/15 mins and eventually entered a new lane. At the end he apologised for the delay, that one of the machines weren't working correctly, but said that "Every Cloud has a silver lining". Apparently the focus of my lights failed on the first lane, but when he re-inspected on the second lane they passed.

How many people failed because of an incorrectly calibrated machine….or how many people passed because of an incorrectly calibrated machine.

It pissed me off before that, but really have no time for it since then.

Absolute shambles of a system.

MOTs were always open to abuse in the UK. I remember a garage in Warwick where batches of blank MOT certs were "stolen" during at least two break-ins. The garage was warned that if any were any "stolen" in future they would lose their MOT testing status. I don't think they had any break-ins after that.

Some garages would fail cars to create more work for themselves and some garages would pass dodgy cars for other reasons e.g. helping out their pals who promised that the necessary work would be carried out to fix the car's problems.

With NCTs there are sometimes problems where the tester has grudges against local mechanics and garages for some reason, one of the reasons being that they once worked for a particular garage and didn't get on too well with the people there. Overall, with the NCT system, the necessary independence still exists.

There’s few places more depressing than the waiting room in the NCT test centre off the M50 J4. Jesus Christ, what a kip.