What's your worst ever MOT failure?

[Joseph]

Elderly shite and a sweat during MOT time go hand in hand. It goes with the territory. So what's the worst ever MOT failure you've had?

 

In my experience, my 137k Polo has only failed once in the four years we've had it - on a non-working horn. So all pretty mundane (thank God)...

 

Just thought it would be interesting to hear anything you guys have experienced!

[purplebargeken]

I bought an 'Auntie Rover' 95 on ebay, P something or other. It came with a 3 month old MOT.

 

The list of things that it should have failed on ran to nearly 4 pages of A4. It was MOT'd by Blind Bob McBlind using telepathy. Turns out the ebay seller sold number plates and had this thing MOT'd so he could flog the plate and he just got greedy and sold the car too. A quick call to the MOT place had the car collected by them within a couple of hours and a full refund sorted asap from the seller. He gave one of the testers a backhander to issue the cert. He was jobless shortly after that.

 

Not quite in the spirit of the thread but nearly.

[Spiny Norman]

I had a 3 cylinder '81 VW Jetta (#4 registered about 20psi and was basically just along for the ride...) which I'd bought for £100 years ago and I thought it would be fun to stick in and see how it got on.

Couple of pages of rust related woes, shonky brakes, no effective handbrake, variety of leaking, worn & perished this, that & the other, basically it was a total shitter.

I'd been using for about 2 months like that so did the decent thing and drove it into the local scrappy who gave me £80 for it.

[Lord Sterling]

None of my own cars have failed the MOT on anything particularly significant, maybe the odd occasional wiper blades or a small bulb. I did work at my mates garage for a good year or so, he does MOTs and I remember a couple of cars being particularly bad.

 

1st was a chavved up mk4 Golf, it was horrible, I've never driven a car that actually felt like it was going to fall over. Imagine you, carrying a rucksack of bricks being given a piggy back by someone with weak spindley legs trying stay up right. The electrics were blown, (lad had tried and failed to install LEDs in his car) everything to do with wheels, suspension/wish bones/arms/track rods + ends were dangerously shot to pieces hence why it felt so horrible to drive, verdict: CONDEMNED

 

2nd car was a mates Nissan Almera saloon, he always carried a couple of long ladders on the roof, never saw the car without it. Like the Golf it felt so unsafe to drive, the tyres were cracked to pieces, suspension arms, track rods etc.... were dead, steering box was dying, gearchange was sloppy as was the performance, it really was a bad car. The lad though, to his credit did pay to get the track rods, tyres and whatever else sorted so it scraped an MOT. Haven't seen the car since, I know the lad bought a van for his business.

[Ben_L]

Mum's Fiesta Mk3 1.4 CFi went something like;

 

OSR Seatbelt Area Rust

NSR Seatbelt Area Rust

OSR Prescribed Suspension Rust

NSR Prescribed Suspension Rust

Parking Brake Efficiency Below Spec

Both Headlight Alignments

Windscreen Cracked over 40mm

NSF indicator incorrect colour light emitted (White unit with a clear bulb)

NS Full Beam

NSF Floorpan

Emissions

Rear Exhaust Insecure

Front Exhaust Leaking Gases

And something worn but not seriously impeding it's use (No. Plates I think??)

 

Advisories

 

Coolant Leak

Oil Leak

 

 

No mention of the Rear Fog Light Switch that you had to hold in because the latch had gone though!

 

Took it to Kwik Fit before it went over the bridge as she got a Free MOT if used before blah blah... It was only a bit of fun

Needless to say, we were glad to see the back of it

[crapcarcollector]

Not the worded, condemned loads, but sticks out-

 

Last week we had a 55 plate 78k Jaguar S-Type in. Retired Gentleman owned, looked after car.

 

Both rear wishbones

front suspension arm

Rear discs (dangerous)

Rack end

Wheel bearing

3 Tyres

 

Advise

Coolant leak (Rad)

Oil leak

Power Steering leak

front brakes

 

loads of other little bits that I forget now. The price of 1 wishbone was close to £300 from Jaguar.....(!) Nice looking thing too, drove lovely... if you were looking to buy it you would have wanted it for nothing though with the above faults.

[Cavcraft]

Something like two or three full pages of work on a Transit recovery truck I had been using. The tester also spotted that the one or two of the bolts holding the body to the chassis had been sort of Araldited on and a couple more were missing. Heeding his warning not to use it, I lobbed an XJ40 on the back, drove it home about 19 miles, took the Jag to the weigh in then sold the truck on eBay. The buyer knew the problems and was absolutely made up with it.

[theorganist]

A 1983 Astra I bought. Had one elderly owner from new and had done around 50,000 miles, it was twelve years old at the time.

 

It looked immaculate and this was when I had even less knowledge about cars than now. I though the MOT was going to be a formality. However it turned out the back end was mostly rust and filler and it cost around £300 to have it welded, I could not believe how rotten it was. If it wasn't so good mechanically I would have not bothered. However a few months later the crankshaft snapped so the car got sold for spares for about £100!

 

The longest list of failure item was on the Maxi which will be returning from MOT tomorrow. However most of them are fairly minor!

[Skizzer]

My Golf once failed on corrosion on the bulkhead, leading the garage to quote me a couple of grand for repairs. On closer inspection, the hole in question was where the throttle cable passed through and was just missing a rubber grommet. I also once had a Porsche fail on rusty brake discs - they were practically new, it had just been sitting for two days awaiting test. Driving round the block would have sorted it. Fuggin assholes clearly had some sort of 'arrangement' with the dealer.

 

(Not suggesting all or even many MOT testers are idiots or on the make, obviously, but like anything there are some bad 'uns out there.)

[panhard65]

My best was 4 pages on a '83 Golf cabriolet. It was mostly lights as the previous owner had nicked all the bulbs and I was too lazy to check it before the mot. The Renault 4 pick up I had many years ago was pretty special he needed a second fail sheet for it. This was 30 years ago and the tester said it was the worst car he had ever tested held together by the years of cow crap that had built up during its short life on a farm.

[Negative Creep]

Worst on was my mk2 Golf (VWs seem to be a common theme here). Cost me over £300, bit I figured it wouldn't be too bad since a fresh MOT would make the car worth more. Sold it for £420.

[Guest]

Not me personally and I may have the facts wrong but I'm sure Mr. Bickle had seven pages on his Renault 25. I'd be surprised if someone could top that.

[jonny69]

It's probably the things my Anglia didn't fail on that were the scariest.

 

So I knew the backs of the inner sills needed patching and the MOT guy pointed them out but he didn't fail the car on them. He failed the car on frayed belts; fair point, they were pretty knacked fixed belts so I temporarily swapped them for lap belts to get it through. The next year I took the car off the road to do the sills properly and nothing could have prepared me for how rotten the car was underneath the paint and underseal. Most of the oversills were crust from front to back and the inners were practically non-existent under the underseal. You just couldn't see it. Bottom seatbelt mounts pulled out the floor with a good tug but, again, you couldn't see it because the floor had rotted away between the two reinforcing sandwich plates. A couple of years later I took the wings off and the A pillar was a brown crusty doily, also completely out of view.

 

It never failed on any of them because you simply couldn't see it. Over the years I've seen many people spend good money on cherry-looking Anglias only to find them completely rotten underneath like mine was. It's one of the reasons I stuck with mine, because I know it's all good under the crap paintwork!

[Bren]

In 1991 I bought a mk 1 escort 1300E off a work colleague for £300 (try doing that now).

 

Car had tax and Mot but also rust issues. A couple of new wings and the world's worst respray in red ultraspeed saw it get used for a while, MOT ran out and I sold it to my cousin.

 

Cousin presented it for MOT, after 10 minutes tester told him that if the test was terminated at that point he would not be charged, the car was that rotten. Cousin to his credit cracked on with the welding but managed to set the car on fire.

 

HDJ 308N where are you now?

 

When I bought Pete's SD1 he freely admitted that the car needed new sills and was selling as such , despite the MOT only expiring a few months before, the car had spent it's life previously in Norfolk and Herts. However, one sill had been bodged by having a new rear section tack welded on (hidden by lots of filler), drivers footwell had separated from the inner sill and lots of holes in inner arches at all four corners and floorpan. Oddly, when I checked the car's MOT history online there was'nt a single advisory for corrosion. Somebody was obviously on very good terms with the examiner.

 

I worked with a guy who bought a D reg granada (jelly mould 2.8i ghia). White in colour and quite frilly, he came back from having an MOT done a few months later - he looked ill, and showed me the failure sheet - Rotten everywhere, even the area around the washer bottle in the boot was rotten. He managed to get the work done, it turned out that the car's first owner was P and O shipping - it had spent it's first few years at ports. As a result of this, I try to avoid buying old chod that has spent time close to the sea.

[Big Rod]

'84 (ish) AlfaSud Ti. (Do I need to go on?)

 

It wasn't mine, it was my Mum's who'd bought it with a few months MOT and tax off a friend to use as a runabout.

 

I took it to the MOT station and the guy said something to the effect of, 'Don;t drive this home!'. It was absolutely riddled. I have no idea how the engine stayed in place as the chassis legs were non-existent.

 

I tried to fix it but my welder ppacked up and I couldn't afford to buy another on so the car lay in the garage for a while before my Broterh and I sold some stuff off it and it got weighed in.

 

Shame really as it was a cracking little car to drive.

[oldford]

I tested a 2002 Jaguar XJ a few months back, about 8 failure items and 25 advisory items, it took me half an hour to enter the test result.

 

On my own car I try to keep above the test standard, it failed on a number plate lamp the other day, because I sabotaged it shortly before the test. I had put it in a day too early and wouldn't have got the extra month if it passed, the retest was fine as I did that myself.

[ProgRocker]

Can't remember exactly but my first car - the 1979 Mini failed spectacularly on it's 2 MOTs during my ownership. Welding mostly. I should have sold it as spares the first time around and bought a Fiat Panda or similar.

[DSdriver]

Volvo main dealer once MOT failed my 740 on tyre wear so I took it to local tyre dealer who said they were well legal. When I mentioned this to Volvo manager he said something like: we always fail things which we don't think will last until we next service the car. They never got the opportunity to do anything on any more of my Volvos in which I covered about 300,000 miles.

On a different tack, my local garage used to have a chart on the wall from a parts supplier listing the part numbers for common MOT failure items. I made a note never to buy a Metro because the list of parts was about three times as long as all the other cars put together*

 

*this may be exaggerated slightly.

[catsinthewelder]

I bought my VW 6 years ago off a hippy mate of Ms C for £500, we insured it and booked it for an MOT to get it home. The fail sheet came to 2 1/2 pages

[Vanny]

once failed an mot on 'excessive play in steering wheel' not surprised it was excessive, 2 of the 4 bolts where in the ash tray, 2 where on by only three turns! went down with a 16mm socket, fixed em on the forecourt with the owner watching over me, and walked off with a pass . . . . i miss that garage.

[whitevanman]

put simply.......all of them.....

[skattrd]

I had about 3 sheets worth for Triumph Spitfire I bought blind off ebay a few years back.

None of the jobs were major, little welding around seatbelt mount was the only welding it needed. Seatbelts needed replacing, doors wouldn't open from the inside, most lights didn't work, brakes and brake lines needed work ... Just the usual sort of stuff

I got it all fixed and legal, then decided I didn't like the driving position, I'd never even sat in one before.

[phil_lihp]

Wow, I feel like I've got off pretty lightly over the last few years having read this lot.

 

My first car, the mobile ash tray 1.0 AX, had appalling brakes even for a small Citroen. My dad was horrified when he drove it, it wouldn't lock up and the pedal had to be mashed into the carpet to have any effect. On one occasion, four up in the pouring rain, it wouldn't stop at all and I had to use a kerb to help slow it down. The garage I bought it from insisted there was nothing wrong and said I just wasn't used to it. A few months later it went back to them for its MOT...and shock horror, failed on having useless brakes (among other things). New discs, pads and calipers were prescribed and like the clueless 18 year old I was, I let them do the work and got the pass certificate. The brakes felt no different and it wasn't until the car went for a service at another garage several months later that they found the pedal needed adjusting to reduce its travel, brakes worked just fine after that

 

The only other one that sticks in my mind is when I forgot to book my 1998 MK4 Fiesta in for its MOT until the day before it expired a few years back. Cue one hurried phone call to the garage to squeeze it in as I needed it to get to work. As it was in reasonably good condition and had recently been serviced I didn't even consider that it might fail and dropped it off that evening. The next day I called them up to see if it was ready. Never a good sign when the reaction is "Err, no, you'd better come and take a look at this, actually".

 

It turned out that the shiny, immaculate, spotless sills it sported were not all they seemed and the passenger one now had a foot-long hole in it. As normal, he'd used a small hammer to tap along the length of the sills to listen for changes in the sound indicating thin metal and got a nice 'crunch' sound instead. Luckily a hasty patch job didn't cost too much and I traded it in that weekend for a Focus from a local Ford dealer which had no rust whatsoever. Endless mechanical and electrical issues and dreadful paintwork, but no rust.

[garbaldy]

I took a 71 datsun skyline in for test once and after 10 minutes on the lift mr mot comes over and says, get this pile of shite out of my sight and dont bring it back

Both sills iner and outer had screwdriver holes all along,

both front strut tops and inner wings,

both rear suspension mounts and shock mounts,

floorpans front and rear.

both front and back cross member.

3 weeks of welding later i took it back and he simply refused to test it

after a mexican stand of he stuck it on the lift and took great pleasure failing it on a back brake pipe he thought i was a nutter for sorting it but i used to revel in a challenge.

in hindsight i should have scrapped it as it was a right ballache but years ago i couldnt be told