Worried about your van’s condition? You should be. You never know when you’ll be pulled over for checks. Especially as some commercial van drivers recently found out the hard way.
The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, as well as the police, spent a Thursday in Bristol last week inspecting commercial vehicles. The checks took place at Memorial Stadium, in the Bristol Rover football team’s car park.
Unfortunately, the results were disappointing.
They found that out of 39 vans, only 6 were found to be clean and not breaking any laws. A whopping 80% had some sort of illegal defects. The worst past? Over 50% were in a condition considered so bad, that they were instructed to be taken off-road immediately.
What were the reasons for being considered unsatisfactory?
There were a few, some of which were particularly terrible, actually:
- Faults and/or defects that violated regulations (22 of which were so dangerous, they were asked to immediately remove their vans from the road)
- A van was found to be carrying too much weight, which we all know from previous blog posts is actually illegal
- The aforementioned van was also carrying dairy items that were unrefrigerated, resulting in a swift call and immediate seizure by Environmental Health
- Another van had a load that wasn’t secured properly
- Two vans didn’t have tax and four lacked an up-to-date MOT
- Eight possessed bald tyres
- Two vans were genuinely leaking fuel
- Another van was caught running around with the now-banned red diesel
What was most shocking was the calibre of van drivers, and not just the vans. Get a load of this:
- One particularly naughty van driver has cannabis on him
- Four drivers had absolutely no van insurance – they obviously hadn’t heard of this site – we’re sure if they knew they could easily get cheap van insurance, they wouldn’t have got caught
- Two van drivers just simply didn’t have licences
- Three of them were found to be using their phones
Whilst we’d hope no van driver reading this was caught or is guilty of one of the above points, we are here for you. Especially when it comes to cheap van insurance.