The Government is proposing to move to annual Warrant of Fitness (WoF) and Certificate of Fitness (CoF) safety inspections for vintage cars, vintage motorbikes and motorhomes, a change from the current six-monthly checks.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop said that the present law is not aligned with reality, given that statistics show vintage vehicle owners have a higher pass rate for their WoF inspections compared to owners of non-vintage vehicles.
“The law is basically out of step with reality, and we're bringing it into line with common sense,” he told 1 News.
This adjustment would apply to vintage light vehicles over 40 years old and private motorhomes and affect approximately 128,000 vintage vehicles and 39,000 private motorhomes. Currently, motorhome owners can pay up to $300 every six months for a CoF, while vintage car WoFs cost between $70 and $100. These costs, in addition to the time spent on inspections, have been cited as reasons for the proposed change.
The New Zealand Federation of Motoring Clubs, an umbrella organisation that represents 150 car clubs with more than 131,000 members between them, and the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association have both been campaigning for a reduced inspection frequency for at least five years.
“We’re just delighted," Garry Jackson, president of the New Zealand federation of Motoring Clubs said of the proposed move. "It's been a consistent frustration and nagging issue, not only the cost of doing it every six months but the time it takes to do it.”
“For many of these cars, the mileage that they will have driven between the previous warrant of fitness and the current warrant of fitness might only be literally from their house to the testing station, but you've still got to go through it," he told 1 News.
New Zealand Motor Caravan Association Inc chief executive Bruce Lochore said the association has saying that CoF frequency is "inappropriate for the use of motorhomes".
“It's never made sense because these vehicles do a fraction of the mileage of normal vehicles, they have a fraction of the serious accident. It got lumbered in with all heavy vehicles,” he said.
The New Zealand Automobile Association (AA) also welcomed the proposed change but urged the government to go further and consider implementing an inspection system based on the distance travelled by a vehicle, rather than solely on its age.
Principal policy advisor for the AA, Terry Collins, said the Government’s previous proposal to include light vehicles in road user charges systems made it the right time to implement a mileage-based inspection scheme.
Collins told 1 News that distance was a “very good” indicator of wear and tear to a vehicle.
“We see that on tyres, that’s one of the main reasons that they fail, they get to a certain point after travelling 40,000 kilometres,” he said.
Public consultation on the proposed changes will be open from February 24 to April 4 at nzta.govt.nz.