Surprise Van Checks
Worried about the condition of your van?
You should be.
You never know when the police will pull you 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 clean and not breaking any laws.
A whopping 80% had some sort of illegal defects.
The worst past?
Over 50% were in such bad condition that authorities immediately ordered them off the road.
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 were so dangerous that authorities immediately demanded their removal 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 carried a load that wasn’t properly secured.
Two vans didn’t have tax and four lacked an up-to-date MOT.
Eight possessed bald tyres.
Two vans were genuinely leaking fuel.
Authorities caught another van using 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
Authorities found three of them 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.
