Matiz rear suspension.

We had a renault grand scenic in for test and the steering rack mounting brackets had sheared off of the rack, the only way it steered was when the column hit the edge of the hole in the floor.
Told her it was dangerous and shouldn't be driven away but she insisted she had to use it so we got her to sign a disclaimer.
15 min later she drove past our garage with a load of kids in the car !!!
It never came back for retest !!! always wondered if they got a dodgy test on or it crashed 

The police don't want to know' I had a customer in that was unfit to drive due to illness/old age ,he was virtually blind and could only just walk the 15 feet to the door.
Being a responsible sort of chap I rang the police saying it would be a good idea if they came down (police station 5 min away) the answer was "nothing we can do until he has an accident". Same thing applys to cars with defects, they are not interested until it becomes an issue.
The signed disclaimer was only so we could prove she had been made aware. 



 

Ain't that the truth !!

Last time I looked there was nothing written in the testers manual about presenters of vehicles being fit to drive as a fail or refusal to test 

An interesting thought...if one of these horror stories came in when you were doing an observed test would the MOT man be able to issue a prohibition certificate as he would if the car was pulled in on a roadside check? I know it's very unlikely to ahppen but I was just wondering.

Other than that as David said we fail it and we tell them. There is no more we can do. I don't think that getting the customer to sign a piece of paper (tempting though it is!) makes any difference because they are classed as a non-professional and I don't think a court would hold them capable of understanding what they were signing. Crazy perhaps but I'm pretty sure that's how it would pan out. And as for reporting it to the police I can't see them feeling qualified either. The best they could do would be to call out DVSA and by the time all that's happened the car has gone. Probably into a ditch somewhere (at best).

The really scary thing about this is that people are actually willing to drive some of this stuff. The Renault that Lampy mentioned surely the driver must have thought it was steering funnily?

As I said previously we got her to sign a "disclaimer" (perhaps the wrong word to use) just so we had proof she had been made aware and understood the vehicle was dangerous to drive.
You can bet your life if anything happened she would have said "They didn't tell me it was dangerous.

If I have a fail which I consider dangerous, I always get the highlighter pen out and highlight the words "In my opinion the vehicle is dangerous to drive because of defects marked as such on the failure and / or advisory documents" on the VT30. I also highlight the word Dangerous where it appears next to the RFR.