Due to terrible planning, all three of my cars need to be submitted for their annual MOT inspection in June. This makes June an expensive, and stressful month!

I phoned my local MOT garage well in advance to book in three tests, which always gets a chuckle from the owner. His reply this year was "ah excellent, I was hoping to be able to book a cruise later in the summer!" oh dear oh dear!

With the MOT for the Daihatsu up first I began my pre-MOT checks. There are lots of things on the test, some of which I can check myself and some which are beyond my abilities. However there are plenty of easy things to test yourself and fix for minimal cost, helping avoid 'silly' MOT fails. First up was the lights - do they all work? This is easy to do solo, with the only ones needing a helper being the reverse light (needing the car in gear to activate) and the brake lights. Its possible to do this solo if you have a mirror, but easier with a helper. So far so good, all lights working fine. 

Next up is tyres. Are they correctly inflated and do they have more than 1.6mm of tread over 75% of the contact patch? As the Daihatsu does so few miles, the tread was fine, however there is an ongoing (very) slow puncture/air leak on the front passenger side tyre so I pumped that back up to 26psi to match the other three in prep.

Then into the engine bay. Check the oil level, screenwash, coolant, brake fluid. All of which were fine. Strictly speaking these aren't testable (other than screenwash) but could cause issues which might cause a fail indirectly, such as poor emissions from overfilled oil or poor braking performance from underfilled brake fluid.

I slid underneath to check for rust and corrosion. This is something I couldn't have fixed myself, but if I had found any major concerns then I could have cancelled the test. As the car is rarely used in winter the welding and undersealing I had done a couple of years ago was all looking good still

The day of the test rolled round and I was pleased to find that the car passed with only one signle advisory for an oil leak. I made sure to ask where this was coming from when I collected the car and the tester advised that it wasn't a leak exactly, but that there was residual oil on the outside of the sump pan, likely from me or someone else having slopped oil down the block during a previous oil change and it having slowly run down to the lowest point. I shall clean it up with some wipes at some point but so far thats 1/3 passes

Next up was the Lexus, a week later. I performed the same checks for that and all looked good. The last MOT on it a year ago (the first in my ownership) highlighted that the tyres were all a bit worn - something I knew well after a couple of accidental 'Tokyo Drift' moments on wet roundabouts! I had had all 4 tyres replaced with Kumho Ecsta PS71s shortly after so I was confident that all advisories from the last test had been sorted. This is something I'm a bit neurotic about, I think it shows the MOT tester that you're a careful owner if you have visibly resolved any advisories from one test to the next, rather than neglecting an issue until it becomes a failure point.

I was rewarded for my care with another clean pass on the Lexus test - not so much as a single advisory! I did tease the garage owner that he may have to rein in his cruise aspirations from a 4 week Caribbean excursion to a day drip to Calais, to his credit he did laugh! So thats 2/3 done!

Lastly was the Dacia at the end of the month. It was a similar story here. Last year it got an advisory for a worn front passenger side tyre and both of the fronts were replaced with Kumhos last autumn. Its a bit odd, as the wear on the front passenger side was quite noticeable, but the front drivers side wasn't worn very much. The car has only done 20k miles (its 4 years old) but the worn tyres was worn evenly so I wonder if the previous owner had run it under-inflated or something? Anyway, it had new front tyres (the rears were fine) so I checked over everything else and booked it in. This time it was going to the Dacia main dealer as its quite new, its worth paying for main dealer servicing to keep up the warranty. I also had 2 issues which I wanted fixed under warranty so it was money well spent having the work done with them as I find you get better goodwill for these sorts of issues if you're seen as being someone who services it by the book, at least for the first 5 years or so.

I thought that there was no way I'd manage 3/3 passes in a year but was pleased to get the call from Dacia that it was a clean pass, and they would honour the warranty repairs on the SOS system and front electric window FOC. I had to wait for them to get the parts etc but thats quite a significant cost avoided by keeping them sweet with looking after the car according to the service schedule.

So other than spending lots of money in MOT test fees in a single month, I still have all three cars legal - and just one advisory between them! Best of all is that fixing the sole advisory is basically going to just need me to wipe some oil residue off with an old rag. Can't grumble with that!