What Equipment Does a Garage Need to Do An MOT?

Every car over three years old needs an MOT to be road legal. Light commercial vehicles and motorcycles need them too, so demand for testing is always high, year-round, no matter which type of vehicle your workshop specialises in. If you don’t currently offer MOT testing in-house and would like to, your first question may well be the one posed in the title of this article: what equipment do I need? Let’s take a closer look at each piece of equipment used in an MOT test.

MOT testing equipment
Typically, garages looking to branch out into MOT testing will choose a complete MOT bay installation, which includes all of the necessary components to carry out accurate, compliant testing. It’s much easier to take this route than it is to buy equipment individually.

Our Class 4 MOT bays include the following pieces of equipment:

• Four-post lift: A robust, easy-to-use lift that’s perfect for inspecting vehicles. A four-post lift is ideally suited to MOT testing, as it takes just seconds to get the vehicle up in the air but still provides enough access to check for play in bushes, exhaust leaks, corrosion and other potential failure points.
• Radius (or turn) plates: Not an essential item legally, but a must-have for busy MOT garages nonetheless. Radius plates allow a vehicle’s wheels to be turned without using the steering wheel, allowing a tester to quickly and easily check the operation of the steering from outside and underneath. Much easier than asking a colleague to hop in and turn the steering wheel!
• Play detector: A straightforward device used to check for play in suspension bushes - a common failure or advisory point on an MOT test.
• Jacking beam: Mounted to the four-post lift, a jacking beam makes it easy to lift the vehicle off the ground while it’s still in the air - perfect for checking play in wheel bearings, for example.
• Headlight beam tester: A machine that efficiently assesses the aim of a vehicle’s headlight beam. Using it, a tester can quickly determine whether or not the beam needs adjusting, before making the necessary alterations to pass the vehicle.
• Brake tester: A vital component of the MOT test. Brakes are perhaps the single most important safety component on a vehicle, and this machine will make sure they’re in good working order. Not only will it assess the overall stopping power of the vehicle, it’ll let the tester know if there are potentially dangerous imbalances across an axle.
• Smoke and gas analyser: Used to analyse the emissions from a vehicle’s tailpipe. A variety of parameters are recorded and compared against maximum legal requirements, giving you a clear pass or fail result.

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Ready to learn more and begin planning your MOT bay installation? Learn more about the services we have to offer today, or contact us to get your own tailored installation quote.